Thursday, August 31, 2006

Lord Large: Northern Soul and Punk Rock

Left Right And Centre by Lord Large (Featuring Dean Parrish) was written by a 15 year old Paul Weller but has just been released by Acid Jazz. The records an absolute gem, but the story behind it's pretty good too. Weller had recorded it as demo with the Jam and had written it in the style of the Northern soul records he was listening to at the time. The long forgotten demo turns up on a bootleg unearthed by Weller and Steve Craddock in a New York record shop. Lord Large was the keyboard player in Electric Soft Parade, while Russ Winstanley is the Wigan Casino dj who persuaded Northern Soul Trooper Dean Parrish to sing a 30 year old song written by a 15 year old in Woking.


Re recorded it sounds absolutely authentic and absolutely right. Getting Dean Parrish to do the vocals was a masterstroke. If a voice can sound muscular, then he's been working out. He always had a gritty macho style (Edwin Starr as opposed to the masculine, yearning style of say Tyrone Davis. It's "Huh!" and "Ugh" rather than "Oooh") and Dean Parrish's voice still sounds fantastic. As a performance it stands comfortably alongside his other Northern Soul favourites Determination, Tell Him, Bricks, Broken Bottles and Sticks and most famously I'm On My Way. Some of the phrasing even sounds like Paul Weller, so the tribute act has come full circle really.



Paul Weller was never shy about his debt to Soul though. Last year he recorded a version of Nolan Porter's If I Could Only Be Sure. The original is built round a sly little guitar riff (a bit like The Letter by The Box Tops) and a subtle vocal performance. Before he auditioned for producer Gabriel Mekler in 1967 Porter had been in a college group singing madrigals. Ironically the future soul singer sang Donovan's Sunshine Superman and was promptly sent home to listen to Otis Redding for 2 years.



His best remembered song though is Keep On Keeping On. Northern Soul fans adopted some odd records (Al Wilson The Snake, and those instrumentals that veered between floor filling genius and Testcard music), but Keep On Keeping On really is an odd one. It's a terrific record and doesn't sound like anything else. But it's still amazing that dancers adopted it as the vocals are mixed really low, it sounds spooky and it's got this clumpy rhythm. So clumpy in fact that Joy Division used the riff for Interzone, but even more strangely (after all there's nothing strange about musical theft) an early Joy Division demo was actually produced by Northern Soul dj Richard Searling and I think a version of Keep On Keeping On was recorded for a session for Piccadilly Radio. (I have this last point as supposed cast iron fact in my head but haven't been able to find further proof…. If anyone has got any actual proof I'd love to know for sure.)



The Northern Soul/Punk connection is interesting though. At the time Northern was the music of choice for your mate's psychotic older brother. Maybe that's how Joy Division knew about Nolan Porter, (The mind boggles at the thought of what a psychotic older version of Peter Hook would have been like though.) I don't remember anyone at school liking the music but I do remember leaving a mates house with a stack of records (he saw it as a band toolkit…everything you needed to know about music could be found in the debut albums by Television, Ramones, Patti Smith and The Doors) but being steered away from his older brothers box of Northern Soul. (That small box in those days would have been worth a large car but thankfully they're all now on reissued cds for the price of a curry)

A grizzled punk veteran once told me of the night he'd gone to a Pistols gig at Wigan. The gig had been cancelled so they'd all gone to Wigan Casino. The Punks tried to look surly and bored, as the regulars eyed them with bemusement and then increasing hostility… They did indeed get their kicks out on the floor.

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