Ian Levine Interview Part 1 from Manifesto

Ian Levine Interview Part 1 from Manifesto

site note orig up in 1999

From the time before SWONS

Reproduced with kind permission from Manifesto mag, see fanzine section for details

Note the layout of these articles is text only and doesn't represent the mags layout

In the seventies you either loved him or hated him such was the strength of feeling caused by this man. His crime? tantamount to breaking one of the ten commandments, he played records that had a beat not instantly recognisable as northern soul. Yes it's him, the men behind Blackpool Mecca, Motorcity and even Take That! Ian Levine.

Those of you who were around in the mid seventies will no doubt remember the ridiculous 'Levine must go' campaigns that were raging in the music press, Wigan Casino and anywhere else that feared change, no matter how slight. I say ridiculous because let's face it, it was. But whichever side of the fence you were on, one things for sure, time has proved lan Levine right. Records like The Carstairs 'It Really Hurts Me Girl' that caused such stir when he first introduced them have gone on to become northern soul classics and get played nowadays side by side with the likes of Eddie Parker, Little Anthony or Major Lance. And despite all the warnings our world has not come to an end.

lan's love of the music should never be doubted, ask anyone whose worked with him. This is a man who in his early teens was luck, enough to be taken on regular holidays to the States with his parents only to spend the entire vacation, much to their dismay, rummaging around backstreet record stores. On one such occasion returning with over 4000 singles!

His ear for music made him a natural producer and in the 70's he had hit's with The Exciters, Evelyn Thomas, James Wells, Doris Jones, the list goes on and on. In the eighties he pioneered and dominated the high energy disco scene. He also formed the Motorcity label gathering together a stable of soul artists the like of which had not been seen since the heydays of Motown and together they produced a staggering 800 tracks!

In the nineties he's produced records for the likes of The Pasedenas and most famously of course Take That.

So that's the brief history. Neil Rushton whose a good friend of lan's had kindly set up this interview and together we travelled down to meet lan at an Italian restaurant in West London where we got aquainted and chatted for a while before going back to lan's amazing house (complete with it's own cinema and original Dalek.) where prior to recording this interview I was treated to some of the yet unheard Motorcity tracks. Ian is in the process of re-recording many of the backing tracks to get better 'live' sound quality to them and believe me some of the tracks I heard that day were absolutely stunning and had 'northern soul dancefloor hit' written all over them. More news about them later On now to the man himself.....

IL: I started off collecting Motown at school in about 1966/7 when I was about 13 years old. Kenny Everett was playing a lot of Motown on Radio Caroline at the time and I got really potty over it but couldn't find out where to get it from. Eventually I found a little record shop in Bond Street in Blackpool. the girl there knew a little about Tamla Motown and told me almost it. Whilst they would stock all the things like The Supremes etc. they never used to bother stocking the more obscure stuff which I sometimes got to hear on the radio.

By the time I was 14 I was busy collecting everything I could on the Motown label. I'd noticed the release nunnbers on the labels and was busy trying to fit in the missing numbers. There was this cigarette kiosk on Victoria Street in Blackpool run by a guy called Gary Wilde who was a Dj at the Casino on the pleasure beach playing Motown and commercial soul. He'd sell Silk Cut by the 20O and Tamla Motown singles to the lads who went to the Twisted Wheel. On Saturday afternoons the Blackpool contingent who used to go to the Wheel would hang around Garys stall on the street corner tallking about records. I used to go to school with one of of these guys by the name of Stuart Bremner. I got very friendly with him, he was like a mentor to me at that time. He was very into Curtis Mayfield and played me all these Impressions records like "You’ve been cheating" and "Cant Satisty" which got me into the music and made me aware of what else was coming out of Detroit. I used to be envious of these lads getting on the train down to Manchester and hearing all these great sounds. But I was still a kid and too young to go.

However 3 years later I was 17 and finally got to go myself. When I first went Brian Phillips was the main Dj, people wrongly credit Les Cockell as the Dj at the Wheel but that was later in around 1970. It was at the Wheel that I met the man who should be credited with creating or masterminding what became northern soul, Rob Bellars was his name and he was the guy that supplied both Brian Phillips and Les Cocked with most of their records. He had a great collection and went out of his way to discover new records and then brought them down and lent them to the Dj's. So when Dave Godin went to the Wheel and did his famous 'northern soul' article those records were all supplied by Rob Bellars.

When I arrived at the Wheel the big records at the time were things like 'Baby Reconsider' by Leon Haywood on Fat Fish and 'More More Of Your Love' by Bob Brady and the Concords. These were the new wave of northern records because they weren't British releases and were all down to Rob Bellars.

