Seano

Ten shades of blue might have been nice! Sadly my blue card was stolen as I used to keep it in my wallet (just for the nostalgia!) at the time about 20 years back.

Exactly what I moaned about to my wife while watching it - loads more interesting stuff to say if you want to reference Gladys' Motown period. It would have been far better to have just had the clips and none of the sofa chat, especially as it wasn't even chat, it felt far too scripted for that. I didn't actually mind having Bob Marley on, though based on the little I know of his music I'd have gone for 'Waiting in Vain'. But the closest things came to Parliament/Funkadelic was Elton John's glasses, and even then it didn't exactly sound like Bootsy.... The tiny glimmer of brightness was that they did include Bobby Womack, but even there I've seen better stuff featuring him on BBC programmes, which I presume was the constraining factor for their supposed "beginner's guide for an alien". The problem seemed to be in the construct; it tried to blend people talking about their early and then subsequent musical influential moments relating to a specific genre of music, in this case Soul, but then drifted through the programme to include other bits that seemed to be more about their informed opinion of key artists. So it started with the Jackson 5 because it was one of Trevor's first recollections, then later we flick back to a 60's clip of Aretha simply because she was known as the Queen of Soul. The programme would have been much stronger to be either entirely about the personal historical moments of music that moulded these two presenters, or abandon that and, like Kegsy and Cologno say, find someone who has a far more comprehensive knowledge of this area to select the clips, even if they still have to be restricted by what's already owned by the BBC.

Just spotted that at 8pm tonight Corinne Bailey Rae and Trevor Nelson are in a programme about how Soul music influenced them. The write up refers to it being episode 5/10, but no idea what the previous 4 were, whether they were all focussed on Soul, or who the featured people were.

And then the ending. I'd forgotten the sequence of along titles dropping down at the end. I think I was overwhelmed by seeing it at a modest cinema not long after it came out when my cousin was living in New York's East Village and absolutely loving the reaction of the audience, just whooping and clapping as the credits came up! Might be fun to track back over the song titles and see what comes across as a surprise....

Just got to the later moments of the film where the full band of the Funk Brothers get ready to play with the photo images of the ones who've already gone proudly posted on stands inbetween them all while the strains of "Ain't no mountain high enough build up." Emotional just as a soul fan - who knows what it must be like for their relatives and friends?

I've not been one to pay too much attention to the lyrics in past years, more the overall feel, but watch out for the difference if you click on Google for the lyrics to Jimmy Ruffin's 'What becomes of the broken hearted' as opposed to hearing him singing it via this YouTube' link: Here's Google's top link for the lyric: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=what+becomes+of+the+broken+hearted+lyrics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Google gives us "As I walk this land with broken dreams" whereas Jimmy sings "As I walk this land of broken dreams." What a difference a word makes, 24 little hours.

Just been re-watching ‘Standing in the Shadows of Motown.’ Good quote from Ben Harper at about 44 minutes into the film saying: “Soul music is powerful. Soul music makes you believe. Soul music gives you hope in the way that you feel. In the way that you want to feel.” Like that.

Nice, but I'd still have fancied having 45! Having noted my being pleased to see Richard's approach of listing the records by first name of the artists, I am intrigued to see him writing on page 41 (in the piece about Billy Harner) that he accidentally reversed over his record box in 1977, but that thankfully because "What about the music" was filed "A-Z by title" it escaped the worst damage and still plays with a hairline crack. Come on Richard - what's the story, how come you changed your approach to filing, or was it only by first name for this book? Also - chuffed to read that you are already planning a follow-on book!

Great set John and from Dan too, thanks both. Got to say a huge congratulations to the Banbury Soul Club for 15 great years of soul nights in the town.

I'd have liked to have got the '45' issue!

493 for me. Nice touch on presenting the numbering within the image of a 45.

Mine arrived this afternoon - looks really good. It looks like the focus is strongly on the Wigan years but even just skimming through you can see that he does cover a wider era, mentioning Va-Va's and other clubs. Maybe there'll be a 2nd book to come - "Cueing up the B-side!" I like that he's taken the theme of working through specific records as a sort of chapter sequence, and then spinning a story about the record and artist and wider aspects of the scene. And also that just like my filing of my singles, he lists the artists in alphabetical order by first name (e.g. Johnny Honeycutt and Johnny Williams are next to each other). I'm sure there will be many out there who think that's ridiculous, but it works for me!

