Northern Soul November is drawing towards a close. A month of music by artists of whom most people have not heard whose songs often enjoyed little by way of commercial success. In fact, it seemed that a lack of commercial success was almost a requirement for Northern Soul fans. Northern Soul was about dance, it was about gathering at venues like Wigan Casino and dancing, sometimes dancing all night. It was about the friends with whom you went, and the clothes you wore, and the records that were played, and it was about dance: dance for its own sake, dance which captivated those out on the floor.

The electronic musical duo The Chemical Brothers capture a sense of what dance might mean in their current release, the lyrics are repetitive, rhythmic and simple:

Dance
Free yourself, free me, dance
Free yourself, free them, dance
Free yourself, help to free me, free us
Free yourself, help to free me, free us

Dance is about freedom.

Perhaps that was part of the appeal of Northern Soul, the playing of minor hits by lesser known singers and bands meant that the music was not about success or fame or anything associated with the celebrity culture, instead it was about sound and rhythm, and melody and syncopation. It was about musicians and singers for whom the music was all that mattered.

The discotheques that appeared from the 1960s onward allowed dance as something that was a free expression by an individual, there were no set steps, no routines, no expectations of how a person might or might not move. Dance became a form of individual freedom. Northern Soul became an expression of individual identity in towns and cities in northern England caught in the drabness of post-industrial 1970s England. No matter what life had been like all week, no matter how dull or oppressive daily life might have seemed, come the weekend, there was the opportunity to gather in huge crowd, to be absorbed into the event.

In the lyric by The Chemical Brothers dance becomes a liberating act; it becomes not only freedom for oneself, but freedom for the other person, and freedom for all those present. As someone who prefers soul music to electronic music, Dobie Gray’s Out on the floor better captures the mood. Gray had million selling records, Out on the floor was not one of them – it reached just No 42 in the UK charts in 1975. Regarded as the Number One song by Northern Soul fans, it defies commercialism and embraces the spirit of dance.