When the Wheel closed down he got very disheartened and fed up and vanished off the scene, that was in the beginning of 1971. Many years later Tony Cummings who was the editor of Black Music decided to write a book. At that time there was a battle going on between Black Music and Blues and Soul with Black Music championing the side of the Mecca with Dave Godin and Blues and Soul being very anti Mecca . So Tony got very interested in the northern soul scene and decided that he wanted to write a book on the subject. He'd already written a very good book called 'The Sound Of Philadelphia' and this was to be his next project "The Strange World Of Northern Soul"

As part of his research I'd agreed to take him up to Manchester to seek out Rob Bellars one Sunday night. We had no idea were he lived and I don't think he was even on the phone. So we had to drive around the streets in Wythenshaw where I knew he last lived until we eventually found him. So we then took him out to a pub and Tony sat there with a tape recorder and reams of notes and interviewed him for two to three hours about how the northern scene started. So I think if you ever want to credit where northern soul really came from it should be Rob Bellars. It would be interesting to find out where he is now, this interview was twenty two years ago, and at that time nobody had seen him for about five years.

Unfortunately 'The Strange World Of Northern Soul' never did get published and Tony Cummings went on to become a born again Christian and the editor of Buzz Magazine.

Anyway, back to the Wheel. I remember Les Cockel playing things like 'Agent Double O Soul' and one night I went up to him and said 'I've got an instrumental of this' at which he burst out laughing and said "so has everbody mate, it's on the B side". No I said it's another version, I'll bring it next week. So the next week I turned up with my version by Sonny Stitt, and Rose Batiste's 'Hit & Run' and when Les put that on he practically fell to the floor clutching his head in his hands shouting ooh.

I was still a kid at that time, around 17 years old but for the past few years I'd been going to the states with my parents and trawling through thousands of records in hundreds of backstreet stores and finding some real gems whilst in the process of looking for my missing Motown records. I remember one such holiday, it was a hot and muggy 110°c in New Orleans and there was I hunting around the junk shops for my Motown collectionwhen I found my first Ric Tic record "Please Let Me In' by J.J.Barnes. I got really excited on finding this, I'd known about Ric Tic prior to this but this was the first actual Ric Tic record that I'd found.

Back at the hotel I had this little battery operated thing that you dropped the records into in order to listen to them and as I dropped the record into it I remember thinking 'J.J.Barnes, hmm, sounds like J.J.Jackson. It's probably going to be one of those earthy gutteral kind of memphis tracks'. Then came the voice and I just melted. I must have played it over 50 times in a row.

Suddenly my life changed. I went from the commercial sound of Motown and the

Four Tops, Temptations etc and had gone into this more underground world of Detroit which was responsible for artists like JJ Barnes, Pat Lewis, Rose Batiste and all those other wonderful artists. So by the time I got to the Wheel in '71 I had reams of these records. I had J.J.Barnes, The Fantastic Four, Pat Lewis, Rose Batiste, Sonny Stitt etc. etc. I know these records are common place now but you have to understand that at that time nobody over here had even seen any of these tracks and they were still playing things like 'Mr Bang Bang Man'. Even Rob Bellars hadn't seen these records before at that time.

So there I am in '71 at The Wheel with about half a dozen records and Les is practically kissing my feet. So the next week I turned up with a whole box full. Suddenly the word had got round that this kid from Blackpool had turned up in Manchester with all these fantastic rarities and the next week the place was packed and it went nuts. I can still picture these lines of people, all with their stupid one black driving gloves on. And the ferocity of the claps to 'Hit & Run'. You have to remember that The Wheel wasn't like The Torch or Wigan, it was a little narrow place with about 250-300 people max and the main dance floor was probably no bigger than this room but the atmosphere down there was electric.

Sadly not long after this the Police closed it down and for a little while the scene went into mourning. Then two things happened, an all-nighter opened up in Wakefield called The Metro but the bulk of the crowd didn't want to go there because it was really crap and so they started flooding to Blackpool Mecca because it was the nearest thing in the area.

At that time Blackpool mecca had two Djs Tony Jebb and Stuart Freeman. Tony Jebb was leaning towards Motown and the peripheral edge of northern soul and Stuart who was just playing commercial pop records. So I went along there and said to Tony Jebb "if you get rid of this idiot they'll flock here, you need to get a Dj from the Wheel on. Get Les Cockel on with you and I'll lend you my records. So I did.

I the meantime I'd gone to Wakefield and had the unpleasant experience of being busted which didn't go down too well with my parents as I was still only 17. But eventually the whole Wheel crowd ended up at Blackpool Mecca. Tony Jebb and Les Cockel were Djing with of course the help of my record collection, and then eventually they started to give me money to go to the states and find more records for them. Only about 200 quid but that was enough in those days to finance such a trip.

After one such trip I returned to find that Les couldn't make it one week because he was ill and Tony along with the very boisterous Wolverhampton crowd persuaded me to do it. I was shitting myself but they convinced me to go on. Of course with their support by the end of the night I was liking it so much that I didn’t want to give it up. So Tony said to me "your much better than Les Cockell why don't you do it every week'. Ok said I and then when Les turned up the next week I said "look Les I've got some bad news for you Tony has asked me to Dj" at which point he burst into tears and got really upset insisting that everyone had shit on him etc. In the end I felt so sorry for him that I agreed to do alternate weeks with him, and I stuck to that agreement for another 18 months. Everyone kept telling me I was an idiot because I was spending a fortune tracking down and buying new records while Les was still surviving off his records from The Wheel and not keeping up at all.

