“It was just to say ‘if you’ve got customers from the north, don’t waste time playing them records currently in the US black chart, just play them what they like – ‘Northern Soul’.” “I devised the name as a shorthand sales term,” he says. With contemporary black music evolving into what would eventually become known as funk, to differentiate the tastes of the die-hard soul-lovers of the north, whose musical preferences seemed to have stalled somewhere in that classic mid-’60s era of Motown-sounding black American dance, Godin referred to their requests as ‘Northern Soul’. “I started to notice that Northern football fans who were in London to follow their team were coming into the store to buy records – but they weren’t at all interested in the latest developments in the black American chart,” explains Godin. For Godin, it was merely a handy quickfit reference to help out the team at his Soul City record shop in Covent Garden. It wasn’t even intended as a generic journalistic term to sum up a developing musical movement. When Blues & Soul journalist Dave Godin first coined the term ‘Northern Soul’ in 1968, he definitely didn’t have in mind the sound that Wigan would begin to evolve some five years later. At first Wigan looked to be just another temporary resting place – its founding DJ Russ Winstanley had little more than a local reputation and the venue itself had seen better days – but after closing the doors on its final weekly all-nighter some eight years later, the Casino had established itself as ‘the heart of soul’, the most famous of ‘Northern’ venues.

The Highland Rooms of the Blackpool Mecca had developed a passionate following under DJs such as Ian Levine and Tony Jebb, but as the Mecca existed in normal club hours, the scene was still in search of a favoured all-nighter venue.

Following in the all-night traditions of Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club of the late ’60s, Northern Soul had been bereft of a spiritual home since the closure of the Golden Torch in Stoke six months earlier. There were clubs for purists, for innovators, for collectors, but if what you really wanted was a club for dancers, then Wigan Casino was the place to go.Īt 2am in the early hours of Sunday, September 23, 1973, the doors of the Wigan Casino opened to the Northern Soul all-nighter crowd for the first time. There were clubs more progressive in their evolution of new styles of ‘Northern Soul’. There were clubs that were far cooler than Wigan Casino.

FOR DANCERS ONLY: THE STORY OF WIGAN CASINOįIRST PUBLISHED: Mojo Collections, Spring 2002

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