While the US had it’s soul and R’n’B boom in the early 60’s onwards, with groups like The Shangri-La’s (girl group), Gladys Knight and the Pips, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and so on and so forth; the artists were many and the music great, but it wasn’t until the Wigan Casino that the UK found it’s own stride with the birth of Northern Soul. Collected over the course of almost ten years, The Wigan Casino Story Continues… (1999) charts the unbelievably groovy and meteoric rise of Northern Soul as a cause-to-be. As R’n’B turned to funk and funk to disco here in the States, Northern Soul propelled British music in a completely different direction, eschewing the blatantly commercialized aspect of the music in favor of fun, perfect pop confections. Amassed on Wigan Casino are 27 different artists, each forgotten by the American music world and rediscovered here. But rather than an approximation, Wigan Casino is an amazingly potent artifact of an era many overlook in British music that was just as important as punk if not just as influential, despite not even being created by Brits. A collector’s wet dream.
Listen to “Double Cookin’ (The Checkerboard Squares)” and “Baby Mine (Thelma Houston)”
Download “The Wigan Casino Story Continues…”
