If the world of soul music were a car, Keb Darge would be the most important part you’ve never heard of.
Unlike the tires or the steering wheel—big, obvious things with clearly defined roles—Keb’s bit would be tucked away near the engine somewhere, small but integral, and not easily replaced.
Throughout 1970s Britain, while people from each of the island’s soft corners came together to bathe in the chilled-out wake of Beatles euphoria which splashed and gurgled with the sounds of David Crosby, Neil Young and the Carpenters, a handful of others were meeting in sweaty dance clubs and thrashing to the uptempo beats of American soul music from the decade prior. Eventually, the “Northern soul movement”—named for its young fans from northern England, who would descend on London record stores looking for vintage 45’s—would grow big enough to inspire a generation of Vespa-riding mods and current acts like Amy Winehouse, not to mention confound many Brits, who made it clear that they couldn’t understand white English kids getting into old black music from the States. But before it laid the foundation for the 1979 cult film Quadrophenia, in which king mod Ace Face (played by a young Sting) clashed violently with leather-clad “rockers,” Northern soul was the pet project of Keb Darge and a few of his close associates.
Armed with cassette recorders, tens of thousands of records, the occasional spot of drug money and pure, uncut ambition, Darge and company nurtured and energized the Northern soul movement from its very beginning, doing everything from opening their own nightclubs to traveling around the globe digging for new tunes to spreading the gospel with an endless supply of gratis mixtapes. Whether or not you know his name, make no mistake: Keb and his mates changed music forever. Even more amazing is that they did so not to become famous, but simply to honor something they thought deserved it. “I always wanted to market the music more than myself,” says Keb. Try to imagine a DJ uttering those words nowadays, in a world where everyone with a MacBook, Pro Tools and a self-aggrandizing MySpace page fancies himself a mixmaster.
Forty years after he started his journey, Darge, now a world renowned party starter and record collector, has seen his beloved Northern soul rise, fall and rise again, as if it was dancing along with the upbeat tunes he’s spent his whole life hunting down and sharing with the masses. Along the way, he’s also invented “deep funk,” trailblazed the mixtape, perfected the art of the unassuming DJ and accumulated one of the most important private record collections in the world. This winter, he teamed up with Paul Weller to release a new collection of gems, Lost+Found:Real R’N’B+Soul. Not too bad for a Scottish lad who dropped out of college to work in construction.
Here, Darge and a litany of his celebrated associates—DJ Shadow, DJ Z-Trip, Lyrics Born and original Northern soul cohort Guy Hennigan—lead FILTER on a tale about soul history, the birth of the mixtape and the legacy of the hardest-working, most underrated man in show business.
The Rise of the Northern Soul Mixtape
In Scotland in the early ’70s, there was a big interest in ’60s soul, new funk and emerging soul—just black music in general, I guess. So, when the first cassette recorders arrived in Britain around 1973, I’d take mine down to Wigan Casino in Manchester, which was the best club in the country for discovering new soul tunes. Looking like the most excited lad in the world with my new gadget, I’d stick the recorder on the stage and tape the tunes the DJs played throughout the night. That was my first use of cassettes—recording those sessions and then going home to study the music.
Eventually, we got our own soul club started in Aberdeen: Center City Soul Club. We used to get people coming in with no idea about the music or what we were trying to do. So I just thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to give them cassette recordings of my records, get them into the music and get some converts from pop”—because the big thing in the clubs at that time was ABBA and Gary Glitter and all that real shit pop music. The four or five of us who started this club agreed that if anyone came in and didn’t recognize the tunes, we’d give them a cassette full of Northern soul songs and start yapping to them to get them into the music. That evolved into me giving cassettes to promoters in Dundee and Edinburgh in the hopes that they’d book me to DJ. A mixtape to me was just a cassette of my records I used to try to get bookings as a DJ. Because the soul scene then was interested in one thing: Has anyone got any great records that nobody else has got?
