Stateside

2 hours ago, BabyBoyAndMyLass said:

It's only the same as every other retro scene that started decades ago. Take the Punk scene, my daughter goes to gigs and festys, UK Subs, Three Chords and stuff like that, the first wave of Punks are now well into their sixties in age but they still go to events and still soap their hair and the whole caboodle, it doesn't bother my daughter when she goes to an event and sees her mates' dad who's a postman there with his Spiky green hair, she wouldn't be seen dead I expect at a Soul event with her Mum and I but is happy to go to mixed age events. When I started on the soul scene everybody was older than me I'd say from 25 to 40 at the time and I myself was still a teenager, that's why I was 'Babyboy' back then I was one of the youngest on the soul scene and in those days, the eighties, it was pretty much national in the sense that to go to regular allnighters you did have to travel considerable distances to attend regularly. It didn't put me off but then I was brought up in Workingmens clubs, playing Darts, Snooker and going Fishing with all the old boys, a lot of whom were a lot older than my Dad at the time, in those days you mixed with 'the olds'...

Nowadays though that has all changed, read a recent study the other day about the new generation of kids coming through schools that are so wrapped up in online, computer gaming and social networking that they can't even mix with the other kids in their own class, the kid sitting next to them doesn't even know them, there is no interaction outside of class unless they're friends on social media, the report read like the teachers were predicting the emergence of a real-life 'Stepford wives' sort of kid with no social skills, no capacity for interacting in the non-virtual world, very much like a kind of Drone or Clone, it was very worrying, the teachers reckon this has only come about in the last few years from about 2014, like Bob Dylan said 'The times they are a changin'...

Very worrying stuff for the human race, not only the Soul scene but every facet of human existence, remember Mrs Thatcher saying in the eighties that 'There is no such thing as society' well things have moved mighty far along that road since then...

Northern soul, and Soul will go the same way as the Vera Lynn singalong shows and the Rock n Roll shows that I do with my cabaret outfit, it'll just be a relic that people read about in those university studies that people do nowadays for their Media Studies degree, I've never understood the point of studying an old scene in that way or the value of them. Judging by the study that I read the other day, there won't be any kind of scene of any kind in the future, going out in public is dying out with this new generation that'll be along in ten, twenty years time, we won't be worried about it by then either way.

If you like it go, if you don't don't, some younger folks will some won't, there's only one certainty in life, and we're all getting closer to it, just be thankful we weren't part of what is coming along for our Grandkids, the age of the mindless Drone, George Orwell might've been out a few years with his predictions, but he weren't wrong though!

As for the soul scene, just go out and enjoy yourself while you can, who cares who is there and how old they are? If you enjoy it then win-win, when you're in a care home you'll lament every opportunity for actual life that you didn't take, for us it'll be Newquay Saturday, for me I don't worry about what a scene will be like long after I'm dead and buried, I kinda do worry about the future for mankind but by the same token why should I give a flyer what happens when I'm gone? In fact what was the point of this post? Twenty minutes gone out of my life that was for nothing! The Internet, a kind of worm that gets into your head and keeps you indoors doing basically nothing, I'm suffering from the same problem as those kids I talked about...

That last part of the last paragraph is excellent.

Kev

I like the reference he made to bounced cheques. That might have been me I'm afraid. At that time living beyond my means trying to balance a life with record collecting a bounced cheque was a regular occurance.

Kev