As a successor to Today at Six, Northern Life was the weekday regional news programme on Tyne Tees Television, covering light hearted stories. It would become the station’s longest running show, airing from 6 September 1976 until 2 October 1992. Presenters of the show included Bill Steel, Tom Coyne, Paul Frost, Jane Wyatt, Pam Royle, Eileen McCabe, Stuart McNeil and Sheila Matheson. The show used the north east folk song Blaydon Races as its theme tune, performed by Larry Adler, and...

As a successor to Today at Six, Northern Life was the weekday regional news programme on Tyne Tees Television, covering light hearted stories. It would become the station’s longest running show, airing from 6 September 1976 until 2 October 1992. Presenters of the show included Bill Steel, Tom Coyne, Paul Frost, Jane Wyatt, Pam Royle, Eileen McCabe, Stuart McNeil and Sheila Matheson. The show used the north east folk song Blaydon Races as its theme tune, performed by Larry Adler, and originally written by George "Geordie" Ridley. Other news items from Northern Life can be viewed on the NEFA wbsite, covering everything from Whippet Racing at Backworth to professional women wrestlers in Newcastle. The show was a rival to the BBC’s counterpart, Look North.

Northern Life would cover not only the North East area but also Yorkshire due to a 1969 merger with Yorkshire Television to ensure the survival of the network. It was then split into covering stories from the northern and southern areas of the region. This merger of the two networks stayed in effect until 1982 when the Independent Broadcasting Authority allowed the two to de-merge.

The two competitors in this news item, Albert Harding and John Vipont, are trying to break the world record for the longest non-stop dancing in a modern style. Harding had previously held the record in 1975 before losing it to an Australian. However, after this dance marathon he reclaimed his title. In the Guinness Book of World Records 1978 it is confirmed that Albert Harding alone held the record for longest recorded dance marathon in a modern style, dancing from 23 April to 29 April, 1977, in the Middlesbrough club Inn Cognito, for an astounding 144 hours. This record was broken in the following year, however, when a group of individuals from Sunderland danced for 160 hours.

Dance marathons were endurance contests that became a popular craze in the United States in the 1920s after a woman named Alma Cummings set a record in 1923 for dancing continuously for 27 hours with six different partners. Originally, participants were aiming to break Cummings record. As the Great Depression kicked in, the contests became exploited as ‘a unique kind of theatre’, a gruelling display of exhaustion, anguish and humiliation, Darwinism as free entertainment, in which the promise of food, shelter (for the spectators too), cash prizes, or fame, lured working class contestants. In the early phase of the dance marathon, there was a spontaneity to the dramatic situations at these events. Soon, promoters cleverly manipulated the drama and real physical struggle of contests with rigged rivalries, spats and romance, not unlike contemporary ‘reality TV shows’. Carol J Martin states in her book Dance Marathons: Performing American culture of the 1920s and 1930s, ‘Everyone knew that much of what went on at marathons was theatricalized. This did not prevent the events from being emblematic of people’s lives during the Depression.’

A forgotten phenomena for some time, the dance marathon and its history was revisited in a popular 1969 Hollywood movie by Sydney Pollack starring the Oscar-nominated Jane Fonda. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? was based on the 1935 novel by Horace McCoy, who worked as a bouncer at several marathons in California and was a struggling Hollywood movie extra who turned to screen writing. As a bleak evocation of the desperation of depression-era America and the exploitation of hope acted out in the seedy world of entertainment through sadistic dance competitions, the film is an agonising watch. McCoy’s book did not sell well when published in 1935, but later became a favourite with French existentialists.

The release of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? inspired a revival of dance marathons organised by groups of university students in the United States, which focused on charitable goals. Albert Harding’s first attempt at a world record for non-stop dancing was in 1975 when he raised nearly £500 for a Red Cross Vietnam appeal. He danced for an incredible 114 hours, 12 and a half minutes, beating the previous record by six hours. A more contemporary form of charity marathon dance evolved in U.S. universities from the Harlem Shake ‘self-replicating, bad-dancing’ meme, which became a global viral trend in 2013. It grew from a sampling dance track recorded by American DJ and producer Baauer (Harry Bauer Rodrigues), which re-appropriated a vocal line from a 2001 song by Plastic Little.

