Northern Soul is the labor of love of fashion photographer-turned-director, Elaine Constantine, who recreated the sweat-soaked and amphetamine-fueled soul scene that was centered around northern English venues such as the infamous Wigan Casino during the 1970s and 80s. Constantine did so with the help of her husband and fellow devotee, Marco Santucci, who was Executive Producer for the film, which stars Elliot James Langridge and Josh Whitehouse as two friends feeding off the all-nighters and rare records at their disposal.

Below, Santucci reveals how he assisted Constantine in turning a shared passion into a singular reality:

This film has been about 17 years in the making. Me and Elaine first met in 1997 on the dancefloor of a northern soul all-nighter at the 100 Club, after we had both come back to the scene. Although I was from the south and Elaine was from Bury in north Manchester, we had already both attended the same dos without knowing it during the 1980s revivals, when we were 14 or 15. 

We started going out. She was a photographer for The Face; I started managing her and her career went through the roof, which left me hanging on for dear life. For some time, Elaine had been taking pictures of the northern soul scene, and wanted to make a documentary on it. But any representation of it in the 1990s would have fallen short; she wanted to get across the excitement of the initial discovery, when people were young, lithe, amazing dancers. She said: “I’m going to have to make a feature film about the original 1970s wave instead.” I remember almost laughing it off at first, but Elaine was deadly serious and so started learning scriptwriting.

Elaine realized that if we were going to populate the Wigan Casino interiors— which were all filmed in a place called King George’s Hall in Blackburn—we had to do it with people who could master the moves, so we set up open workshops above pubs in London and Bolton. We had Mark Dobson aka Butch, a guru of the scene, on board as a musical consultant. The records needed to be accurate in terms of the chronology: This clip features Lou Pride’s “I'm Com'un Home In The Morn'un,” for example, which became a huge record in 1975, towards the end of the film’s chronology. It’s a far darker, more powerful piece of dance music than some of the poppy dross wheeled out whenever mainstream media talk about northern soul.

Getting the rights to the songs was quite an undertaking. In the end, me and Elaine sold our Lambretta scooters—I had a GP150, she had a GP 200—and part of our record collections to fund it all. But partly as a result of the interest in the film, there has been resurgence of late. The 100 Club all-nighter is still going after over three decades. There has been an influx of young people across the scene in the last two or three years and the soundtrack to the film is in the UK top ten. I think the appeal transcends the rare soul nuts: it doesn’t matter what scene you had grown up with, but if you were an independent-minded kind of teenager born in a certain period in the late 20th century, you would have gone out and found a scene that you embraced.

Northern Soul is in cinemas and out now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD. The soundtrack is available from iTunes and Amazon.