Equinox The Northern Soul Scene (Studies in Popular Music)

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s, it still thrives today with a mix of fifty-year olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s Soul has an international following. This innovative and distinctive book brings together original commissioned essays and pivotal scholarly articles that have defined the field so far, interspersed with dossiers of published journalistic articles and photographs, and interviews with, for instance, producers and directors of Northern Soul-themed films. This publication represents a subject-defining book on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and the first anthology of work in the field, which will provide a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate for a readership of lecturers and researchers, students and general readers interested in creative analyses and interpretations of the scene, past and present. The book links academic research, photography, film production and journalism in the documentation and analysis of historic and current music scenes. Representations of the scene from different media and different historical locations are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the Northern Soul scene in the UK. Review Like northern soul itself, this collection is crisp and clean in parts, gritty and a bit uncomfortable in others, and has its own identifiable rhythm. Like the scene it represents collective, collaborative, and co-produced work. The book s ambition is a powerful one: to illuminate not only northern soul, but also popular music culture and the form of edited collections more generally. It is a perfect textual match for the scene itself, with lessons and ramifications far beyond northern soul... If we want to understand how an academic field is made up of insiders, we will learn a lot from this examination of what it takes to be insiders, how we police boundaries, and how the stories that we tell each other stabilise and legitimise our academic work. --Professor Lucy Robinson, University of Sussex As a young rare soul DJ, this edited collection comprehensively explores what it actually means to be a part of the Northern Soul scene. With input from the 6Ts soul icon Ady Croasdell, this book gives an excellent insight to the contemporary soul scene that forms my secret life. --Tom Paige, rare soul DJ About the Author Sarah Raine is a PhD candidate at Birmingham City University's School of Media, researching the younger generation of the current Northern Soul scene in the UK and Spain, in particular the linguistic, kinetic and virtual narratives that participants construct in their pursuit of a scene-authenticated Northern Soul identity. Sarah's multidisciplinary theoretical approach builds upon her anthropological background, facilitating the study of a dance-based, retrospective, record-focused and increasingly international music scene. Sarah also act as a research, editorial and exhibitions assistant for the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Nicola Watchman Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Liverpool John Moores Unviersity. Tim Wall Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Arts, Design and Media