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This site really isnt about me, its about the local northern soul scene over the years, in pictures rather than words,
what I do know as an innocent 15 year old girl the first time that I heard the music that is Northern soul, I was hooked, thus began a lifelong love affair with the music that lifts you as high as a kite one moment with its back breaking beat and stomping rhythm, to the heartbreaking vocals of a lost love that rips your very soul out.....
The venues are the most remembered places of all times, as a soulie you can recollect where the first time you heard "that song" who you were with, where it was played and who it was by.
My own special places were
Lincoln Drill hall all nighters
Cleethorpes pier and winter gardens
Notts Palais
Va vas Bolton
Samanthas in Sheffield
Clifton Hall Rotherham
Oueens Hall Bradford
Derby
and the many many other venues i travelled to in my youth...
At the venues you met the friends that became lifelong sisters and brothers, names weren't important, just the faces and the solidarity of the music.
The dance floor was sometimes the most lonliest place in the world, especially when tunes with the haunting melodies got "into your head" and entangled with the sweat, came the tears, for the pain and heartbreak expressed by the male or female vocalists.
Thoughts of the night/day never wanting to end, and the dread that a certain tune would be played that indicated that it was nearly over, not wanting to go back to reality of the working week, but to stay in an environment where all were equal, and wanting to stay just as much as you, begging the dj to play "just one more" until those words from mates "right where are we off next week?" Made the thought of reality a little more bearable, to go to work, to earn money, to keep the love affair sweet.
For as long as i can remeber my life contained Northern Soul, right back to my early childhood days (not that I knew it at the time), My mum and dad was into the Mod music of the sixties and music was always played at home. I was allowed to develope my own tastes in music as I grew and did the David Cassidy and bay city roller thing in the 7ts, but then when the novelty of these wore off there was a void, and I was looking for something, I found it at the school type discos and in the fourth and fifth year boys that wore thier hair "just so" the clothes that had to be "just right" and thier music that was Northern Soul, I quickly became a young soul rebel, wanting more and more of the scene and the music. A brief period in the 8ts saw me without the scene that I cherised, due to the "split" down blackpool way, that had a devastating knock on the northern scene country wide, my life was complete again, when a local nite was spotted in the newspaper,the rest thay say is history.... I am still here doing what I love with a passion. I am a few years older now with a daughter of my own, whom like me has her own tastes in music, but thankfully she too loves Northern, so maybe one day........
