The Wordsworthian journey to the source […] is more of an amble than an anabasis or strenuous heroic quest.
First, I got the fever – an actual fever, a sickness that almost certainly clouded my judgement for at least seventy-two hours. And it was perhaps heightened by the Dostoevskan fever that grips the soul of the punter when he is forging ahead – ‘gamblers know how a man can sit in the same place for nearly twenty-four hours, playing cards and never turning his eyes to the right or the left…’ that great Russian punter wrote.
Groups of schoolboys neatly dressed in white shorts and yellow cravats, a truck load of maidens in pink and green, another long silk banner and another carriage...it seems as if there are dozens of Matsus, each one accompanied by her retinue of standard bearers, musicians and heralds.
The overwhelmingly young population involved in northern soul needed to find a way out of the depression slowly taking over the UK in the seventies. Speed gave them the edge they needed to rise above all the pain and frustration of a country losing its way.
