Lifestyle
Northern Soul is thriving across the UK thanks to Gen Z looking to dance
Northern Soul, the up-tempo Black American music made during the ’60s and ’70s, is experiencing a resurgence. Will Foot and Lewis Henderson from the Deptford Northern Soul Club have brought this underground subgenre to venues across the United Kingdom, attracting a Gen Z audience looking to dance.
Greta Kaur-Taylor
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Greta Kaur-Taylor
Northern Soul, the up-tempo Black American music made during the ’60s and ’70s, is experiencing a resurgence. Will Foot and Lewis Henderson from the Deptford Northern Soul Club have brought this underground subgenre to venues across the United Kingdom, attracting a Gen Z audience looking to dance.
Greta Kaur-Taylor
LONDON – It’s 1964. No, wait. It’s 2023.
The music blasting through the speakers at this dark and sticky club in East London is 1964’s “Tainted Love” by American artist Gloria Jones.
You may have never heard of Jones, but you have listened to Soft Cell’s 1981 hit cover of the same song. If Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, Jones is the Queen of Northern Soul. There’s an important distinction here.
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“Northern Soul is inherently up-tempo, Black American music that never really made it in America,” says Lewis Henderson, who makes up one half of the Deptford Northern Soul Club (DNSC), the duo headlining this sold-out event at the Moth Club in Hackney.
“It’s like B music,” Henderson says, “but you know, like this kind of fast up-tempo music that people didn’t want to listen to in their homes.”
For more than seven years, Henderson and his musical partner Will Foot have brought this underground subgenre to venues across the United Kingdom, attracting a Gen Z audience looking to dance. But as packed and energetic as this dancefloor is, the story of Northern Soul hardly starts with this generation.
Will Foot (left) and Lewis Henderson, of Deptford Northern Soul Club.
Deptford Northern Soul Club
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Deptford Northern Soul Club
Will Foot (left) and Lewis Henderson, of Deptford Northern Soul Club.
Deptford Northern Soul Club
It dates back to the 1960s when most of these records were made at places like Motown in Detroit or Stax Records in Memphis, Tenn.
“If a song didn’t make the cut of Motown or was scrapped, they would often press 500 demo copies to send out to test audiences,” says 29-year-old Will Foot, the other half of DNSC.
He says those demos were destined to live in obscurity if it wasn’t for an obsessive group of British music collectors.
“There’s stories of DJs flying over to America and going to places like Miami and Chicago and Detroit and just going through warehouses of records that dealers were selling on and didn’t really know what they have,” Foot says. At which point, “they would bring them back and make them hits in the UK.”
Hits not just anywhere in the UK; Northern Soul’s success came from cities and clubs across northern England, where the music resonated with the region’s working class, such as the legendary Northern Soul DJ Colin Curtis.
“In a nutshell, this was working-class people finding an exciting music form and finding clubs that were doing this,” says 71-year-old Curtis, who still performs across the UK.
Curtis says a London-based music journalist and record shop owner named Dave Godin coined the term “Northern Soul” in the late 60s after receiving a strew of visitors from the north coming into his shop looking for rare offbeat – and up-tempo – soul records.
The up-tempo made these records flourish in clubs across the north – songs that were rediscovered and recontextualized by a scene of young and energetic working-class people looking for a weekend escape from the drudge and drear of what was primarily industrial factory work.
Clubs like the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the Golden Torch in Stoke-on-Trent quickly gained reputations for hosting Northern Soul all-nighters, with people coming in on buses from across the UK to dance for 24 hours straight.
“There’s folk spinning, running up the walls, flipping over, landing in box splits,” says Keb Darge, a famously mouthy Scottish taekwondo master turned dancer and DJ who quickly gained a reputation on these dance floors.
A souvenir woven patch from the last night at the Wigan Casino, which played Northern Soul at all night dances during the ’70s and early ’80s.
Ker Robertson/Getty Images
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Ker Robertson/Getty Images
A souvenir woven patch from the last night at the Wigan Casino, which played Northern Soul at all night dances during the ’70s and early ’80s.
Ker Robertson/Getty Images
Darge’s favorite venue was an old ballroom outside of Manchester called Wigan Casino, which in its heyday was welcoming sold-out crowds of over 2,000 people every weekend.
“There was no alcohol. There was no chatting to girls or dancing with girls,” Darge says. “You were there to dance to the records…and if Raquel Welch had walked up to me when I was dancing, do you fancy coming back to my hill? f*** off, Raquel. I’m dancing. Don’t be stupid.”
