The Isle of Wight festival, 1970, Roland Godefroy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Written by Phil, a member of Interest Groups Online.

I was 16 years old in 1970 and living in Fleet, Hampshire, with my parents. I had left school the previous year and was due to start an apprenticeship at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough that October.

In the meantime, I had part-time jobs in engineering and shop work, trying to get a little bit of money together to buy a motorbike. When I wasn't working, I was working on my motorbike or listening to music, to be perfectly honest.

Music had already become a big part of my life. I listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline and recorded music from the radio onto a cassette recorder. I read the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. My first record had been Twist and Shout, but by my mid-teens my musical interests were changing.

Thinking about it now, my parents must have been quite liberal to let me go to the Isle of Wight Festival at 16 years of age. Mind you, I probably badgered them a lot. I was that sort of mindset. But I'm grateful to them for letting me go.

I went with a local friend of mine called Nigel. We travelled from Fleet by train and took the ferry from Portsmouth to Cowes. How we actually got from Cowes to Afton Farm, near Freshwater on the west of the island, I really can't remember. It must have been a bus or something like that.

We had a canvas tent and canvas sleeping bags, all army surplus. I think back now at the amount of kit we must have carried on that train. Nigel had one of those long cylindrical Army and Navy bags. This was long before lightweight pop-up tents.

Our tickets cost £3 for the weekend, which was a considerable amount of money to me. I wasn't yet earning my apprenticeship wage, so the money had come from my part-time jobs. I had really put some effort into getting there.

My memories of arriving are of the whole thing: the smells, the sounds, the sheer volume of people. Reports say there were around 600,000 people there. Whether or not that's quite true, I'm not sure, but there were certainly an enormous number.

I remember the Hell's Angels being all over the place. After a couple of days the fencing was being torn down and a lot of people were able to get in free. Thankfully, I also remember good weather.

And then there were the toilets. I won't go into an explanation of what they were like, but they were something else. They really were.

Heaven knows how we ate or what we ate. I just haven't got a clue. There was so much to absorb. The schedules became rather ad hoc as well. You would think a group was coming on at a certain time and then they would be pushed back, or they wouldn't turn up.

But I do remember seeing the major groups, including The Who and Jimi Hendrix. If you asked me now for my favourite performance, I would sway between the two. Seeing Hendrix has particular significance looking back because only a few weeks later he was gone.

Very early on the Monday morning, Richie Havens came on. Hearing him perform Freedom is another memory that has stayed with me. There are some quite poignant moments when I think back.

Not all the memories were musical. At some point our tent and sleeping bags disappeared. For years I've said they were stolen, although now I think about those vast fields full of people and wonder whether we simply couldn't find where we'd left them. Either they had gone or we couldn't find them.

Hey-ho, these things happen. Worse things happen at sea — and we weren't at sea, by the way.

I remember sleeping on the quay at Cowes while waiting for the ferry home the following morning.

We didn't have cameras with us and, of course, there were no mobile phones, so there isn't the personal photographic record there would be today. I can remember what we looked like, though. I had an army-surplus camouflage jacket with, for some reason, a silver chain across the epaulette. If I remember rightly, Nigel was wearing a bowler hat. We wanted to stand out, didn't we?

I was only 16, a couple of months away from starting my first proper job, and I am so pleased I was allowed to do it.

The Oval, 1972

Two years later came a very different experience: the Melody Maker Poll Awards concert at the Oval in London.

The ticket was £1 for a one-day event. I went with another close school friend, Ken, and once again we travelled by train. Thinking back, it was probably one of my first times travelling independently on the London Underground, which was an experience in itself.

By then I had shoulder-length hair and thought I was the bee's knees. My mother didn't necessarily share that opinion.

Wishbone Ash had won the Melody Maker poll with their album Argus and were playing live. Emerson, Lake & Palmer were the headline group and played in the afternoon, while Wishbone Ash finished things off in the evening.

One visual memory that has stayed with me is Emerson, Lake & Palmer's enormous inflatable armadillo on the stage. It seemed to take up at least half of it.

But more important than any single detail was the whole experience of listening to live music. It got me even more into music.

After the Oval, travelling to see bands became part of my life. Within a few months I had my van and I was going to Farnborough, Woking, Reading and Guildford to see groups. Genesis, Groundhogs, Mott the Hoople, Wishbone Ash — you name it, I've probably seen them.

I'm still going to concerts today. There are new groups and new ways of discovering music, but I do think we were there at a great time.

Looking back at that 16-year-old carrying an army-surplus tent to the Isle of Wight, I'm very glad my parents let me go.

How England embraced Northern Soul

Listen to classics like Tainted Love, Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) or Here I Go Again and you'll immediately recognise what made Northern Soul so distinctive. The tempo was fast, the lyrics meant something and the music had a feeling that got inside you. When a great Northern Soul record came on, you simply couldn't sit still. You had to dance.

