Elaine Constantine's Directorial Feature Debut Was 15 Years In The Making

26 May 2015 | 7:20 pm | Guy Davis

“A lot of the dialogue is straight out my mouth when I was younger."

Northern Soul, the directorial debut of renowned photographer Elaine Constantine, does a brilliant job of capturing that energising, electrifying moment in a person’s life when they not only find something they’re passionate about but also find like-minded people just as turned-on by it. “Everything comes together at once, doesn’t it?” says Constantine. “And your personality starts to form.”

For Constantine, and for John and Matt, the young protagonists of Northern Soul, it’s the musical genre of the title – urgent, hard-driving American soul – and the scene that emerged around it that became central to their lives. Indeed, Constantine has been a devotee since her teens in the Lancashire town of Bury. “I’d just started secondary school, and I’d heard this phrase ‘northern soul’ but I didn’t really know what it meant. And then I was in this youth club – there was about a thousand kids in there, and they were all moving around to whatever music was playing but not really connecting. But then this record came on, it sounded a bit old and echoey, and the floor cleared but some guys went out and started doing all these acrobatic moves, spins and kung fu poses and all this weird stuff. But I remember looking at their faces and seeing how they were completely engaged with what they were doing – they didn’t give a shit what they looked like! I was blown away. And when someone told me it was northern soul that was playing, I said, ‘Oh, fuck, this is northern soul! Ok!’ Within a year, I was taking three buses to go to towns far away from mine or telling my mum I was staying at a friend’s place when I was going to all-nighters. And I never got out of it, really.”

Constantine remains a fan of the music, even if the scene isn’t quite what it once was. “There isn’t quite the energy on the floor anymore,” she laughs. “It’s full of old people like me.” Her film, which she also wrote, is a heartfelt if unsentimental love letter to the story’s era, setting and soundtrack. “A lot of the dialogue is straight out my mouth when I was younger,” she admits.

It took Constantine 15 years “on and off” to put Northern Soul together and then another two to get it into the marketplace. The result stands as a tribute to Constantine’s background and the northern soul scene. “It’s maybe a northern working-class thing. Where I come from, going out on the weekend meant looking incredibly smart. Where I came from, people worked down the mines or in filthy factories, so they’d polish their shoes and iron their shirts when they were going out. You would never show up looking like you’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. You’d want to outdo all your peers. That sort of thing, and the feeling that we weren’t going to be knocked, that we weren’t victims, it created a work ethic in me, and Northern Soul was a kind of complement to that.”

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