Colin Curtis

12 hours of records, dancing and a crowd that had come for one reason, the soul.

The resident DJs included Keith Minchell and Colin Curtis, with Alan Day and Martin Ellis also becoming important names at the venue.

They weren't simply playing familiar hits, they were finding records that most people had never heard, often on small American labels, sometimes pressed years earlier and forgotten in their country of origin.

This was the crucial difference.

Twelve hours of records, dancing, and a crowd that had come for one reason, the soul.

The resident DJs included Keith Minchell and Colin Curtis, with Alan Day and Martin Ellis also becoming important names at the venue.

They weren't simply playing familiar hits, they were finding records that most people had never heard, often on small American labels, sometimes pressed years earlier and forgotten in their country of origin.

This was the crucial difference.

I was a 22-year-old kid really, you know, but my venues now were dominating the club scene within the region.

And all of a sudden, you know, I'm up there with the main DJs like Colin Curtis and Mike Shaft.

A- a- and this is where I took a lot of criticism because I am playing, w- as we just said, about this new electronic music, electro funk.

This is coming in exactly the same time.

He'd been part of the original Blue Notes alongside Harold Melvin before going his own way.

But the Northern Soul story really begins in the '70s when Colin Curtis started playing this one during the last hour at the Blackpool Mecca.

It wasn't an obvious floor filler, it was something different, a little unusual, beautifully produced, and with that unmistakable vintage soul feeling, and slowly people discovered it.

Bernie Williams, Ever Again.

It was also released on seven-inch singles, split into part one and part two.

On the UK Record Mirror Disco chart, it peaked at number 13. and it is the first of four tunes that appears on an absolutely enormous playlist that Colin Curtis put together in 2010 of all the tunes that were played at the Blackpool Mecca.

So, yeah, James is kind of right.

Four of these tunes are on the Blackpool Mecca playlist.

On the black music scene, you have things like the Blackpool Mecca, which is the club that James mentioned in the first place.

It was originally a Northern Soul club playing, you know, like 60s, 45s in the traditional way of Northern Soul.

But what they did there, the DJs, Ian Levine and Colin Curtis, was in the 70s, they started introducing contemporary soul records and they created a new genre, modern soul, you know, which was basically 70s soul.

And there was starting to be a schism with the Wigan Casino, the main northern soul venue around these issues.