Then, there was the music itself. Dozens of American artists whose careers never took off at home were now the stars of Northern Soul – unbeknownst to many of them.
“Some of them didn’t even remember they made a record,” says Darge.
That was the case for Johnny Baker, whose 1973 single “Shy Guy” became a Northern Soul hit. Producers in the UK struggled to track him down to pay royalties. When they finally did find Baker, Darge says he was working at a gas station in New Jersey.
Rickey Calloway, a Florida-based artist who gained a reputation for his James Brown-like vocals, was working as a janitor in a school when he learned about his success on the other side of the pond. Calloway ended up relaunching his career in the UK and Europe.
Others, like Charles Simmons, never saw their success during their lifetime.
“He was a car mechanic and he died in a pauper’s grave,” says Lewis Henderson of DNSC.
Henderson credits the uplifting lyrics to Simmons’ single “Save the World” for sending a message of coming together during difficult times.
“A lot of [Northern Soul] songs are sending this message of ‘we got sick together and we can fight this, and we can build a better like world.’”
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That message still resonates with people today, says Henderson, who believes the genre’s more recent popularity with Gen Z comes at least in part from its convergence with movements like Black Lives Matter.
“When people listen to a record that was recorded in the 60s with the same message, it resonates now because they understand the context of it,” says Henderson.
Others say they appreciate the movement’s origins as something born out of counterculture.
“There’s no sense of conformity,” says 24-year-old Alex Standish. “Everyone turns up in crazy outfits and they dance like, in a way which is completely uninhibited.”
Standish says he sees Northern Soul as an escape – and it feels very freeing to be a part of what some thought to be a temporary underground movement.
People dance the night away at the Moth Club in Hackney.
Lewis Henderson
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Lewis Henderson
People dance the night away at the Moth Club in Hackney.
Lewis Henderson
Tim Matheson says he’s lucky he never got too big into cocaine … saying he played hard — but, he worried too much about how the white stuff would affect his work to get addicted.
The star of “Animal House” spoke with Page Six about his new memoir, “Damn Glad to Meet You” — a reference to a line his character says to prospective pledges in the iconic college fraternity film — and, he explains that because he was a working actor, he was afraid of overindulging in coke.
Basically, Matheson says he wasn’t a star and lived paycheck to paycheck … and, he was acutely aware he could lose his income unless he continued to perform well.
That said, Tim says he didn’t completely shun the stuff … but, he didn’t use it as much as some of his contemporaries who were further up the callsheet.
One of those contemporaries … John Belushi — who died of an overdose of cocaine and heroin in 1982 at just 33 years old.
Matheson says part of the problem is that everyone in his generation was saying cocaine wasn’t all that bad for you … obviously, not the case.
TM’s gone on to have quite the career since “Animal House” … taking parts in “The West Wing,” “Hart of Dixie,” “Fletch,” “Batman: The Animated Series,” “Black Sheep,” “Van Wilder,” and “Virgin River.”
Drug addiction probably would’ve limited his career credits … and, Matheson’s thanking his lucky stars he never fell into it.
President-elect Donald Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to play a major role in U.S. food policy as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Some farmers and agriculture experts worry that Kennedy will push unscientific and unproven ideas.
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President-elect Donald Trump won farm country by wide margins in this month’s election, with rural voters helping fuel his return to the White House.
But some farmers, economists, analysts and others in the agriculture industry are voicing alarm over Trump plans that could disrupt America’s $1.5 trillion food industry.
Trump moved this past week to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Food and Drug Administration. A nomination requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
In a column published on Friday, soybean farmer Amanda Zaluckyj called the choice “a literal middle finger to agriculture, which constituted a key piece of Trump’s base.”
Writing in the trade journal Ag Daily, she described Kennedy as “an absolute danger” to the American farm industry.
“He has gone as far as saying he would ‘weaponize’ regulatory agencies to eliminate the use of pesticides,” Zaluckyj said, adding that Kennedy has “voiced strong opposition to the scientific consensus” on farm industry practices.
Zaluckyj isn’t alone in raising questions about Kennedy’s role. In an essay published in September, before Kennedy was named to head HHS, biotech analyst Dana O’Brien described Trump’s “embrace” of Kennedy as “a threat to American agriculture.”
“The elevation of Kennedy by Trump is chilling,” O’Brien wrote in the online trade journal Agri-Pulse. “It represents a wholesale shift in politics and farm policy.”
Kennedy has a long track record voicing conspiracy theories, including baseless claims that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain”; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; and that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender.
Some agriculture experts worry similar unproven or unscientific views could now reshape U.S. farm and food policy.
