In 1993, Elaine Constantine was commissioned by the Face magazine to photograph a northern soul night at the 100 Club in London. “It was challenging, to say the least,” she recalls. “The place was really dark except for the illuminated signs for the exits and the toilets, and a few lamps above the record decks. The only way to photograph was with a flash, which kept blinding everyone on the dancefloor.”
Having recently moved to London from Manchester, Constantine had come of age on the northern soul scene a decade earlier, regularly attending all-nighters across the country as a teenager. At the 100 Club, she immediately noticed that the crowd was older and the records more obscure, but the dancers were as energetic and self-absorbed as ever. When she heard the familiar propulsive thump of Lester Tipton’s rare mid-60s record This Won’t Change, it proved irresistible. She put down her camera under a chair and took to the dancefloor, losing herself in the music until the dawn.
Now, just over 30 years later, the photographs Constantine took of the scene are being published in a book called I’m Com’un Home in the Morn’un, the title an insider’s nod to a northern soul classic from 1970 by the gravelly voiced Lou Pride. Shot in the 100 Club and also at the Ritz, Manchester, as well as various lesser-known venues across the country, it’s an intimate glimpse of a peculiarly British subculture that began in the 1960s and stubbornly refuses to die. Its roots lie in a predominantly working-class soul music scene that took hold in the industrial north and the Midlands following the demise of the mod movement.
By the early 1970s, at venues such as the Wigan Casino and the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the defining stylistic aspects of northern soul had been established: loose athletic tops, wide trousers and skirts that facilitated often acrobatic dance moves. Out on the floor, the atmosphere was both communal and fiercely competitive, the more extravagant dancers executing high kicks, backflips and dizzying 360-degree spins to the up-tempo thrust of often obscure American soul 45s. For confidence and staying power, amphetamine was the stimulant of choice.
When Constantine initially revisited the music of her youth for the Face in the early 90s, she was “reluctant to be dragged back into the scene”, but over the next year or so, she kept photographing around Manchester, the Midlands and Yorkshire, while simultaneously establishing a reputation as a fashion photographer.
Constantine first picked up a camera as a teenager in her home town, Bury, where, encouraged by her mother, she attended an amateur photography workshop. There, one of the teachers showed her a copy of In Flagrante, the late Chris Killip’s celebrated photobook about working-class life in the north-east of England during the Thatcher years. “I was 19 and on the dole and that book changed my life,” she recalls. “I was stunned by the raw power of his images and remember thinking, maybe there is hope for me.”
All these years later, though, Constantine remains something of an outsider in terms of British photography culture. “I still don’t work like a traditional documentary photographer,” she says, cheerily. “I tend to go off on my own tangents, more for enjoyment than anything else.”
This may be why, at 58, I’m Com’un Home in the Morn’un is her debut photobook. It grew out of a talk she gave at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol in 2022. Parr, the veteran British photographer, recognising the cultural importance of the northern soul series, suggested she should do a book and an exhibition of the work (the book will be launched there in July).
In the interim, her rekindled passion for the music of her youth led to her directing her first feature film: Northern Soul was released in 2014, and was nominated for a Bafta. It was a bruising, if ultimately rewarding, experience, she recalls. The film was denied a theatrical run at first, then became a social media cause celebre, with fans successfully pressurising their local cinemas to show it. It made the box office Top 10 on its first week of release and was an even bigger success on DVD. “Everyone in the industry thought it would be niche,” she says, “but there were queues around the block at every indie cinema that screened it.”
Like the film, Constantine’s new photobook is an ode to a subculture that endures against all the odds. “When I was shooting the scene in the 90s, it was dwindling.” she says. “There are still regular nights across the country where the regulars are mainly older, but there are also clubs in places like south London and Bristol, where it’s all youngsters on the dancefloor.”
She describes the song whose title she borrowed for her book as “a record that never dates”. For the faithful, old and young, the northern soul scene continues to cast a similar spell. Her images are a testament to the power of the music and those who have kept a passion for it through the generations.
I’m Com’un Home in the Morn’un is published by RRB Photobooks; the exhibition is at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, 11 July-22 September
