Initially emerging from David Sanjek's one-day symposium on Northern Soul at the University of Salford, followed by further meetings in Birmingham, UK, this edited collection includes key academic essays, journalistic articles and new research essays. In addition, the collection offers a set of photographic dossiers and eight portraits of participants, presented as vignettes around selected music recordings. Also included are interviews with three scene-defining film makers: Tony Palmer, who shot The Wigan Casino in 1977, linking after-hours dance marathons with the experience of being young and working in uneventful industrial jobs; Elaine Constantine, who wrote and directed the 2014 fiction film Northern Soul, recreating the 1970s scene through the experiences of a young male protagonist; and Liam Quinn, Northern Soul dance choreographer for the 2010 fiction film Soul Boy. As personal accounts and mediations mix with critically positioned studies, this engaging collection aims to reach beyond textual knowledge production. Northern Soul is mainly identified as a dance and music collector scene, centring on danceable soul recordings that first appeared during the 1960s. By the 1970s, the infamous working-class all-nighter weekend events that occurred in northern England locations, such as Manchester, Blackpool and Wigan, with their dancers reportedly fuelled by stimulating chemicals, became the mythological stuff of legends, leaving a legacy in a range of cultural outcomes.

Back in 1982, Cosgrove published an article on the trend-setting Northern Soul club Wigan Casino, republished here as the opening chapter and rebalanced by the rich collection of cross-generational contributions by experts, researchers and participants that follow. A first response to Cosgrove's article is a 1998 essay by Northern Soul scholars Joanne Hollows and Katie Milestone, who argue for a more diverse understanding of the experience and development of the scene. In turn, Tim Wall's 2006 essay emphasises the importance of dancing as a musical activity, as ways of listening and of interpreting, that forges an embodied engagement with Northern Soul. Later in the collection, Katie Milestone responds to the gendered perspective on the Northern Soul scene, where men are seen to compete for dance moves and rare record collecting; nevertherless, she shows that women, although marginalised, are ever present in the scene, particularly on the dance floor. Nicola Smith completes the first set of foundational essays by addressing a characteristic ageing dance crowd mixed in with younger dancers, as the scene continues to this day, thereby exploding a persistent idea in British subcultural writing that dancing is the exclusive domain of young people.

Ady Croasdell and Nicola Watchman Smith, respectively, take the discussion further by addressing issues of authenticity in the collecting and reissuing of rare dance records. Joe Street, meanwhile, turns the reader's attention to scene leader Dave Godin, credited with introducing the term ‘Northern Soul’ during the 1960s as a tag in the London-based record shop where he worked. According to Sarah Raine and Tim Wall, Godin further established the concept of Northern Soul during the early 1970s in the (London-based) magazine Blues & Soul. Taking a trans-generational approach, Raine and Wall critically address the mediation of a linear origin myth of the scene as reproduced in documentary and fictionalised films, as well as other popular cultural mediations. How this can be re-interpreted is further explored in these authors’ reflections, together with Mark Duffett's piece on participants’ diverse first-hand experiences.

The first-hand experience of participants reminds me of Mark Leckey's 2019 exhibition Mark Leckey: O'Magic Power of Bleakness at London's Tate Britain, which addressed his experience of growing up during the 1960s and 1970s in north-west England. The exhibition included the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), made up of found film fragments of young people turning, twisting and losing themselves to music on the dance floor, linking Northern Soul and the rave scene through images and re-inserted soundtracks. For Leckey (2019, p. 15), the film is ‘about a very particular working-class culture’ and functions as a form of ‘exorcism’ to dispel a certain nostalgia (p. 13). Perhaps similarly, a haunting sense of nostalgia may well be dispelled for both authors and readers of this diverse collection. Northern Soul lives on in a range of interpretations, enabling new forms of becoming transformed through mediation, as Lucy Gibson emphasises in her chapter.

The sense of community that is built through dancing to rare soul records is characterised by idiosyncratic loose dress style and attendance to in-crowd events. Relying on imported African American soul music, the mostly white British working-class Northern Soul scene brings up questions of racial identity, which David Sanjek's closing chapter addresses from an American perspective, problematising crude black-music stereotypes of displaying either ‘floating’ emotionality or ‘stomping’ physicality. Yet, based on his observations during the creation of his 2004 photographic book, Keeping the Faith, John Barrett here argues that there is a case to be made for a resonance between struggles of ‘the African American in the 1960s and 70s and [Northern English] white working-class’ (p. 168) participants, who were prepared to travel great distances and miss out on sleep throughout their weekends to engage in dancing, collecting music and socialising, and to escape the bleakness of repetitive working weeks.

The power of audience participation is further demonstrated by the sheer diversity of perspectives, forms of engagements and mixed-age generations that emerge from the pages of this collection; it is in the lived experience of the dance events, and in their immediate contexts, that Northern Soul acquires its multiple meanings. The recognition of a plurality of scenes over historical time and geographical distance is the achievement of this collection, enabled through a rich mix of academic, journalistic, and personal accounts. The notion of a single Northern Soul scene, as the title seems to imply, can therefore not be sustained. A simple encyclopaedic narrative has not only been avoided but also laid to rest, instead opening the doors to a multitude of fragments that inform a range of understandings of Northern Soul. The collection thereby offers an example of how to address diversity in (popular) music scenes. Keep the faith, to recite the Northern Soul slogan, and listen to a plurality of hearing.