Quote Originally Posted by Tailspinner View Post
Sure, variety is the spice…

Yours is an interesting bio. I guess such a wide range if influences is quite rare. I wish I’d had a similarly broad education, musically speaking. My granddad played piano, first in an orchestra, then in cinemas for the silent movies, before the work dried up and he got steady job in the stores on the Scunthorpe steel works! I’d hear him play at his home whenever we visited as a family. But apart from that I never heard proper live music until I was a teenager, at the Top Rank in Doncaster... not at a Motown special, but to see Bowie on tour as Ziggy!

My town was Goole [[though we lived just outside). You’d say it was a working-class town, a bit like a pit town but with a port instead. A fairly prosperous hard-working, hard-drinking place, where most people had a connection with the docks or some light industry nearby.

As a teenager, Northern soul and Motown were massive, and you heard the tunes everywhere you went. There was no real venue locally, so fans set up bus trips to the all-nighters on Wigan, Stoke and other places.

Tho’ I was immersed in soul and Motown I couldn’t identify at all with its image or sentiments. I wore the clothes – high waistband bags, stax shoes / loafers, fred perry's, Ben Shermans, button down collars, rolled up sleeves…. but always found the heavy and progressive bands more exciting to listen to – they seemed subversive and dangerous, and just seemed to attract more like minded souls [[no pun intended).

But, it wasn’t until much later that I began to understand more about soul/Motown and their origins and appeal. I think it probably started in the mid-1980s, when, browsing in the York University library, I came across something about Berry Gordy [[can’t remember the title) and I was amazed that a book had actually been written about Motown, and that it had been created in the way it was!

Later on, and after so watching so many tv docs about pop in general - y'know BBC4 on Friday nights, I began thinking about the thread title - why it took off in the UK the way it did - and with a bit of sociological imagination, the pieces began to fall into place, particularly when you wonder why soul/Motown weren’t appropriated by the blacks in Britain of the 60s and 70s, who mostly preferred reggae, because it was the music of the marginalised which seemed to speak to their cultural present in Britain at the time, as well as reflecting their cultural past.

I think to understand the production and consumption of culture and the arts in Britain, it’s important to understand the role played by class, something which has been long understood by marketing people as well as sociologists.

It has got a lot harder now, given the fragmentation of class through the loss of traditional industry with its heavy reliance on manual labour, and the shared attitudes, values and so on of that labour. There’s also multiculturalism; immigration from around the world, and of course feminism, and the rise of social media and the internet, which has changed the ways we relate to one another and created a ‘supermarket’ of style, taste, and of course, of music.

Any road, rambling here, and I’ve got some chips on! Thanks for the chat, interesting stuff…
So, from your biography, you were an exception too?

Although you tried to conform, you couldn’t. You always knew what you really liked.

Instead, you developed an understanding and liking for Motown at a later time, presumably at a point where you were more independent of thought and allowed yourself to just be you.