soul britannia

I love to watch Soul Boys dance: whether it’s that tidy little shoulder-drop, ankle-twist manoeuvre all mods seem to pick up with their first pair of decent trousers or the full-on, talcum-powder-on-the-floor acrobatics of a true Northern Soulie. So I’ve been enjoying the BBC’s truly wonderful Soul Britannia documentary.

The series, three programmes in total, charts the history of soul music in Britain from the 1950s onwards. Having watched the similar Folk Britannia programmes, I knew I could expect a well researched hour, taking the subject seriously, if at a slightly whistlestop pace. For me, one the most pleasing aspects of the two instalments I’ve seen of Soul Britannia is the wide focus; that the makers spent as much time on the audience, and on the world outside the crammed clubs, as on the artists. British soul wasn’t just Geno Washington and Jimmy James, or Dusty Springfield and Julie Driscoll, but local girls dancing with American GIs stationed here in the 50s; mods, predominately white and working class, hanging out with and dancing alongside their new Caribbean neighbours and Northern Soul, thousands kids throughout the north and the midlands, dancing through the 1970s nights in Wigan and Preston and Wolverhampton, to obscure US soul records; records that were over a decade old then and largely forgotten, the rarer the better. The narrator moved on to Two-Tone and Ska and then… Simply Red. Way to end it guys.

Watch this if you can.

[Apologies to most you, who won’t be able to see this, unless we get very lucky with a multi-region DVD release. However, if you are interested in British youth culture, I recommend a book by the journalist Robert Elms called ‘The Way We Wore.’ Essentially the book is his autobiography, told through clothing, but he’s pretty hot on music and on what young people, young men especially, get from youth cults.]