“His distrust of genetically modified seeds is longstanding and in opposition to thousands of scientific studies,” wrote Blake Hurst, a farmer and former head of Missouri’s Farm Bureau, in the journal Agri-Pulse.
Hurst described Trump’s ties to Kennedy as an “unholy alliance.”
Kennedy has long condemned industrial food corporations as well as Big Ag trade groups, which he says have driven an obesity epidemic in the U.S. while polluting farmland and bankrupting smaller family farms.
“America’s current ag policy is destroying America’s health on every level,” Kennedy said in a video posted on social media last month.
“Corporate interests have hijacked the USDA’s dietary guidelines to make natural, unprocessed foods an afterthought.”
Kennedy is calling for restrictions on a host of food additives and dyes. He wants to reduce the dominance of ultra-processed foods; he’s called for reforming the SNAP food assistance program — formerly known as food stamps.
In naming Kennedy to head one of the nation’s most powerful food regulatory agencies, Trump appeared to embrace that vision: “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex,” Trump said on the social media platform X.
According to Trump, under Kennedy’s leadership, “HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives.”
Trump’s decision to make Kennedy a major player in U.S. food policy has also drawn support from some farmers.
Sid Miller, a farmer and rancher who serves as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, praised the selection.
“Today, more than two in five adults and over one in five children in America are obese,” Miller, a Republican, wrote in an essay posted on the Texas Department of Agriculture website.
“This didn’t ‘just happen’ — it is the outcome of misguided public policy and corporate influence,” Miller said.
Concern over tariffs’ impact on farmers
Kennedy’s nomination isn’t the only Trump move raising concern among farmers and others in the industry. They’re also voicing alarm over Trump’s proposal to levy stiff tariffs on Chinese goods.
A study released last month by the National Corn Growers Association found a tariff-driven trade war with China could cost U.S. soybean and corn farmers as much as $7.3 billion in annual production value.
“This burden is not limited to the U.S. soybean and corn farmers who lose market share and production value,” the study’s authors predicted. “There is a ripple impact across the U.S., particularly in rural economies where farmers live, purchase inputs, utilize farm and personal services, and purchase household goods.”
Experts say the next indication of how food and agriculture policy will play out over the next four years will come when Trump announces his pick to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The online publication Farm Journal reported that many of the names being considered by Trump’s team to head the Agriculture Department have deep ties to industrial farming.
Asia White defines herself as an “idea person” — someone with an expansive imagination and a tendency to get overexcited.
“I want to do lots of things. I’m always thinking of concepts, but I move on too quickly,” says the 27-year-old food influencer, more commonly known as the Foodie Bitch. “It’s like I live several lives in between each of my ideas.”
All of her ideas have one thing in common, though: They point back to building community with good food. Last year, she started her “Was it really worth the gentrification?” TikTok series, in which she candidly reviews L.A. restaurants in “newly colonized areas of L.A.” In a vlog-style video, she travels to places such as Donna’s in Echo Park, where she expresses a distaste for the “burnt sourdough bread with parm,” or Highly Likely in West Adams, where she dubs a hot tomato on a B.L.T. “criminal.” Through these comical yet eye-opening critiques, she realized her platform — as a Black foodie born and raised in L.A. — was an anomaly. She had attracted an audience eager to chime in about their own experiences and quick to ask White out to dinner.
Inspired by her comments section and the lack of a gathering space, White launched Suppa Club in 2022, a recurring dinner party that highlights local BIPOC private chefs and different restaurants. Complete with decadent platters, occasional live music and constant chatting, White has developed a new outlook on the traditional evening meal.
“I never really had sit-down dinners with my family. My mom was a single mom and we would eat on the couch,” says White. “Now, dinner has become ceremonial to me. It’s so special. It’s a time that we can all sit down and really take a moment. I don’t do that otherwise.”
But as dinner clubs in general continue to rise in popularity, White, a true Aquarian, wants to make sure Suppa Club stays original and creative, and is in the process of turning it into a production house. Lately, rather than the typical sit-down meals, she’s been hosting things like an ice cream social at Echo Park’s Fluffy McCloud’s, and she’s currently brainstorming a cooking competition-inspired dinner. No matter what form Suppa Club will take on in the future, the Foodie Bitch promises her priorities remain unchanged.
“I’ve always been a foodie, I just always been bougie, I’ve always been opinionated. And I’m always gonna talk my s–,” says White.
When I wake up, the first thing I do is pet my dogs. They’re Frenchies — Poundcake, Dubois and George. They’re a little family. They’re perfect.
