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Chatting the return of Northern Soul live and Orchestrated with radio legend Stuart Maconie

'Come along, you're gonna have a great night!' (this article contains affiliate links)

Danny Jones - 9th September 2024

Ahead of the wildly successful and cult-favourite Northern Soul Orchestrated UK tour returning to the likes of Manchester, Liverpool and more, we were lucky enough to get some time with the man curating the latest run of sensational shows.

Following the success of its debut at the Royal Albert Hall as part of last year’s BBC Proms, what was intended to be a one-off night of music is now a fully-fledged live production coming to the O2 Apollo this winter alongside a small handful of select and equally special venues.

Similarly, the classic Northern Soul tracks being pulled out of the archives are just as carefully hand-picked by radio legend and the event’s much-loved host, Stuart Maconie, a revered veteran broadcaster for the best part of three decades.

Set to take his baby and the brilliant BBC Orchestra on the road once again for four nights only, we sat down with Stu to break down why people are once again going mad for the music and dance movement.

Northern Soul Orchestrated returns this November, how are you feeling ahead of the tour?

Oh, really excited. I mean, the shows so far have been incredible. People always talk up things obviously, but I couldn’t have predicted the level of excitement we’ve got from the crowd.

I mean, it all comes out of that one performance, as you know, that Northern Soul prom at Albert Hall last year, which was just a triumph and almost immediately we all thought, “We can’t only do this once.”

And so we did we did a string of dates in April, including at Factory International in Manchester, and the audiences have been incredible. I mean, this music is music that it’s hard not to love, you know what I mean? It’s passionate, it’s dramatic, it’s brilliant, and people don’t just quite like Northern Soul, you know what I mean? They love it.

There are some real devotees who know every song, and you can see that they know every word of these songs even though they were never hit records.

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Yeah, it’s always had a real cult-like following, right?

For sure. These songs mean so much to them because they’ve been the soundtrack of their life since they were teenagers so they’ve grown up to them: they got their first job to them, they got their first partner to them; they got married, they got divorced, they’ve lost loved ones, they’ve lost jobs etc.

I also think they speak about the things that really concern people in their lives. Heartbreak, work, family, and you can see it in their eyes just how much this music means to them.

Having said that, if you’ve never heard a note of Northern Soul, if it’s a baffling mystery to you – less these days than it used to be because back in the day, in the 1970s, it was very much an underground thing; little clubs, people exchanging records almost in secret. That was part of its allure, I think.

You went to these clubs and heard this music that nobody else knew about. You met like-minded people from all around the country so, yeah, it was a real cultish scene. But now, thanks to the internet – although the internet’s got many things to answer for – it’s been great for putting people together like Northern Soul fans.

You can now buy compilation CDs of records that would’ve been as rare as hen’s teeth back in the 70s, so it’s helped ‘keep the faith’ as the phrase goes and spread the word and I’m really excited about it.

Absolutely, and you kind of have the ideal role as curator, don’t you?

Oh yes, I mean, the shows like the April were astonishing, emotional and thrilling, and I’ve got such a great day ahead of me, it’s fantastic.

I’ve got the best job there because yeah, most of the work’s already done; I just sit back and enjoy it basically, yeah. I come on five or six times, I wave and people go mad, you know. The crowd’s having a great time and loving it – I just get a chance to be part of this fantastic party.

It is good and useful to have me there though [he laughs] because you need to set the music in some kind of context and it’s good to go to places and talk a little about their time and their experience of Northern Soul.

All the places we’ve been so far have got their own rich bit of Northern Soul heritage. Manchester, obviously, with the Twisted Wheel [nightclub] – arguably the birthplace of the movement – and I guess there might be one or two people that actually went there then and are now reliving it.

The Twisted Wheel,
6 Whitworth Street
Manchester.
Closed its doors today in 1973.#northernsoul pic.twitter.com/awPA2AE5SI

— Keith Tweet 🥯 (@acidkeith) September 3, 2024

Yeah, I think it’s also having a real renaissance at the minute too – like Northern Soul Nights are a thing once again all over Greater Manchester and beyond, be it in Stockport or under the arches at Thirsty Scholar as it has for years...

—You know it and, more importantly, new generations are hearing it now. It’s a bit like folk music or the Beatles or whatever: new generations hear it and there’s something just so brilliant about the music, it transcends genre, it transcends generation.

Anybody who likes music hears ‘Do I Love You’ by Frank Wilson or these records, and goes “God, this is good”, and it transcends those usual boundaries. I think it’s just quintessentially brilliant pop music.

What is it you think about the genre and maybe the era as well that you think makes it so special? Because like you say it’s not just the music, it’s the aesthetic, the style of movement, the fashion…

Yeah, everything. I think that a lot of it has to do with that cultishness we mentioned. You’re not just getting into a style of music, you’re getting into a way of life in a way, of like-minded people. There’s a lot about friendship and a lot about class, I think, in the best sense of the word.