I suppose in some way it was marketing for me but, the way I remember, it was less, “Hey, I’m a great DJ,” and more, “Hey, you should fucking listen to this music because it’s much better than the shit you’re listening to.” I always wanted to market the music more than myself. And within a couple months I realized that people weren’t just interested in the music, but my specific music. That’s when I decided I needed to get more records.
Digging in the States
In the record stores in Britain, you couldn’t find Northern soul or funk records. You could find James Brown albums and a few other artists with British releases, but nothing else. In the early ’70s, 90 percent of the British population got into hippie shit—Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and all that rubbish. So, the British labels stopped licensing all the great black music.
The first two gentlemen who went from Britain to America with the specific intention of buying obscure soul records was in 1968. They came back with a horde of albums, because nobody was looking for the stuff over there. When they returned, they started selling their haul, and the record dealer was born.
They started the dealing at Wigan Casino. You’d go in and the record bar there was as big as most clubs are today. There’d be about 200 dealers with tables in front of them and boxes of 45s they’d got from America. Literally every time I went to Wigan back then, the first thing I’d do is go to the record bar to spend all the money I had in my pocket. I’d keep a shilling for drinks then go dance away the night with my records in my bag. And that was it.
One day I realized I was paying about a week’s wages for one record from these dealers and I decided, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go to America and find them myself.” I wasn’t a rich man, of course, so I broke into a drug dealer’s place, stole the gear and sold the speed to get the money to go to the States—that was how I funded my first trip.
At first I just went to Detroit. I started out just going to record stores, but eventually I got wise and started asking the store clerks for numbers of private dealers. Sometimes you’d get lucky and a bloke would go, “Oh, you like this stuff? My uncle used to sing for this band.” And next thing you know you’re digging in some old funk drummer’s private collection.
It was big business for the dealers, but it wasn’t so much of a selfish business thing for me. It was more like, “Hooray! We’ve discovered this wonderful music; let’s get as much of it over to Britain so we can play it and dance and all help each other out.”
The competition really came when the music started drying up. It used to be you could go to the States and definitely find some dealers you hadn’t worked with before and find some new discoveries. That was the main thing: finding stuff that people had never heard—and you could always find that in the States. But then the records started to dry up, because eventually people from all over the world were into it. By the mid ’80s, you had Japanese guys buying entire record stores. More and more British and American people got into it, too. Eventually, everyone realized how much their records were worth.
I remember one particular dealer in Florida. This guy Richard had died and left his wife, Edna, in charge of a giant warehouse full of records. I thought I was going to phone Edna, pop over and get my hands on a boatload of great deals. It turned out that Edna knew exactly what she was sitting on, because she put a fucking shotgun in my face as soon as she saw me and didn’t take it away until I’d paid her cash and left with my records. I swear to you, this 65-year-old woman told me, “If you try to steal any of my husband’s records, I’ll blow your goddamn head off.” She even followed me into the bathroom of the warehouse while I had a shit, and she didn’t even flinch when I wiped my ass.
Protecting the Horde
The Northern scene was flooded with bootlegs by ’74 or ’75. That’s when DJs started covering up the names of records. You needed to play a record for a month or two for it to really break into the scene, and if the bootleggers got hold of it before the month was up, they’d bootleg it instantly. Next thing you know, there’d be a few thousand copies of it and every club would be playing it—that would be a record killed.
You have to remember that the people going to these clubs—especially Wigan—were driving 10 hours each way to get to them. Nobody is going to go through a journey like that to hear a record they could get off a bootlegger at their local pub; you had to have what nobody else had. Covering up the names of the records was a business decision. You’d cover up the label and put whatever name you wanted on it. I used to name mine after American Civil War generals. If I remember correctly, Nathan Bedford Forrest had quite a few good Northern soul tunes. James Longstreet had a few stompers, too. Most of the people at Wigan had no clue who the fuck these people were. They’d say, “Ulysses S. Grant? That’s a great name for a soul singer!” And I’d say, “Yes, it is.”