Wonderful. I suspect that a route like this would be a great option for many other exceptional collections if the collector had never wanted to split and sell the individual items.

Still waiting for mine - anyone else still waiting?

Just spotted that BBC4 are running a programme at 8pm tonight called "Blues & beyond with Cerys Matthews and Val Wilmer." Val Wilmer was apparently widely known as a photographer who covered many blues artists. Might be worth a look.

Mine too, late afternoon, excellent thanks Kent / Ace / Ady.

I think it was some chancer coming by the school I worked in who may have jumped in via an open window and just struck lucky and probably jumped straight out again and legged it. I scoured the grounds but no luck, thought the person might have grabbed the £10 and chucked everything else. The wallet itself was a Mulberry sample that my wife had got in a sale and it was worth a couple of hundred pounds so I made a claim - after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with me proving ownership of the wallet they did pay out on that but attached no value at all to the soul club cards. A sad statement on how we value things.

Hope it wasn't my card - stolen in my wallet on a rare occasion when I took the wallet to work about 25 years ago! My 6Ts membership card went at the same time. Probably meant nothing whatsoever to the git who took it.

As is clear from threads like this it's almost impossible to separate music from 'politics' in a social sense. Adventurous collectors and DJs bring a track to your attention, it might be bang on the most typical type of music that is broadly accepted as Northern, or it might be quite an extreme tangent but just kind of still seems 'ok' to you when you hear it - the crucial thing is you hear it in a context that encourages you to give it some space and to listen and put your normal preferences on hold for a bit. It can be anything from the old tape-swopping to hearing a track you don't know at a venue where you're enjoying the atmosphere through to just finding a 45 you've not heard of while out record-hunting and getting it home and thinking "it's got something, it could sort of get played out". But for all of these you might hear the exact same record at a moment when you're just not ready for it, and you shut down and ignore it. Personally I love the feeling that I can tell what I consider to be 'Northern' (and for me that doesn't just mean oldies / '60s) and yet haven't got a clue how to express that here or to people I know who are interested in "So what is this Northern Soul stuff?"

Got mine via Amazon earlier this week - great value for the triple CD set so I can't complain about the lack of sleeve notes. It must have been quite a task filtering everything down to these 66 tracks, it's a nice balance and I like the fact that a few of the Motown 7's have been included amongst them. Showing my ignorance - what's the story re including Al Kent 'The Way You've Been Acting Lately'?

It arrived late afternoon. I've quickly read the foreword and am looking forward to getting stuck into it. Really like the fact that it's hardback like the Memphis one; it's a trilogy that I'm sure most of us will dip back into well into the future.

Email from Amazon this morning to say the book is to be delivered today - and at the new price of £13.88 instead of the pre-order price at £16.99, what's not to like?!

I picked up an issue copy of this at Leamington record fair a couple of months ago:

Fantastic B side. My first copy of the UK issue on green must have had this on the flip, but the it was stolen from our flat in Deptford in the early '80's when I stupidly left it on the 'music-centre' (along with a cassette tape of a night at Wigan that was in the tape player). Bastards nicked our duvet as well, which we think they used to lower the prized goods down from our first floor flat and had it away with them. At the time I don't think I'd even played this side, even though I was getting more and more interested in B-sides. Luckily I now have another basic UK green copy but even better, found a lovely US DJ copy of it (There You Are) where the plug side is 'Bad Risk'. In case you're interested; the insurers were happy to pay out on the state of the art music-centre (those days when spreading all the features like radio, tape and record player sideways was the way to go, none of this stacking concept), and even on the record itself which I think I managed to persuade them was worth around £12 in early '80's money. But I was devastated to lose my very poor quality copy of what I think was a C120 tape live from Wigan with me chopping tracks all over the place to try and record the stuff I liked at the time. I couldn't persuade them it was worth anything at all. I've kept the case all this time as a memento.