While all this was going on I was finishing my schooling and my father was desperate to get me into University and at the last minute I knuckled down and got two A's and a C in my A' levels which secured me a place. However by this time the only place my father could arrange was at Manchester University studying Greek Civilisation and Drama! neither of which I was remotely interested in. But I was such a bastard. My father used to give me ten quid a week for train fare and he'd drop me off at the train station every morning. The minute his car was gone I'd start hitching to Manchester so that I could keep the train fair and use it go around all the Manchester junk shops finding all the rare records I could.

But I soon got caught out, as I hadn't been going to any of the lectures I couldn't sit the exams and got expelled. This plus the Wakefield thing led to my father saying "right then you'll have to come and work for me". He had a casino/nightclub and I used to check off the wines as they were delivered and little odd jobs like that. In the meantime however I was making money as a DJ. Not at the Mecca because believe it or not we only ever got ten quid a night there but later we became more shrewd, and Colin and I eventually got very shrewd and used the reputation of the Mecca to get better paid work elsewhere. For example we'd still be on only ten quid at the Mecca but then we'd do a gig at say The Top tank in Hanley and get many times that so it worked out ok in the end.

I was still going to the States to find more records, often these trips would be paid or by other collectors and they used to get really good value for money. For about a fiver each they'd get The Larue's and the Lee David's and all the other great undiscovered records that I brought back. Of course I was getting these for about ten cents a piece and with the profit was able to build my own collection at the same time so both parties were getting a good deal. In the end I had built up a collection of around 60,000 singles.

And so Ian Levine the DJ was born and with it came the problem of how to make a living out of it. Fortunately this was now 1972 and the northern scene was starting to build up nicely and then Tony Jebb got poached and even though I stuck it out with Les at the Mecca I soon realised that we could compete with the Torch which was now a major force on the scene. Chris Burton had been trying to persuade me for some time to go down there and join the team and so I eventually gave in leaving Les in the lurch and started working at the Torch.

By the time Major Lance made his famous appearance at the Torch the line up consisted of Colin Curtis, Keith Minshull, Tony Jebb, Alan Day and Myself with Martyn Ellis doing the warm up spots. Then in 1973 Colin and Keith left the Torch and went back up to restart the Mecca. So I was now in the bizzare situation of driving down to Stoke to work each week whilst they drove up to Blackpool. I remember kicking myself because I had been booked to do the Top Rank in Hanley after it became obvious that the Torch had to close and I therefore missed out on the chance getting back into the Mecca.

However, Keith was only at Blackpool Mecca for a short time, I went to Miami in June and July 1973 and when I came back I went straight into working back at Blackpool Mecca along with Colin, Keith was already gone by this time and Colin desperately wanted me back for my records. By this time I could look at a record and instantly tell if it would be quality just by the publishing details etc. the only thing that I couldn't tell was if it were a ballad or not.

But you know if you see a track called 'Standing In The Shadow Of Your Empty Heart' and it's written by George Kerr and produced by Mike Delvano on some obscure Warner brothers subsidiary like Loma you've got a pretty good idea that it's gonna be a blinding stormer. I just made that up by the way but you get what I mean. When I saw Len Jewel 'Betting On Love' written by L.J Smith etc. I had a pretty good idea that I had something special.

Now I've never told anybody this before but one of my the greatest finds ever was in 1973, a place Flagnor Street in downtown Miami which is no longer there called Goodwill's which is the equivalent of our Salvation Army shops where people could give things to be sold to help the poor. Anyway, this place had this wall of records, all 45's with no sleeves, I was there from 9 in the morning till 7 at night every day for a whole week and went through every single record. They only had one copy of every record but I found things like The Glories 'I Worship You Baby' The Sweet things 'I'm In A World Of Trouble' there was 'The Larue' and 'Temptation Is Calling My Name' you name it I found it there they must have had just about every northern soul record that you could name. I managed to negotiate a brilliant deal, they wanted 20c each and I got them down to 5c each. There was no air conditioning and the temerature was in the nineties and there was me with this mountain of records to get through and I kept on finding more in demand things like Linda Jones'Just Can't Live My Life' and 'Mister Creator' by The Apollo's and most of these were white radio station copies.

From that one find it wasn't the records that I've mentioned that I already knew that proved to be important it was all the others that I brought back that nobody had yet heard of which kept the scene going for another couple of years. And all white demos left in that one same place it was incredible. I would write to Colin telling him of what I was finding and he couldn't believe it. In fact he kept those letters and showed them to me several years later. It was a real time of discovery, but you had to have the knowledge, without that you'd end up with Country & Western and all sorts of shit but I knew what to look for.

Those next couple of years with Colin and I really were the hey days at Blackpool Mecca.

In our next edition Ian talks frankly about his life since the early Mecca day's the ups and downs, Motorcity, Take That, and the very interesting story about THAT record, The Carstairs, and the effect that it had on his sex life!

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN MANIFESTO MAG AND REPRINTED BY PERMISSON.