Broke and Boring Social Scene
The reason I got into Northern soul is very simple: Life in Scotland was fucking shit! I got kicked out of university for lack of attendance and I never went back. After that I took shit jobs at shipyards and farms and building sites, all of which contributed to a really shit, boring life.
The music they were offering us at the clubs wasn’t enough to help me escape. A big part of it was fashion, too. Me and the other Northern soul boys would go to these clubs where they were playing absolute shit like Boney M. and we’d hand a Northern soul record to the DJ and tell him to play it. He’d listen to us because we were the sharpest dressed guys in there. And the next thing you know, we’d be dancing—Northern soul dancing looks like breakdancing, but that’s not what we called it—and instantly, every young man worth his salt was thinking, “Fucking hell, if I can dress and dance like that, I’m definitely going to get a shag. I want to be one of them. What’s this music you’re listening to?”
What Kind of Power We Got?
I’ll give you a good example [of how powerful the movement was]: In 1976, there were two music magazines in Britain, the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. They were run in London, which was completely removed from the Northern soul scene. Instead, London was going, “We’ll follow the latest trends and we’ll tell you what to listen to and buy.” Anyway, one of the magazines published an article slagging off the Northern soul scene, saying how ridiculous it was for kids from Britain to be listening to records being made by black American artists from six years ago, and how everyone should instead listen to music being made by some wanky, posh kid in London whose mommy and daddy bought him his instruments. In other words, “Hey, listen to this shit, because we’re going to make money off it, and we’re not going to make money off black Americans.”
If some trendy lifestyle magazine came out today and said, “The new jazz movement is shit and out of date,” people would drop out of that scene. They’d think, “Oh, that’s not trendy anymore. The new thing is high-hat beats!” and everyone would get into high-hat beats or whatever. But what happened then was that the week after it published that article, the magazine lost 70,000 sales. People said, “Well, fuck you, then. I’m doing my thing.” Immediately, of course, the other magazine jumped to it and said, “We love Northern soul.” From there, you saw British labels actually releasing Northern soul records and the whole thing took off. And then it was completely taken away from our control—it got trendy and it got away.
The Mod Complex
We went to Wigan Casino on a Saturday and it was fucking great, as usual. We went to Wigan Casino the Saturday after [seminal mod film] Quadrophenia came out and there were huge queues of fucking idiots with parkas on carrying sleeping bags. They brought fucking sleeping bags to the all-night dance party! They danced for an hour or two and then went to sleep. Since then there have been people who ask me, “Oh, you were into soul and all that, what scooter did you have?” And I’m like, “What the fuck do scooters have to do with soul, you cunt?”
It was pretty irritating, because we got into Northern soul because this music satisfied something inside us, whereas other music didn’t. But the mods got into it because they were told, “If you want to be in this new trendy gang, you have to listen to this music, whether you like it or not.” You could see it in their faces, they were all completely lost. They just wanted to create an image about themselves.
I used to break into Oxfam shops and steal clothes, and I had a string as a belt because all my money went to records. As long as I could dance, who fucking cared? The day it died for me was around 1979, when one of the main DJs at Wigan played The Who—The Who at fucking Wigan Casino! I threw a Coke can at him and fucking left.
Thirty years later, after the whole mod scene has come and gone, I will say that it left behind quite a few people who are now into the music properly. There’s also some people now who don’t want to be associated with it anymore, because it’s too cool and popular. That blows my fucking mind. I’m going, “You fucking idiots, the whole idea was to get people into good music, and now that they are, you don’t want them here because you want to feel special. For fuck’s sake!”
Everybody Hurts
To be honest, I didn’t really identify with any of the musicians. They made great music, and some of them were marvelously nice blokes, but I was having a hard enough time of it myself and didn’t give a toss about anybody in America’s struggles. I remember one time going with a cab driver to get some records in Detroit and he dropped me off a few blocks from where I was going because he wouldn’t go into what he called the “ghetto.” So I walked by myself into this area, and there’s lovely little bungalows and cottages everywhere with gardens. I thought, “Fucking hell, this is a ghetto? They’ve all got fucking gardens! I’ll take them to Aberdeen and show them a fucking ghetto.”