One of the fascinating things about Northern Soul is that so many of its greatest records were virtually unknown in America. Many were B-sides that record companies regarded as little more than fillers. Here in Britain, however, people listened differently. DJs unearthed these forgotten tracks, audiences embraced them and suddenly songs that had been overlooked in the United States became treasured classics on dance floors across the North of England.

The music itself also struck a chord with young working-class people growing up in Britain's industrial towns. The beat grabbed you immediately, but the lyrics often spoke about hope, heartbreak and determination. More importantly, the music offered an escape from lives that, for many, seemed to offer very little. Dancing became part of the culture, competitions sprang up to find the best dancers and, almost overnight, Northern Soul became a passionate but peaceful movement.

For many people it was both an escape and a reflection of their lives. A whole week could be endured simply because there was something to look forward to at the weekend.

My experiences of Northern Soul

Music had already become a big part of my life. I listened to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline and recorded music from the radio onto a cassette recorder. I read the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. My first record had been Twist and Shout, but by my mid-teens my musical interests were changing.

I grew up in Yorkshire where, as a youngster, it seemed there were only two career choices: the coal mines or the glass works. My father worked down the mines and hated every minute of it. My brother worked in the glass industry and often came home covered in boils from the intense heat. Watching that made up my mind very early. At just nine years old I decided I would join the Army. People said I wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it, but at fifteen and a half I left Yorkshire behind and never looked back.

That became my escape. For many of my friends who stayed behind, Northern Soul was theirs.

By the mid-1970s I was serving in Berlin, rather improbably guarding Rudolf Hess. Life had taken me in a completely different direction. I was earning good money, especially with the favourable exchange rate, and that was when my love of black music really began to grow. Friends persuaded me to see James Brown and his orchestra, and that concert changed my life forever. I had found my musical home.

As a child my brother constantly played The Beatles and The Everly Brothers. They never really did anything for me. Then I began hearing Motown on the radio. It was different. It had soul, rhythm and emotion. Once I had my own small stereo after Army training, I could finally buy records for myself, and everything changed.

Whenever I came home on leave, though, I was struck by how little Yorkshire itself had changed. The same dark, grey streets. The same mills. My old friends seemed weighed down by work that offered little enjoyment and even less hope. Yet as Friday approached, everything changed. They came alive. You could almost feel the excitement building because another Northern Soul weekend was about to begin.

That anticipation was part of what made the scene so special.

Northern Soul wasn't built around chart success. It was built around all-night dancing, incredible DJs and rare records. The scene could be quite cliquey, but once you were part of it you belonged. Nothing else really mattered because there wasn't much else. Then suddenly this extraordinary music began circulating and everyone had a reason to work through another week just to reach the weekend.

Why was it so popular?

Looking back now, perhaps we all see it through slightly rose-tinted glasses, but there is no doubt that the music helped people through difficult times.

The DJs became legends. Finding a rare American record gave them real status. Some even travelled to the United States searching for forgotten singles. Before social media, word spread by conversation, phone calls and sheer excitement. Everyone wanted to hear the latest discovery. When a DJ finally played that elusive new track, the dance floor erupted. In those moments, DJs were gods.

People often ask about drugs because they're frequently associated with Northern Soul. Personally, I never saw much of it, although I wasn't looking for it either. Films have probably exaggerated that side of the story. For me and my friends, the music itself was the drug. So were bottles of water after dancing for hours on end—and, of course, there were always plenty of girls around too.

The reality is that drugs have been associated with almost every music scene throughout history. Sometimes the stories are exaggerated, sometimes they're justified, but I don't believe they were ever the defining feature of Northern Soul. The music was.

Although Northern Soul wasn't overtly political, I do think it represented a quiet form of rebellion. Not against the government or society in any organised sense, but against the lives people felt trapped in. They were rebelling against dead-end jobs, poor wages, limited opportunities and the feeling that nothing would ever change.

Putting on your best clothes—a pair of high-waisted Oxford bags, a Ben Sherman shirt—and heading off for an all-night session meant everything. Coming home with a few new 45s to play endlessly until the following weekend gave people something to hold on to. Those records became lifelines.

I know how fortunate I was. The Army gave me opportunities that many of my friends never had. Even now, when I visit my niece in Yorkshire, it's almost like stepping back in time. Many of the same streets remain unchanged, and for some people holidays are still places like Cleethorpes or Blackpool. For many, life has barely moved on. Perhaps that's why Northern Soul has never really disappeared.

An enduring legacy

More than fifty years later, people still fill dance floors at Northern Soul nights, and younger generations continue discovering the music. I think part of the reason is that the music itself is timeless. Motown remains, in my opinion, the finest popular music ever produced. Berry Gordy knew exactly what he was creating. Working alongside Smokey Robinson, with musicians like The Funk Brothers and the incomparable James Jamerson laying down those unforgettable bass lines, they created a sound unlike anything before or since.

Northern Soul took those remarkable records, gave them a second life and, in doing so, gave thousands of ordinary people something equally important.

It gave them hope, friendship, identity and, if only for one weekend at a time, an escape.