The best dish I can make is a roast chicken. I’ve just been watching and hearing all the tips for roast chicken for so damn long. I feel like I have to put every tip into one phenomenal recipe.
The thing I can never master is anything that has to do with baking. I’m a horrible baker. I don’t know what it is. I can’t even make a Betty Crocker thing taste good — it always comes out dry. I feel like baking is science and cooking is like jazz.
A habit I’m currently trying to incorporate into my daily routine is going outside. I am always shut inside. There are days where I have not seen the light of day. So, I’m trying to be outside more — I call it my “sit and stare.” I go outside, without my phone, and just stare.
When I need a midday pick-me-up, I always want dessert. I’ll get a chocolate-covered banana with almonds from Baskin-Robbins. I love that.
Asia wears House of Campbell top and Cinq à Sept pants.
Whenever I host a dinner party, my go-to playlist is all lowrider oldies, specifically “Family Reunion” by the O’Jays. That’s my vibe.
A goal I have for myself before the end of the year is to launch Smackdown. It will be a version of Suppa Club that’s set up like a cooking competition where the guests are the judges. But I’m a super perfectionist and I’m sensitive about my s–, so sometimes it takes a while.
If I were taking myself on a date to a nice dinner in L.A., I would most likely be stopping by Camélia, which is actually so funny because I don’t like the food there. But they have really great drinks, really great french fries and great dessert — which is all I need for a date. I always get a martini and this chocolate passion fruit tart with an order of fries.
The most important thing to me right now is, I don’t wanna get corny but, believing in myself. I have so much self-doubt and insecurity. And I really want to start to lean in to who I am and trust that it’s gonna bring me success in life.
As a kid, my favorite home-cooked meal was always pork chops with applesauce — which I think is a white thing. I’ll tell my Black friends about it, and they have no idea what I’m talking about.
I first knew I was a foodie when I made my dad take me to Benihana when it was really popular in the early 2000s. I don’t even remember what we ate. But when we walked out, my dad asked me if I liked it. And at the age of 7, I told him it was overrated. He loves to tell that story.
When I think about Suppa Club, I would say I am most inspired by my own nostalgia. I want to re-create all these feelings from old movies and my own past experiences. I feel like it’s my thing.
“I never really had sit-down dinners with my family. My mom was a single mom and we would eat on the couch,” says White. “Now, dinner has become ceremonial to me. It’s so special. It’s a time that we can all sit down and really take a moment. I don’t do that otherwise.”
My ritual for after Suppa Club is going to Fukagawa, which is a Japanese breakfast place in Gardena. I get so overstimulated at Suppa Club, so the day after, I just have to sit in silence by myself. It’s a really nice quiet restaurant and I get my combo plate with broiled salmon, tamagoyaki, soup, rice and little pickles.
After a few years of throwing dinner parties, the biggest tip I’ve learned is that you never have enough ice. People always underestimate that. But also make sure to keep it simple. The moment is the moment. As long as the food is good, that’s what makes me happy. I don’t need some crazy s– going on.
The key to creating a welcoming space is reading the bible, not actually the Bible, but “The Art of Gathering” [by Priya Parker]. There are some phenomenal tips in there, really intentional stuff. But ultimately for me, I’m shy and awkward. So, I always make sure to greet people when they come in and introduce them to someone. I know us awkward girls need that.
What would you say to someone who is looking to make new friends in L.A.? I would say come to Suppa Club, but sometimes it’s not even like that. The reason I started Suppa Club is to find something that you like to do and start doing it. That’s how you’ll find your people. You have to leave the house. This can be a lonely city if you don’t.
The biggest deciding factor for when I try a new restaurant is the menu. I’m really a menu reviewer. A lot of menus are the same nowadays, they’re just making the same s– everywhere. But if there is one thing that looks good to me I’m happy to try it out. It’s a rare occasion. As an Aquarius, I’m not easily influenced.
My thinking place is my bedroom. A lot of thoughts come out of there. I like to rot and introspect.
What mindset do you encourage people attending Suppa Club to bring? Come really open and no f–ing networking vibes. If I hear about your job, I’ll kick you out. F– your job. I also love when people come alone. That’s like a really big thing for me. Just come to enjoy yourself. You don’t have to be the main character. You can come as you are.
My newest hobby is Pilates [she rolls her eyes]. That’s so L.A. coded.
Photo assistant: Chris Behroozian
Hair: HairGameConcepts
Nails: Pio Pio Nails
Location: Fluffy McCloud’s
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