Who Stole the Soul?
There’s no future for the funk mixtape because most of the good stuff has been found. It’s also all accessible on the Internet now. However, I do have boxes and boxes of ’50s R&B stuff that’s never been released onto the ’Net. So, that means there’s a tremendous future for R&B mixtapes.
Today, the majority of artists making “soul music” aren’t making soul at all. It’s just that they’re black and in nice clothes. They’re very rarely soulful. That’s irritating. There used to be real singers with proper talent backed by halfway decent musicians. Anymore it’s just pop music pieced together. I went to a Bobby Womack concert and he brought out this fucking terrible English chick who couldn’t sing a note, and everyone was calling her “soulful” just because Bobby told them to. No thanks.
On the Relevance of Digging in the Internet Age, with DJ Shadow
I think that the Internet has made a lot of people who used to go out and dig in the analog sense—actually going out and rooting around basements and stuff—it’s made a lot of them kind of lazy. Like, if it’s rainy outside, they think, “Oh, I can just go on eBay and find some stuff.” But then there are people like myself and Keb who are digging just as hard now as we were before the Internet took over.
Just yesterday I was digging and I’ll be doing the same tomorrow and the next day. The bottom line is that it’s endless. It’s endless when it comes to records and the amount of music people have put on vinyl. Every year there’s new discoveries. The difference is I’m not going to a Goodwill hoping to find the Incredible Bongo Band anymore. If I find it, fine, but I’ve become a little more sophisticated musically. For me, it’s not about finding breakbeats anymore, or a funky loop. It’s more about finding something with really beautiful cover art or a story behind it. Once you get to a certain point in your digging age, it’s about finding misfits and orphans, not the Holy Grail.
I found something just yesterday that—on a monetary level—is worth nothing, but on a sort of discussion, showpiece level, it’s priceless to me. It’s a Gucci Crew record, which was a Miami-based rap group from the ’80s, and somebody’s written all over the cover. They’ve drawn Garfield; written, “Chill out and eat pussy”; the dude’s name who owned it was Stoner Joe; there’s dollar signs all over it—it’s a beat-up old record. It reminds me of African records, which are always beat-up and personalized. They’re not perfect, but you have to remember that it’s because it was somebody’s life. The scars and bruises tell a story. It’s really something that’s kind of lost now, but back in the day, people identified themselves by the music they listened to.
Teaching Keb the Tricks of the Trade, with Guy Hennigan
I remember the night I met Keb. I think it was 1982. Wigan Casino had closed by then, and, at the time, I was trying to break the new dawn of Northern soul. I was DJing an all-nighter in Peterborough called the Fleet, and Keb was in the audience. We exchanged pleasantries then and, about a week after, I was out in London with a mate and bumped into Keb again. He said, “You know, I’d never heard anything like what you played last week. I didn’t think there was any more soul stuff to discover.” It was then that I sort of introduced Keb to this idea that there’s a ton of stuff out there, you’ve just got to find it.
From there on out, Keb took the whole concept behind the Northern soul movement—all the principals associated with digging and promoting and DJing and all that—and switched it into funk. He realized that nobody was really searching out or playing the hardcore, uptempo funk. Keb can spot something before it happens. He can look at what someone else is doing and say, “Hmm, I wonder if that would work this way?” Then he flips it a little bit. That’s what he did with the funk movement: He built that scene out of nothing. He literally named it.
I remember sitting in his flat and he told me about this funk music he was going to try and break. And we were trying to come up with a name for it—give it a handle—and I came up with “popcorn funk” and “popping funk.” Neither of them worked, but I didn’t care; I went off traveling again. When I came back, this “deep funk” thing was already half-established. Keb had sat down to think of a name and came up with “deep funk”; it didn’t invent itself. That was Keb. He’s not foolish, Mr. Darge.
