Insta(nt) Soul
The online heist of Northern Soul dancing
and
the rise of the ‘soulebutante’
One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One catches sight of everything, yet reaches no Insight. One accumulates information and data, yet does not attain knowledge. One lusts after adventure and stimulation, but always remains the same. One accumulates online ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ yet never encounters another person. Social media constitutes an absolute zero grade of the social.
Han, The Expulsion of the Other (2018)
During the 70’s when I first joined the northern soul scene, there was only one way to learn about the history, music, dancing, venues and people, and it was a purely oral and visual tradition, it was a ‘live’, visceral and embodied route. There was no such thing as being online. It was not mediated by absurd online courses or charlatan teachers peddling their manufactured and imagined northern soul dance steps. No one was telling me I needed to do their class to give me confidence to step onto a northern soul dance floor. My northern soul apprenticeship was guided by encountering like-minded souls, by experiencing, and by dancing at, multiple venues across the country, by navigating the rough edges that often presented themselves on that exploration, by observation, by living room/youth club practice sessions, amphetamines, skipping school, by talking endlessly to other devotees, by buying records and listening to tapes. I contributed to, and was a part of, a scene, a community of like-minded souls who were there for one thing and one thing only, the music, the community, and the freedom to dance.
Why Am I Writing This?
It’s a question that I ask myself, and after much reflection and soul searching, I return to the answer that I must. My soul needs to set things straight, to put it down in writing before the scene that changed my life’s trajectory forever disappears for good in a sea of online curation and parody.
Amidst the dramatic rise in numbers of attendees on the northern soul scene during the past fifteen or so years, made up predominantly of older returnees, younger groups in search of a scene, and older individuals searching for a musical scene that does not exclude or mock them, a strange re-imagining of northern soul dance history and fashion has manifested on the dance floors.
In a previous chapter for Equinox books in 2019 called ‘I’m Still Looking for Unknowns All the Time’, I discussed the original ethos of the northern soul scene, which was to dance to music you didn’t know and to immerse yourself in the improvised excitement of those moments. There was no top 500 of reified tunes or price guidebooks aimed at creating an imagined and highly inflated market for 45’s. Of course, we knew many tracks after a while, but they never became hammered to death by DJ’s playing them week in, week out, year in, year out, for ever and ever amen. That was not the faith we referred to in the utterance “keep the faith”.
The purpose of this book then is to combine my personal experience of dancing on the Northern Soul scene (I didn’t stop when Wigan Casino closed, and the scene went truly underground) and to use that embodied experience, in combination with my academic dance practice research background, to argue that the rise of online celebrity northern soul dance teachers, curators and commentators has led to the creation of ‘something else’ and that something else I have previously defined as historical pastiche. Rather ironically, this historical pastiche is full of histrionics that are acted out within the practiced performance of each song to signal emotion and supposed cultural capitol within the scene. Think, windmilling the arms, clutching the heart, or doing ‘soul-face’ to signal that the lyrics touch you deeply: all affected behaviours that have been misguidedly garnered and regurgitated from Tony Palmer’s absurd, classist documentary ‘This England’.
But what scene is this? To me it is not recognisable as northern soul, the movement that always moved forward as a reaction against the stagnant repetition of quotidian life at the time. One of the reasons it could not be marketed and capitalised upon very easily was that it was impossible - at that time and up until the last couple of decades - to reify it in terms of music, musicians, dancing, fashion, celebrity or venues. So, what changed?
The book is not intended as an academic un-picking, and it is my voice as a long-time participant in this vernacular dance culture that takes precedent. I will though, attempt to lead the reader through a short history of what I have experienced and observed as the historical route to this present state of repetitive dance strain.
As the title suggests, the arrival of ‘Insta(nt) Soul’ around a decade ago changed everything, and upon closer examination it has the markings of a well-produced cultural heist.
So, let’s have a look shall we…
The book is very nearly finished and will be available to buy in July 2025.
ABOUT the Author
Paul is an academic scholar who specialises in how vernacular dance culture is gentrified, legitimised, and corporatised for financialisation. He argues that the commercialised space(s) of vernacular dance render freedom of expression mute through aggressive and restrictive production processes and that these manufacturing processes co-opt histories for cultural and financial capital. In doing so the corporate dance colonisers shackle and manipulate corporeal freedom.
Vernacular dances are dances which have developed 'naturally' as a part of 'everyday' culture within a particular community. In contrast to the elite and official culture,
Pauls doctoral work focussed upon the co-optation of hip hop dance culture within the space(s) of elite contemporary dance institutions in the UK and the resulting commodified and legitimised Hip Hop Dance Theatre products that emerged from that context.
He has written for Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies as well as contributing a chapter about northern soul dance culture for the Equinox Northern Soul Scene book.
Paul has been active on the northern soul scene since 1976 as a dancer, and record collector.
He was the director and producer of the stage play Once Upon A Time in Wigan (2003-2005).
He was the movement director for Elaine Constantines feature film Northern Soul (2014)
He was the movement director for the groundbreaking Gucci Soul Scene campaign (2017)