The In Crowd
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Until the last couple of years, apart from the odd short documentary, precious little information about Northern Soul has ever been published. Now suddenly the soul fan is bombarded with it. This book appears hot on the heels of David Nowell's 'Too Darn Soulful', his 'Soul Survivor's' book which he co-wrote with Russ Winstanley and Ian Levine's 'Strange World of Northern Soul' film. In this context the question is not really whether this is a good or a bad book, but whether it can add anything new to what has already been said. On the historical side it devotes three chapters to the development of the British Soul Scene prior to the opening of 'The Twisted Wheel'. It pays tribute to the work of pirate radio stations in bringing the sounds of Black America to the public's attention at a time when the BBC refused to have anything to do with it. These topics are covered in far greater depth than in any other book or film I have seen and are therefore new and exciting. In Chapter four however the book moves on to consider the most influential clubs on the Northern Circuit and at this point it becomes a little stale. The contributions of Blackpool Mecca, Wigan Casino, The Golden Torch and the Twisted Wheel are inestimable, but so much has already been written about them that as publishable material they have become exhausted. The authors redeem themselves by considering the work of lesser known clubs about which much less has been written. These include Va-va's in Bolton, Up the Junction at Crewe, The Catacombs in Wolverhampton, Cleethorpes Pier and numerous others. They also add variety to their text by discussing other issues which have not previously been dealt with. These include the disharmony between soul Guru's Tony Cummings and Dave Godin and also their early pioneering work. The detailed account Dave Godin's tireless efforts on behalf of soul music is a particular revelation. The book is full of fabulous photographs and illustrations which have not been published before, and there are also large pages of quotations taken from Soul Literature of the era. These give the book a broad appeal despite the fact it is technically inferior to David Nowell's 'Too Darn Soulful'. The In-crowd is far too disjointed at times as the reader will quite often come across a paragraph which seems to bear no relationship to the one which went before. It has also been badly edited because it is littered with both spelling and punctuation errors. At £30 it is unquestionably overpriced which is not redeemed by the fact it has 300 big pages. It looks deceptively weighty until one realises that it is well spaced out and written in an extremely large font. From the point of view of my eyesight, which isn't what it used to be, I was grateful for this, but from the point of view of value for money I was sorely disappointed. There is enough new material in this book to justify its existence, though inevitably there are sections which simply repeat the information which might be found in other publications. If, like me, you're a die hard soulie then you won't regret buying it, and you'll probably also invest in the second volume, but be prepared to feel more than a little cheated.
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Why Not visit the Authors other Website, 'The Alternative Blackpool Website' at http://www.localdial.com/users/jsyedu133/bpool This Site Last Updated 18/05/05
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