Description: 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 sixty-year-olds and several generations of new converts, and its celebration of 1960s soul has an international following.
Brief description: Sarah Raine is a Research Fellow at Birmingham City University. She is co-Managing Editor of Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music, Review Editor and special issue Guest Editor (2018) for IASPM@Journal, and the Network Coordinator for Jazz & Everyday Aesthetics. Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies, and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. His publications include the second edition of Studying Popular Music Culture. Nicola Watchman Smith is Head of Higher Education at Newcastle College University Centre and a cultural sociologist and researcher. She has published widely on northern soul, including chapters in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009) and Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (2012).
Review Quotes:
Nominated for the 2020 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research
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
This title is some kind of a revelation, as it easily combines academic research with interviews and fans' stories on a large scale, leading to massive amounts of data. This approach to theoretical or cultural study of music in popular culture will not always work out so well, but here it can present a very readable and informative work.
It is also remarkable that all three editors are highly involved into the topic of the book. And not just as researchers, but in various ways, as DJ, record collector or as in all three cases Northern Soul fans and dancers. A very lucky coincidence indeed. And it absolutely makes a difference. Recommended reading through and through.
Dr. Alexander Ebert, popcultureshelf.com