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Representing the deep / soulful sides of drum & bass, future beats, house music, disco, soul & afrobeat. Northern Groove was set up by Myself - Soulsmith in August 2005. I have been DJing for 10 years and decided to start a company with a view to promoting my own interests in music.
I currently work full-time promoting LTJ Bukem's legendary label; Good Looking Records - working as press officer and as the networks administrator of the goodlooking organisation community. You can check out the goodlooking org pages by hitting the image below.
Northern Groove's future missions... Check out the DJs / acts listed on the left of this page... I would eventually like to bring some of these artists to Manchester / Liverpool on a more regular basis. Music is life! ... These people have made my life more interesting so I am gonna try and get them on!
If you are interested in any of these DJs / producers then add yourself to my friends list and say hello.
Word to all of the Manchester crews out there... Northern Groove is a company that also aims to promote other North West club nights (not just our own) so please feel free to use this page and our music event listings blog as an open message board / space to advertise your nights and events. Peace xQuote...
"It’s 1:30am on a sweaty Saturday night / Sunday morning. You’re in the middle of a dancefloor in the middle of a club in the middle of a city in the middle of the Universe. Your brain is finely tuned into the pulses emanating from the sound system as your body does a new dance that blends perfectly with the shape of the rhythms. Somewhere in your head a voice says – I want everything all at once forever, now – and that’s when the trigger hits. An “Anthem†is rushing out of the speakers, all you can think is yes, yes, make it happen, its happening now, I…Love…this…tune… Surrounded by bodies and faces strobed into abstraction, your palms start to sweat as your arms shoot up to the ceiling, out of your mouth comes a strangled scream, your legs feel like jelly as the dancefloor transforms into a trampoline... The bass drum pounds, the basseline sounds and then that vocal, like syrup flows into your ears and fills you up with warmth and happiness, taking you to a new plane of pure pleasure... It’s a magic club moment encoded on wax or tape or digital data and imprinted in the heads of thousands of clubbers all over the world. It’s a little packet of emotion sealed in plastic"A BRIEF HISTORY...14th Feb 1970 - David Mancuso Holds his ‘Love Saves The Day’ party at his Loft space on Broadway. His weekly parties take off and become the most crucial epicentre of underground disco and soul.
Sept 1973 - Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes’ ‘The Love I Lost’ is released, featuring the drummer Earl Young, whose hissing hi-hat sound would come to define the disco beat. 1975 - Tom Moulton accidently invents the 12 inch single by spreading the grooves accross a 12 inch plate after running out of 7 inch plates. “The difference in sound was incredible.†May 1976 - Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Percent’, mixed by Walter Gibbons, becomes the first commercially available twelve-inch single. 1977 - The Warehouse opens in Chicago with Frankie Knuckles at the helm. The club would become the crucible of house music, into which disco eventually disolved. Feb 1978 - The Paradise Garage, The club presided over by the person nearly everyone calls the worlds greatest DJ, Larry Levan, officially opens in New York. Between 78-88 Larry bridges the link from disco to US garage / house. 1982 - Knuckles moves to The Powerplant. The Warehouse re-opens as The Muzic Box with Frankie’s understudy Ron Hardy puhing the tempo and experimenting with the house sound. 1982 - The Hacienda opens in Manchester... This period saw a shift in white appreciation of black music, as rap & electro started to filter in from the US... "In The Hac Rock sounded shit, Electro sounded great."1988 - Rave is born - The second summer of love.
The Hacienda - Manchester Rave on '91, Rave Thru '92... "When rave culture first swept Britain it wasn’t, as the tabloids would have us believe, the drugs and all-night dancing which attracted so many eager converts. It was all about the music. Not only were we dancing to a different tune - acidic, balearic, garage, sweet techno - but due to the increasing cheapness and availability of technology - a pair of turntables, a mixer, a sampler and away you go - we were not only consumers and participants; we could also be creators, innovators and shape our own culture." - Mandi James - 'Sublime - Manchester Music & Design'. "In dance music there’s always an underground... This is at its most creative just after things have got horribly commercial. The mainstream picks up on something, burns it up, and declares it dead. But meanwhile, the pioneers have moved on and are free to push things further, to reclaim the momentum... there’s always an underground, always something fresh on the horizon." - Bill Brewster / Frank Broughton - 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life'. 2006 - "In a hard time for music sales one thing is apparent the music is still very much alive when 15 years ago a lot of doubters said the music, the people, the soul of what we were trying to create, wouldn’t last a year." - LTJ Bukem.
(Parts of the above taken from Peter Shapiro's - 'Turn The Beat Around - The Secret History Of Disco')