For me, it’s always been the music; for Keb, too, I believe. The drive has constantly been the music, popularizing the music. I’ve done quite a bit of oddball radio over the years, which is a fantastic medium. Never had my own show, but I’ve been a guest an awful lot. I’ll be somewhere strange and somebody I don’t know will come up to me and go, “Weren’t you a guest DJ on so-and-so’s radio show? I listened to that music you played—it was fantastic.” And then they’ll tell you how this one record I played changed the rest of their life. That’s the impact this music has. It’s always been about the music.
Nowadays you’ve got people DJing with CDs and bloody iPods. There’s no heart and soul in that shit. I say if you’re not DJing with vinyl, you shouldn’t be allowed in the goddamn door. I’ve heard a story that might be completely untrue, but I think in Spain, you can’t call an event a certain type of event if you’re not DJing off of vinyl. There was actually a national law that said that. I’ve never investigated, so, as I said, it might not be a law—but it should be.
The Birth and Growth of the American Hip-Hop Mixtape, with Lyrics Born
Mixtapes in America have been around since the inception of hip-hop, much like the Northern soul mixtapes, and they’re not going anywhere. When hip-hop initially started, none of the artists were making albums. They would make single tracks which would then go onto mixtapes.
A mixtape is where you went to hear the latest compilation of what was hot and couldn’t be heard on the radio—that’s the part that still holds true. People make records now, but mixtapes are still the place to go hear what’s not on the radio. The themes may vary from genre to genre and DJ to DJ and mixtape to mixtape—but the essence is the same.
I don’t think the Internet’s killed the mixtape. In hip-hop, the mixtape is the only place you’re going to hear those songs compiled into one neat little package. Sure, you could go out there and look for all those songs individually, but the person who’s compiling the mixtapes—be it the DJ or the artist or whomever—they’re generally doing it with the idea that they’re the tastemaker. They’re saying, “I’m putting this together. I’m the one compiling these songs so you don’t have to. You’re relying on my sensibilities and you’re trusting my tastes.”
Mixtapes are not playlists. A good mixtape should be composed of things you don’t know exist. The Internet should be considered like a giant catalog for this sort of thing—a giant record store. If you walk into a record store not knowing what to look for, you’re not going to come out of there with anything good—it doesn’t matter if it’s available. And that’s what a good mixtape DJ should do: expose you to things you didn’t even know were out there.
The Record Selector, with DJ Z-Trip
Anytime I think of Keb, I always think of the time we were out on the Product Placement tour with Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow. I got assigned to room with Keb and I thought it was going to be a bit odd, because I knew of him but we weren’t friends or anything. So I walk into our hotel room at our first stop—our very first night sharing the same room—and there’s Keb, in the tub, scrubbing his back with a big brush and singing his ass off, all with the bathroom door wide open. From that moment on, we hit it off.
Keb is a fucking master at what he does. I remember being at Scala in London and that motherfucker went up there and proceeded to throw down one of the illest DJ sets I’ve ever heard. It was all uptempo Northern soul and funk tunes and, in my opinion, it was good enough that it should go down in history. And here’s the thing: he didn’t mix one record, he just selected records. That shit needs to be appreciated and recognized for what it is. There are very few people who can select a party as well as Keb Darge. There are a lot of dudes who can mix and scratch and bend over backwards on the decks, and that’s fine. But Keb’s set that night proved to me that being able to select hot songs that people are going to love is an entirely different skill. He floored me.
You can see in Keb’s mannerisms when he’s DJing that he just loves what he’s doing. He’s got so much style and the records to back it up. Whenever anyone would ask what he was playing, he’d be so open with them, really doing his best to educate everyone about the music. He’s so quick to dive into folklore about record collecting, about the music itself, about other DJs he’s known. I could sit and talk to him forever, because not only is he down-to-earth, he knows what the fuck he’s talking about.
People forget that the fundamental root of DJing is exactly what Keb portrays, which is, “I love this music and I want you to hear it. I want to share this with you and get you as excited about it as I am.” That comes across so clearly and precise with him. It’s inspiring, man. And it’s good to see that still exists in the world, because that flame is flickering. F
