Northern Soul at The Proms - BBC 26 Jul 2023

For various reasons, which we won't bore you with, we only got around to watching Saturday night's Northern Soul at The Proms show until last night. It was recorded on 15 Jul and broadcast on BBC on Saturday (26 Jul).

The show was a celebration of over 50 years of the Northern Soul subculture which evolved in the late 60s/early 70s in the North and Midlands of England (initially).

It's a good watch and most reports we've seen have been positive. Whoever would have imagined 50 years ago that the disregarded soul music of the 60s and 70s, discovered by an essentially working class underground subculture, would feature in the BBC Proms? To an extent it is the antithesis of what Northern Soul was about, as it was always elitist and underground, but let's celebrate it for what it is.

Six singers were backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra (conducted by Edwin Outwater) at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London. The singers were:

Vula Malinga, Frida Touray, Natalie Palmer, Brendan Reilly, Nick Shirm and Darrell Smith.

The show lasted just over 90 mins and they sang 22 Northern Soul classics. The 'dyed-in-the-wool' Northern Soul devotees will say they are 'played out', but we bet every one of them danced to most of them back in the day!

It's available to watch on BBC iPlayer but unfortunately for those living outside the UK it probably won't be available for you to watch (as you need to be a UK TV licence payer). Therefore, we've included a playlist of all the songs in the order they were sung. Videos have leaked onto YouTube which we won't post as we don't believe that they are official ones.

NOTE Frank Beverly and Judy Street songs are not available on Spotify so alternate version have been included.

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