Do you know the whole Northern Soul thing? Basically, soul music fans in some big U.K. dance halls started having these dance nights in the 1970's, where they would play all their beloved Tamla Motown records and other similar artists. Then the disc jockeys started to compete with each other, trying to find obscure, great songs that would then become weekly favourites. Then the thing went crazy, with nutsy collectors going to unheard lengths to scour the archives of record labels, looking for unreleased or barely-issued tunes they could turn into hits decades after being recorded, the more unheralded the better. Northern Soul became a genre unto its own, and has resulted in dozens of such collections over the years.
It's still almost completely a British thing, although on occasion some of these collections get released on this side of the world. Here's a real killer, discovered in the archives of Cameo-Parkway of Philadelphia from 1964 to 1967. To say these are lesser-knowns is being polite. Only Chubby Checker, by then desperate for a hit, has any name recognition to even the bigger music fans. There are a few that might spark a memory, such as The Orlons, Bunny Sigler and Eddie Holman. Still, I'm a huge 60's soul fan, and do this crap for a living, and I've never had the occasion to hear from Nikki Blu, Vickie Baines or The Four Exceptions before.
It turns out Nikki Blu was an alter ego of Marlena Davis of The Orlons, and while her single "(Whoa, Whoa) I Love Him So" didn't bother the charts, it is a fine, uptempo pop-soul track. The Orlons contribution here, "Envy In My Eyes," may have been relegated to a b-side, but it was a whole lot better than the group's earlier dance craze hits like "The Wah-Watusi," and showed they had moved into sophisticated girl group soul. Poor Ms. Baines never managed to reach fame with her scant three 45's in the mid-60's, but "Country Girl" here is a scorcher. Honestly, I think many of these tracks languished because Motown so dominated the airwaves and charts.
Not everything is great here, of course. Ben Zine (not, I'm betting, his real name) just had a lone single, with "Village Of Tears" having a groovy beat that excited the British dance fans, but his voice was decidedly unsoulful. But it's the rare clunker in this 20-track set, all songs that became dancefloor favourites for weeks on end an ocean away from Philadelphia. Oh, and Chubby Checker? His 1965 move into more sophisticated pop than his string of novelty dance numbers like "The Twist" and "Limbo Rock" utterly failed. But darned if "You Just Don't Know (What You Do To Me)" is a gem. Those Northern Soul fans were on to something.
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