The trend all but obliterated the ‘real’ origin of the ‘Harlem Shake’ dance. It was created on the streets of New York City by Harlem resident Al B. (Albert Boyce) in 1981, who entertained the crowd with his frenetic dance moves during halftime at basketball games in Rucker Park. Initially named ‘The Albee’, it became known as the Harlem Shake when it spread outside the neighbourhood, popularised by hip hop dance crews such as the Crazy Boyz, and later by hip hop and rap music videos. The Harlem Shake meme has been controversial with current and former Harlem residents of colour who see the craze as a mockery of their authentic art and culture, although it revived interest in the decades-old dance style and its history in the 21st century.

The Inn Cognito club down Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough, attracted many local soul and jazz dancers in the 1970s along with Teesside soul boys, Albert and John. Dressed in the latest sportswear brands (by 1977, not just for athletes but status symbols with an increasing politics of identity and social meaning – race, class, masculinity, criminality), the young working class men are evidently immersed in two influential cultural scenes of the 1970s based around the music of black America.

John refers to ‘soul-funk music, fast beat, up-tempo’ as his favourite to dance to, his moves on the club floor a subdued version of the underground Northern Soul style. This working class British music and dance youth subculture was driven by fast-paced songs (100bpm or above) recorded by lesser known black singers between 1963 and 1971, usually without commercial success, released on vinyl in limited numbers on smaller regional American record labels, the scene’s DJs obsessively searching out obscure songs with the right beat in U.S. warehouses, rough round the edges, the rarer the better. In their book on Northern Soul, authors Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton describe the music as "a genre built from failures". This was the music that didn’t make it through Berry Gordy’s slick and smoothing Motown mixer.

Growing out of the Mod rhythm and soul scene of the 60s, popular Northern Soul venues (most hosting all-nighters) included the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Blackpool Mecca, Golden Torch (Stoke-on-Trent) and the legendary Wigan Casino, their dancehalls heaving with fast and furious music and the athletic moves and kung-fu kicks of the dancers, their baggy trousers and sports vests featuring sew-on patches with the rebellious clenched fist ‘Keep the Faith’ symbol re-appropriated from the 1960s Black Power movement of the States.  An ex-Northern soul fan, journalist and radio commentator Paul Mason recalls what the movement meant to him: ‘We were using the black industrial music of the late 1960s to say something about our white industrial lives in the 1970s. And we were using fashion, as the Mods had done before us, to make a statement about what looking good should mean.’

Northern Soul never disappeared. Ageing fans kept the faith. Much as the Mod scene keeps coming back, new generations have rediscovered the music and dance since the original scene faded. A BBC Tees radio documentary of 2016 has picked up on a revival in north east venues as DJs and promoters in Durham and Middlesbrough who once queued outside Wigan Casino continue to carry the torch for the music of their youth, as do the recent British films SoulBoy (2010) by director Shimmy Marcus, and the buddy bromance Northern Soul (2014), by photographer turned filmmaker Elaine Constantine.

However, we join Albert and John at the Inn Cognito as another underground musical genre that exploded into commercial success in the 70s soundtracks their dance marathon moves. Fermenting in New York clubs such as David Mancuso's Loft and Nicky Siano's Gallery, and later the legendary Studio 54, disco had its roots in gay activism, springing up after the Stonewall Riots stand against police brutality, and following the repeal of the New York bylaw criminalising two or more men dancing together. It unleashed a hedonistic celebration of sexual freedom, inclusivity of race and sexuality (at least for the fabulously dressed), and dance floor fever, which evolved into joyful music by flamboyant singers such as Sylvester and his falsetto hit single You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).

 

References:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/disco-history

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/feb/26/disco-changed-world-for-ever

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/18/4000068/how-the-harlem-shake-went-from-viral-sideshow-to-global-phenomenon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdeu5aGwwWI

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/01/nyregion/01harlem-shake-timeline.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer#/#time242_7156

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/sneakers-have-always-been-political-shoes/511628/

Carol J Martin, Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994)