This Won’t Change: The Joy Of Northern Soul

In 1993, the Face magazine asked Elaine Constantine to photograph a Northern Soul night at London’s 100 Club. Recently moved to London from Manchester, Constantine knew the scene well, having danced at all-nighters a decade earlier. At first, things seemed different. The crowd was older and the records even more obscure. But when Lester Tipton’s rare mid-60s record This Won’t Change played, she put down her camera and lost herself in the music.

 

 

In the 1970s, dressed in button-down Ben Sherman shirts, single-vent blazers, Oxford bags, trickers and brogues, clubbers danced in all-nighters at staid ballrooms and dancehalls transformed into dynamic clubs like Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, where it began, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, the Golden Torch in Stoke-on-Trent and Sheffield’s Mojo.

 

“I remember going down those stairs into that dark basement and seeing those shadowy figures moving energetically in sync with each other. It all came back to me in an instant and made me slightly hesitant. It was obvious the scene had gone further underground, the crowd older, little new blood, the records more obscure and the attitude on the dance floor as fierce as ever.”

– Elaine Constantine 

 

 

 “The images made in the 1990s were forgotten about, and it wasn’t until I showed them to Martin Parr… that I realised they did have atmosphere and that the ritualised aerobic pleasure they depicted, kept alive by a dwindling hardcore, were worthy subject matter in their own right.”

– Elaine Constantine

 

More of Elaine’s pictures are in her book I’m Com’un Home in the Morn’un, the title a nod to a northern soul classic from 1970 by Lou Pride.

 

Northern Soul – The Film, 2014

Constantine soon became a regular again and travelled to venues nationwide, photographing at many of the all-nighters. She wanted to create a document of the scene, so it wouldn’t ever be forgotten. But when she looked through her pics, she felt they lacked something. Those packed-out dance floors she’d enjoyed frequenting aged 16 were far less populated, and the extreme aerobics and unstoppable energy of youth en-masse had been replaced by a handful of 30 to 40-year-olds. It was then that she decided to depict the movement as a “fictional film set in its heyday”.

First shown in 2014, Elaine Constantine’s film Northern Soul tells the story of two young Lancashire teenagers, Matt and John, whose lives are changed forever by the discovery of American soul music and the dance culture that grew up around it.

But before that and to get you into the groove, here’s Detroit-born Lester Tipton with his wonderful Northern Soul floor filler This Won’t Change: