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‘My flash kept blinding everyone on the dancefloor’: Elaine Constantine on capturing 90s northern soul all-nighters

The UK photographer took these powerful shots of northern soul nights 30 years ago. Now collected in a new book and exhibition, they offer an intimate glimpse of a peculiarly British subculture

The Ritz, Manchester, 1990s.Now, just over 30 years later, the photographs Constantine took of the scene are being published in a book called I’m Com’un Home in the Morn’un, the title an insider’s nod to a northern soul classic from 1970 by the gravelly voiced Lou Pride. By the early 1970s, at venues such as the Wigan Casino and the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the defining stylistic aspects of northern soul had been established: loose athletic tops, wide trousers and skirts that facilitated often acrobatic dance moves. Out on the floor, the atmosphere was both communal and fiercely competitive, the more extravagant dancers executing high kicks, backflips and dizzying 360-degree spins to the up-tempo thrust of often obscure American soul 45s.

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