Northern Soul
Elaine Constantine (2014)
I can’t say I enjoyed it much but Northern Soul is no mean achievement. It was made four decades on from the year in which Elaine Constantine sets her story but I never doubted I was watching events in 1974, thanks to the clothes, the hairstyles, the décor – and the visual texture contrived by Constantine and her cinematographer, Simon Tindall, which gives proceedings the look of seventies TV news footage. The action is based in the writer-director’s native Lancashire, epicentre of the music and dance movement that gives the film its title, enriches and unsettles the life of its late-teenage protagonist, John (Elliot James Langridge), and sparks his friendship with another local, Matt (Josh Whitehouse). The Black American soul music to which Matt introduces John fuels the narrative and provides the boys with a means of escape – in reality and in their dreams – from dead-end jobs in Burnsworth, their ‘shit-hole’ home town (and only technically fictional). John and Matt want more than the quasi-religious experience of moving ecstatically on the dance floor to the 45s they love. They intend to become top DJs on the Northern Soul circuit. Their hearts are set on travelling to America, the soul music mother lode.
The film’s breakneck pace chimes with John and Matt’s thrilling, increasingly out-of-control involvement in a working-class cultural phenomenon that Constantine chiefly celebrates but also critiques. Speed is of the essence: amphetamines are swallowed by the handful, sometimes with nightmare consequences that de-romanticise what could otherwise have been a simple piece of nostalgia. The young actors in the main roles also contribute to Northern Soul‘s slice-of-life quality because they’re unknown quantities. (Elliot James Langridge and Josh Whitehouse, according to IMDb, have both had regular screen work in the years since they made this film but mostly in smaller parts.) It’s different in the early scenes with Christian McKay and Lisa Stansfield playing John’s parents, Ricky Tomlinson his grandfather and Steve Coogan a strenuously sarky schoolteacher. But grandpa dies, John walks out of an exam and school for good, and leaves home. John Thomson is DJ at the youth club where John first meets Matt but they soon abandon this place, too. From that point on, the film is happening in a world of largely unfamiliar faces whose acting is good enough to reinforce the semblance of reality. (James Lance does well in the small but important role of Ray Henderson, the star DJ on the circuit.) The one exception, for this viewer, was Antonia Thomas, whom I’d seen in Dexter Fletcher’s Sunshine on Leith (2013); here she’s Angela, a nurse for whom John regularly gives up his seat on the bus when he’s still going to school and who turns out to be another Northern Soul enthusiast. As in Sunshine on Leith, Thomas is vivid and likeable but performs less naturally than some others in the cast.
The younger actors’ words are often hard to decipher and the visuals are sometimes impenetrably murky but it’s clear enough that Constantine’s screenplay – as a series of events and a collection of character types – is essentially formulaic. John’s mother and father, for example, are stock dreary parents with no feeling for their son’s frustrations and ambitions: their only noteworthy feature is that, given their age, they must be contemporaries of the misunderstood teenagers of British pop films of the late 1950s/early 1960s. The story is rather more interesting as a dual romance. Despite John’s diffidence, he and Angela end up an item but it’s his friendship with Matt that’s the heart of Northern Soul. In accordance with romantic-movie convention, these best mates have a big falling out that requires a last-minute reconciliation. By this stage, Matt has come down to earth with a bump, working as a labourer for the local council. One night, John confronts him on a job, hoping to make peace. Matt tells him where to get off but John wins him round by graffitiing the lyrics of Tobi Legend’s Northern Soul classic ‘Time Will Pass You By’ on walls and bridges around Burnsworth. Next morning, Matt wakes in the passenger seat of a council van to see John’s handiwork: it takes a few moments for him to realise he isn’t still asleep and dreaming. Tobi Legend’s voice on the soundtrack reinforces the song’s carpe diem urgency. Matt jumps out of the van and finds John at work on his next graffito. All is instantly forgiven. John invites Matt to hear his latest record and they walk off into the sunrise together.
Born in Bury in 1965, Elaine Constantine, according to a 2015 Guardian interview with Charles Gant (used as the BFI handout for this screening), had been ‘a fan of heavy-beat, fast-tempo American soul since her teen years’. She was well established and internationally recognised as a photographer when she made Northern Soul, which was clearly was a labour of love. Charles Gant notes that Constantine had already created mini-documentaries on the subject but she was evidently determined to work her fascination with this music and culture into a piece of drama – she wrote the script after completing the Writers Boot Camp online screenwriting programme. Nearly a decade on, Northern Soul, an unexpected hit with critics and audiences alike, remains Constantine’s sole cinema feature. It seems to be the one and only story that she wanted to tell on screen.
30 March 2023