'In Defiance Of Any Sense Of Normalcy: A Portrait of 21st Century Northern Soul' is a photographic project focussing on the UK Northern Soul scene.
Northern Soul is a musical subculture that began in the late 1970s with a distinctly white, working-class following in the industrial North of England, where all night dancing to the music of little-known Black Soul artists from similar backgrounds in the industrial areas of America, became popular for the youth of the era. The music, which mostly was an attempt to emulate the famous Motown sound, rarely became commercially successful in America, driving a generation of young British DJs and collectors to lustfully find their unreleased and unsold records in U.S. warehouses, bringing them back to play to excited crowds who never knew what they were going to hear next. The scene remains largely unchanged now, aside from the fact that a younger generation of followers is coming into the scene with a new energy.
I travelled all over the UK in an effort to find out what it is that has kept this scene alive, how it has evolved and why, nearly 50 years after its inception.
I found a sincere, educated and longstanding devotion to the music of America's Black Soul community of the 60s, offering an enormous sense of escapism from the grind one’s work and providing relativity to one’s emotional circumstance. ‘In Defiance Of Any Sense Of Normalcy’ is an examination of Northern Soul, one of the last remaining British subcultures and a testament to the experience that it gives to its devotees.