ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors look at the developments from the perspective of the history of live music. The simple formula of venue, Disc Jockey (DJ) and soul fan has never been bettered or equalled by any other musical genre. The label ‘northern soul’ is usually ascribed to the journalist Dave Godin, who used it in the magazine Blues and Soul after a visit to the Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester in 1970. In the 1970s, the term ‘disco’ was used in two ways: to describe a type of musical entertainment—dancing to records played by DJs—and the places, discotheques, where it took place and to describe a particular way of dancing to a “distinctive sound of music.” Early disco DJs quickly discovered that “people liked longer records” and “didn’t want their mood broken”: using two turntables and accenting the bass range, DJs began the practice of fading in a new record as the previous one was ending.
