Please look, listen and share. Some amazing sets to share on this new listening project.
www.lookatyoursoul.org
I’ve been working on creating this site, with Kristen Neilson, over the past few months - and we are finally ready to set it free!!
Look At Your Soul is an active listening platform. As some of you will know - I have collected and danced to rare northern soul and funk 45s for most of my life. The music has had an incredible, positive, and deep impact on my ‘life’, it has been ‘life’ giving. It was responsible for starting me along a ‘life’ long path of dancing and movement that began at the age of 15, when I went to my first all nighter, and danced.
Following the terrible murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery earlier this year - I found myself having challenging discussions about racism in the UK, and it became clear to me that we all have a duty to actively fight against this in our everyday lives.
Kristen and I got talking online (we hadn’t ever met before) about how some aspects of the UK rare and Northern Soul scene are blatantly racist - and shared stories of what we had witnessed over the years.
This is an underground scene which is based ENTIRELY around a love of rare Black American soul records from the 60s and 70s.
So you see the sad irony.
So we got our heads together and decided to do something - our small contribution to opening up a conversation, actively listening to these records again with these issues in mind, asking rare soul collectors from across the globe (of which there are a few!) to revisit their music, revisit their records and the artists, to create a set of “Soul With a Message” to share on our platform.
This is just the beginning and I am excited to see how this will develop over the next few months/years!
First incredible set is by collector, Dj and music historian Tommy Sovik (Norway)
Thanks to Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Liam Quinn for the inspiring talks and support for the project!
Soul With A Message (SWAM) - a term coined by music historian Tommy Sovik (Norway)