Deptford Northern Soul Club: ‘We want to continue the tradition’

DJ duo Deptford Northern Soul Club have a residency in a Leeds venue. They spoke to DUNCAN SEAMAN.
Deptford Northern Soul ClubDeptford Northern Soul Club
Deptford Northern Soul Club

Northern soul was once the province of nightclubs such as the Wigan Casino, The Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the Blackpool Mecca and the Golden Torch in Stone-on-Trent. Places in the 1960s and early 70s where young, working-class Mods could dance all night to fast-tempo, beat-heavy black American soul music – often the more obscure, the better.

Although the scene faded in the late 70s as funk and disco took over, it never vanished entirely and now a new breed of Northern soul lovers are carrying the torch.

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Among them are Deptford Northern Soul Club – London DJs Will Foot and Lewis Henderson – whose reputation has spread nationwide in the past three years. From a one-off show at a club in south-east London to spinning discs at Glastonbury festival and the Q Awards, they are helping to turn a new generation onto soul music. Now they have a monthly residency at Headrow House in Leeds.

“We started it in 2016,” explains Foot. “We went to a festival in September time and there was a soul DJ there would we didn’t particularly enjoy and we thought, ‘We know the music, we can do a better job. Our first night was in November 2016, and we started at the Bunker Club in Deptford, south-east London, in January 2017 and from there we haven’t stopped.”

The pair were crate-diggers before they launched the night. “I was definitely a record collector but I wasn’t big on the Northern soul scene because the records were so expensive to buy,” says Henderson. “But over the last three years I’ve built up a rarer large selection.”

DNSC are keenly aware of the history of Northern soul. “Everything we do we try not to take away from the history,” says Foot. “We learnt so much from people who’ve been there. The amount of times people come up to us at nights and go, ‘I used to go to Wigan’ and you instantly know what that means, you know that their pedigree is pretty strong within Northern soul.”

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While respectful of tradition, their approach also seeks to bring things into the 21st century. “We want to recontextualise it into a modern scenario where young people also feel very welcome into the scene as well,” says Henderson. “Definitely at Wigan and Stoke-on-Trent and places like the Twisted Wheel in Manchester it was all about bringing new music. What we’re trying to do is take the same music and play it to the next generation of music lovers.

“Also what we want to try to do is provide an inclusive space where people feel they can express themselves through dance, I think that’s definitely what Wigan was about. Before Northern soul in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of stigma about men dancing by themselves; Northern soul kind of did away with that. When you see Northern soul dancing you dance alone, you never dance with a partner and definitely in the North of England for working class people that was a bit of a revolution for a man to be able to dance without a partner.

“What we want to do is continue that tradition, to just having a dancing that is free, where people don’t feel social pressure, they can get up and they can dance.”

“At the same time,” says Foot, “there’s no pressure to come to our nights and dance like they used to do. It’s amazing when people do that, we’ve seen some amazing dancers, but there are also those who are coming to their first Northern soul night and they don’t know the moves or whatever, and it’s a really great mix between people who know their Northern soul well and they want to dance a certain way and people who don’t know it at all and maybe want to dance in a different way, that’s what we’re all about.”

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The last appeal of Northern soul is, they believe, its energy. “Northern soul is sad music with a happy beat, as it’s often described,” says Foot. “You can’t not dance to it. I find it very hard when somebody puts it on, especially very loudly in a club environment, and not dance. It’s not the kind of music where you sit down and listen to it, people dance to it.”

DNSC has grown beyond anything either of them envisaged. “We just thought about doing one, just because no one was really doing it for our age group,” says Henderson, “and then we just got such amazing feedback from doing it, then people asked us to do more and more and it kind of snowballed.” As well as the club nights, the pair have launched a record label, making some of the rare Northern soul tunes affordable to fans whose pockets are not as deep as die-hard collectors. Henderson says: “We wanted to bring them back, because a lot of the time either because they’re really rare or they were pressed in the 60s they’ve just kind of been lost in time and now, 40 or 50 years on, they’re so scratched they can sound awful and people are crying out for better-sounding versions, so what we’ve been doing is tracking down great copies and the original artists and record labels and get amazing copies cut back off the vinyl so that people young and old can enjoy it.”

Deptford Northern Soul Club, Headrow House, on November 15 and December 13. deptfordnorthernsoulclub.co.uk

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