Mick Fitzpatrick

I can not remember the day I became a 'Soulie'. What I do remember is being at a youth club when I was a kid and seeing a guy dance like I had never seen before. The '70's was a time when most people just shuffled around on the dance floor and there was this guy jumping several feet into the air landing in the splits then spinning and moving his feet at a blistering speed. The record was K-Jee. From that day on I was hooked. I was lucky, not only did I love the music, we belonged to an exclusive club. We turned our backs on the fashion of the day. No weird looking seventies fashions for us. My first suit was made at Burtons the gentlemen's tailors. Can you imagine it? The rest of the youth at the time looked like some David Bowie/Marc Bolan clones and there was us. Immaculately dressed and cool. When we moved into a club (we never called it a disco) we always took our music. Several '45's in a case. The DJ's would always try and play some commercial soul to keep us happy. They soon played our special stuff. Why not, when you had a dozen people on the floor that could give Fred Astaire or Michael Jackson a run for their money it is free entertainment for the rest of the punters. The main clubs for us were the Casino and Blackpool Mecca. However, they were plenty of very good clubs that never quite got to the Casino rankings. You could do all-nighters and all-dayers from Friday night to early Monday morning and go nowhere near Wigan or Blackpool. Then it became fashionable. A couple of the records made it into the charts, everyone talked about Wigan, the clothes that we had to have tailor made could be bought in the shops. Every club you went to played our music, or they would have a 'northern soul' hour. Footsee was played at every 'disco' in the north. My claim to infamy was dancing to Footsee at my niece's birthday party. She was 3, I was drunk. It was great, fantastic, and marvelous. We could dance, dance, and dance. Then all of a sudden we realised that the commercialism we that we stayed away from in the first instance was becoming part of our scene. My younger brother could dance like the devil but could never 'Keep the Faith'. To this day he relates our music to a 'youth thing', a passing fad. Contraire, our music is forever. I left the UK in '77. My employment has taken me to many countries. Northern Soul has always been part of my luggage. It used to be tapes but these days it is CD. The music is well followed on the Net.Keep the Faith