Interview with Levine here
Ian Levine | DJHistory.com
Art
To get some history the full article is well worth a read (and saves me typing) but this bit tells how the discovery and breaking of one tune (The Carstairs It Really Hurts Me girl) was the beginning of the end of the Northern Scene as we knew it - so I have copied it below.
I am surprised to see Ian admit `we went too far`. He did indeed but what he never quite got, and perhaps doesn`t to this day, is whereas Colin played some quality new stuff, many of the tunes Ian played were considered absolute dross by many. That was the main reason for the campaign to get him out.
I also think he saw a commercial opportunity to write and produce his own material and use the scene as a promotional tool.
Ideally, Colin and Ian should have created a new movement alongside the Northern Scene. History tells us otherwise.
From the article:
Back in England I found this dealer called John Anderson who’d moved from Scotland to Kings Lynn. I told him I wanted this Carstairs record and he’d just had a shipment in from America of 100,000 demo records from radio stations. We went through this collection, me, Andy Hanley, and Bernie Golding, and we found three copies of the Carstairs record. Went back to Blackpool, played the record and changed the whole scene. Blackpool Mecca suddenly became the home of this new northern soul sound. I would’ve heard this record in 1973, when it was supposedly released, but not obtained it until 1974. After the Carstairs came this record by Marvin Holmes called You Better Keep Her, Boby Franklin The Ladies Choice, Don Thomas Come On Train, Jay Armstead I’ve Got The Vibes. This new wave of shuffly, hypnotic rhythms, as opposed to the stompiness of the sixties stuff. It was wonderful for a while.
Wigan hated it and carried on playing the sixties stompers. But when things like the Carstairs got played the floor was much busier than when some of the stompers were played. What had happened was the bootleggers had killed it off for us, because every record that we found – Eddie Foster I Never Knew, The Glories I Worship You Baby, the Sweet Things I’m In A World Of Trouble – every time, four or five weeks after they’d started to break they were bootlegging. Simon Soussan who had been an entrepreneur discovering soul records, went to LA. He would bootleg the record, counterfeit the label, I think he bought some pressing plant to do it in, press 2 or 3,000 records send it over to Selectadisc and sell it.
Our rule at Blackpool was as soon as a record was bootlegged we dropped it like a hot potato. If three or four bootlegs were coming in every week, which they were at that time, three or four records got dropped from the playlist and three or four had to be found to replace them. The quality of the sounds started to deteriorate. What was happening in ’75 was the floor was packing to the more modern stuff and the crowd were dictating which way it went. Wigan was the complete opposite. They were looking for anything they could find with a beat, so all they could find at that time were pop records, like Gary Lewis & the Playboys’ My Heart’s Symphony.
They were playing some good soul records, but a lot of white pop was getting played. Muriel Day Nine Times Out Of Ten, Lorraine Silver Lost Summer Love, Brian Hyland The Joker Went Wild. Then it got worse. It got to Hawaii 5-0 by the Ventures and even to Joe 90. The soul fans started to desert Wigan. At the same time, Dave McAleer was releasing these records on Disco Demand, by Wigan’s Chosen Few. They had these horrible pop novelty hits that were masquerading as northern soul. So whereas the diehards hated it and quit Wigan, thousands of new people would see these dancers on Top of the Pops with their badges and singlets and think oh, this is the new thing, let’s get into this.
A new crowd descended on Wigan, who stayed for a while, but were really like sightseers and tourists who’d got into northern soul through the TV exposure it got. Blackpool Mecca was much more for purists. There was a huge war between Russ Winstanley and myself at that time. There were two feuds going on that split the scene. The one between Blackpool and Wigan, or between me and Russ, funnily enough I get on great with him now, and respect him.
The most bitter feud of all was between Dave Godin, who had championed northern soul in Blues & Soul for a long time and Tony Cummings at Black Music. In 1971, northern soul was Godin’s baby. He’d been to the Wheel in 1970, and written this article called the Land of 1,000 Dances, then he came to Blackpool Mecca and I was pictured with him on the steps of the Mecca in 1971.
Tony Cummings had been a very respected soul journalist ran a company called Black Wax which sold imports. Opened up Black Music. In 1971, Cummings decided to come up with a load of London soul fans and see what northern soul was about. Dave Godin found out about this and phoned up the manager of the Mecca, Bill Pye, and had them barred from coming in. They’d come all that way and weren’t allowed into the building. When Tony Cummings became editor of Black Music magazine he became very interested in northern soul. He wrote probably the best article ever written about northern soul which was about ten pages long. There was a record being played in 1973 by Eddie Foster called I Never Knew. He picked up on this record as a fictional example. It was magical! It was fantastic and everyone was raving about this article. Dave Godin was seething because someone had out-Godined Godin. He couldn’t stand it.
Immediately, we became the hated enemy. So he found this club in Cleethorpes that Mary Chapman was running. Suddenly in Blues & Soul it was Blackpool Mecca’s finished, Cleethorpes is the place to be, all this stuff. The scene got ripped apart by it and in the end a load of it was very libellous.
It all crystallised at the Ritz. Neil Rushton was running these all-dayers there. Everybody came. It was a huge success. 1,500-2,000 every Sunday. All the Blackpool crowd came because me and Colin played and all the Wigan crowd came because Richard Searling DJed. At that time we were playing all this modern disco stuff that we were playing at the Mecca: Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, Tavares, Car Wash, Jaws by Lalo Schifrin. And they were playing anything with a stomping beat. It was like two football crowds: Manchester City and Manchester United. It didn’t work. All of these Wiganites with their singlets and baggy pants were shouting, ‘Fuck off! Get off! Play some stompers!’
They went for me and one of the Blackpool guys, Steve Naylor, stepped in defence of their DJ – me - and got his glasses smashed. They started wearing these Levine Must Go badges and one Saturday night Pete King from Wolverhampton and Shelvo from Leicester had got an 11ft. banner that said Levine Must Go and walked through the Highland Room with it. It was all getting quite nasty because they hated the change in the music from the stompers to the modern stuff. I’ll go on record here and say: We went too far. The northern soul scene was very special. I’ve never been one to be told what to do. I was a soul rebel at 14. The concept of northern soul was that people could travel 200 miles on a Saturday night to hear records they couldn’t hear anywhere else.
And what we started with the Carstairs and Marvin Holmes, they were equally rare but more modern. Then we’re playing the Tavares, Crown Heights Affair and Kool & the Gang, even. And suddenly, you weren’t hearing anything that you couldn’t hear anywhere else. It had no uniqueness about it. We should’ve stopped it before it went too far. Because what we did was split that scene into two with an axe. Wigan Casino, in retaliation to what we were doing, went so far the other way and played pathetic jokes for records like Hawaii 5-0. And for us to be playing Sylvester Mighty Real or Colin Curtis got as far as playing Parliament and Funkadelic. Nothing to do with northern soul. The fact of the matter is that northern soul never died it just shrunk down. We all left it and it survived for 15 years and now suddenly blossomed out again. Belle And Sebastian are playing northern soul at their gigs.