One of the things I love about the music, and I say this a lot, is this was music primarily made by working-class Black people in Detroit and New York and American industrial cities in the late 1960s, mid-60s, then embraced by working-class white people in the north and the middles in the early 1970s.

I really love that sense of kinship between those two communities. I think that they have a lot in common and I think it’s important to showcase that. They were people who worked hard, often in demanding jobs that were not well paid, and I think they sang about the things that were true to them, like their lives, their jobs; their heartbreaks, their love lives and their families. I think that’s why people relate to it.

It just looks good too; the dancing’s great and it has a whole associated aesthetic, as you say – a real built-in subculture and you can buy into different bits of it as well. Like, I know some of the big Northern Soul DJs never dance. Yeah. I mean, they’re into the collecting and the curation, but they don’t dance.

In fact, I’ve only very rarely seen some of the top DJs dance. Some people are into it for the dancing, some people are into it for the clothes, some people are into it for just the music.

There are even people who actively track down everything on the Revilot or Ric-Tic label and stuff like that. There’s so much to enjoy and it has a real sense of joy and community at its heart I think.

Yeah, it’s a very upbeat and uplifting scene. Will we be seeing you pulling out any moves at all?

You know what, I think I might do. I’m not sure if I’ve done that yet. The trouble is, it’s a bit difficult for me because, with the best will in the world, if I go out into the crowd while it’s happening, people then want to stop and talk. I’d love to but I’d be there forever, you know, but it is a lovely atmosphere.

At the prom, I snuck out into the bit where the promenade is for a bit during ‘The Night’ by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, brilliantly sung by Darrell Smith. It was an amazing moment, I’ll never forget it. The whole other hour that I was on their feet.

I love that. I mean, obviously, you mentioned the debut at the Proms – what’s changed in the production since then?

We’re still talking about what to do for the event dates and it’s a nice dilemma to have. It works so well and you’re taking it to new audiences, so we have been debating do we freshen it up or ‘if ain’t broke don’t fix it’?

We dropped and added a few songs between the Prom and the live show but we’re still in discussion about what to do because these are new audiences and also a lot of people saw that performance because it was the most watched televised Prom after the annual Last Night of, I believe.

So a lot of people watched it and recorded it; you also don’t want it to disappoint and people do want to have that experience recreated in a live setting, so you don’t want to disappoint them. Last year it was very important to me and Joe [Duddell] that we had the same singers and BBC Concert Hall Orchestra,

I think if people had come along and seen, frankly, an inferior orchestra or an inferior set of singers, maybe they’d have felt shortchanged, so it was important that we replicated as much as we could and that’s what we’re doing. To those who come along and help, we can guarantee you a brilliant night out.

Yeah, obviously the classics are gonna be a mainstay and you just touched on Joe there, a very talented Manchester local – how special is it to have him on board?

Yeah, so it’s weird now thinking that when we go out and we go on stage and there are waves of love and passion from the audience. I remember in our early Zoom calls where we were just with a big spreadsheet going, “What should we do? What about this Should we put that there?”

I remember us having those discussions and very quickly realising these songs are really short and that we were going to be doing about 34 songs, so a lot of it was thinking how do we pace it? Because obviously, you could just have banger after banger and have people exhausted after an hour and a half.

Sometimes, you know, you need a little bit of texture – a little bit of tempo change – but by the end, it’s just one big party. It’s amazing to think that we started swapping emails and sending Spotify links to see if this would work and specifics like whether we’d need bassoons, and now we’ve brought it to life.

A lot of it was me saying, “Well, you know Joe mate, I’ll leave that up to you!”

Fair enough haha – but yes, there has to be a lot more hard work that goes into building the set on both ends, surely?

One of our great decisions early on, I think, was we have a band, we have the orchestra, we’re fantastic, but at the centre of the stage we have another little band, so we have a bass a drummer and electric guitars, and that’s really neat because the record themselves had those elements.

The difference is that when people put orchestras on pop music nowadays, this is how the people who made these records would have wanted them to sound if they had the money back then. The people who made these records back in Detroit in 1966 would have loved to have them sound like this if they could have afforded the BBC Concert Orchestra, so really we’re giving this music the treatment it deserves.

I love that. And yeah, there are obviously some stunning venues to play like the Apollo at the Philarmonic Hall in Liverpool and the beautifully refurbished Stockton Globe – how magical is it for you guys to be playing these venues like so many before you?

Yep, The Beatles and The Stones, Paul Robeson and many others have tread those boards and they’ve all got a really rich and storied history. It’s going to be great and I hope there’ll be many more to come after this as well.

Fingers crossed. Lastly, if you could sum up Northern Soul Orchestrated in three words, what would those three words be?

Passionate, thrilling, exuberant.

Read more:

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• Loyle Carner announces special headline show at The Warehouse Project 2024

Northern Soul Orchestrated lands in Manchester on Tuesday, 26 November from 7pm onwards.

You can grab your tickets HERE.

Keep the faith.

For all the latest news, events and goings on in Greater Manchester, subscribe to The Manc newsletter HERE.

Featured Images — Charles Patch/Andy Paradise/Press Images (supplied)