Private soul

In the last post I referred to my music fan history. It went something like this:

'I've been a pop baby, a disco dolly, a rock chick, a rave girl and now, most recently, a folk fan'.

Obviously musical genres are a bit of a nonsense (where does rock end and pop begin...no-one agrees about what is and isn't folk etc...) but they are still terms we use and (mostly) we know what we are talking about. Also I should point out that I haven't always experienced an abrupt changeover from genre to genre (for example as a teenager I would happily headbang or groove about to whatever music our school disco DJ fancied playing) but generally speaking I do seem to have been moving steadily through the genres as I've grown. Even if I do tend to keep the boundaries fairly loose there has still been a movement through styles over the years. It's been quite exciting so far and I look forward to getting to know more and more different music as times goes by...

At some point this week, however, I was rereading that last post and I realised I had missed out soul music in that list. How could I have missed that out? I really love a lot of what is called 'soul music' (though other names might apply to some of it...it is a pretty huge genre...I'm not going to even try to define it!). So why was it not in the list? I suppose partly I didn't think of it because it's been a private and personal, rather than a social, music taste. All the others have involved going out with friends and being part of something (dancing with crowds in rave clubs, sitting with slightly smaller, and more mature, crowds in the folk club) whereas soul is something I have mostly listened to on my own at home. Few of my friends or beloveds have shared my taste for soul music old and new so it has been a private matter, a relationship between me and all those amazing musicians and singers (and some of the very best singers dwell in the soul section of what used to be called record shops). I know there are clubs that play various types of soul music but I have never really been to them (not regularly anyway). I have a friend who is very keen on the never-say-die Northern Soul scene that exists in the North of England but I've never quite got into that. Some crazy dancing goes on there (and some very obsessive record collecting of obscure old releases)!

A lot of the soul I've liked has been fairly mainstream...some would even call it pop soul. Some of it is from the 1960s, some from the 70s, some even from the 90s and noughties (though a lot of new soul doesn't do much for me...its eye is too much on the huge money market and it can be a bit unadventurous...but there are still good singers and songs that I like now and again). Some of the stuff I've liked has not been at all trendy or cool but, as I may have said before, we can't help but like the music we like - if we try and let fashion choose our soundtrack then we really are stupid and we deserve everything we get!

When I was at uni, for example, I had a huge Motown phase (and by the way there was a great article about the label recently in The Observer). I'd liked some of it before (back in Middlesbrough I'd listened to a friend's older sister's Motown singles) but in my strange Southern English outback uni town I listened to hardly anything but pop 60s soul music for the best part of a year. It was absolutely NOT what the cool students were listening to but I loved it and it got me through what was really a bit of an odd time. It's never very fashionable to admit to liking Diana Ross but, particularly at that time, I really did (well, I liked her voice anyway...and lots of the songs..both with and without Supremes). I had vinyl albums and cassettes and I used to listen to 'soul alldayers' that they had on the local commercial radio station (Chiltern it was called, I think...some good music, the usual cheesey presenters).

Diana Ross has a terrible reputation (no sense of sisterhood, all ambition, drinking and driving, other bad behaviour) but it's all pretty standard pop star stuff really, isn't it? I don't think Madonna's made many friends either and at least Ross can sing. I watched that 'Dreamgirls' movie (that's based on the Supremes story) but despite some great performances it really is a long, dreary film in search of a script editor (or a better writer). Much better to just listen to Diana the Diva (and look at some of the amazing photos of her too). I still love you, Miss Ross. I don't know why but I do.

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