Stepping off the Soul Train: From Liverpool to London

'The Real Thing'. Image: Liverpool City Council/Liverpool Ecgo

In the early 1970s, the pre-punk era in Liverpool music wasn't all late Beatles, David Essex and Marc Bolan. There was also Soul. Motown of course, but also and mainly Northern Soul which it is often, yet erroneously, said eschewed commercial Motown. In fact the two were intertwined. Northern Soul staples included 1960s songs such as Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love" which was picked up by British club DJ Richard Searling and played in Northern soul clubs in 1973-74; it wasn't a Motown product but sounded like one. Then, there was the Motown label's "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" sung and performed by the Four Tops. It was a hit in 1965 and was popular again in the early 1970s. And then there were Freda Payne's "Band of Gold" and Chairmen of the Board's "Give Me Just a Little More Time" which were both produced by the Motown-breakaway songwriting team of Holland–Dozier–Holland and were UK chart hits in 1970.

Not all Motown music consisted of love songs and romantic ballads. For instance, there was the Temptations' 1970 hit "Ball of Confusion", later covered by Tina Turner (1982), which focussed on real, world problems. And before that even, the Temptations' anti-Vietnam war song "War", which became a number 1 hit in the USA when re-recorded with Edwin Starr as the vocalist.

Soul in the hey-day of pop-rock was perhaps not cool, not hip, but nevertheless immensely popular. It was the music of my schooldays. Sherman shirts (Ben Sherman button-down shirts), bovver boots (Doc Martins), “tramlines" (roomy straight trousers with turn-ups) for those who veered towards the skinhead, and flares for those who were more mod-inclined. I loved the music but baulked at the tramlines. I was a tousle-headed, flares guy listening to pirate radio stations at night.

But, apart from the initiated, Sherman-shirt boys at school, there was Linda and her uncles. Linda was several years older than me and we met at a badminton club. She lived off Lodge Lane in Liverpool's Toxteth and I'd walk her back home after badminton at night. Linda was black, what we now call Afro-descendant, and she was a trainee nurse and I was a 15-year old high school kid. But we got on. She invited me to her birthday party. The attendees consisted of the two of us and four or five "uncles" and, of course,  non-stop soul music. It was a strange but memorable evening. Soul for her was not club music, it was simply black music, her music.

In addition to soul imported from the USA, locally, there was Liverpool born-and-bred The Real Thing and their hit song "You to Me Are Everything". I was reminded of the Liverpool 8 band while swapping anecdotes with my half-brother John whom I recently encountered for the first time. John remembered being a classmate at St James school of band-member Dave Smith. I didn't have such a memorable link to music industry royalty. At my own school as a prefect I was merely responsible for forcing out onto the playground a recalcitrant Holly Johnson who would gain fame in the 1980s as Frankie Goes to Hollywood's vocal singer.

In the summer before I left for London, I spent the vacation factory-cleaning at a paper board mill in Warrington. A number of students from Liverpool Art College did the same and I was often paired with the art school band Deaf School's Steve Allen. It was 1975 and they hadn't yet recorded an album. Every morning, while we cleaned bakelite electricity control panels, Steve would sing me a song he'd been working on. I thought his improbable stage name enviably wonderful: Enrico Cadillac Jr. 

As for the Real Thing, their chart-topping hit came out in 1976 when I'd already left Liverpool and was at university in London. Although the song was a major hit, in the south it not only had to compete with bubble-gum music and Eurovision-inflected pop groups such as ABBA, but also with reggae, a music that had an aura that was more to the taste of the cosmopolitan, middle-class student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where I spent the second half of the 1970s. In 1979, many of us participated in Rock Against Racism as did the groups The Clash and The Specials, and ska became the music to listen to; the Specials were to be heard at all the student dances. Paradoxically, Motown, an archetypical Black American cultural form, and Northern soul, embedded in industrial northern working-class culture, were not on the playlist.

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