No Deposit No Return

After yesterday's slip into the now, it's back to safer ground, or is it? I bet that there will be a few purists who will look at today's choice with disdain.

Debbie Taylor has featured here before with a more "conventional" northern track, Don't Nobody Mess With My Baby" released on the NYC label GWP.

No Deposit No Return is a different beast entirely, recorded in 1972 it was played at the Mecca in Blackpool as a new release and is another illustration of how it is almost impossible to pin down just what constitutes a northern soul track.

Debbie Taylor - No Deposit No Return

Don't You Worry Baby

Here's a track which, when I was a teenager I would never have described as Northern Soul. Since then I like to think that I have grown up, (possibly) become less blinkered  and realised that all that nonsense about the tracks having to be 60s stompers was exactly that, nonsense and that there is room for the likes of  Don't Worry Baby The Best Is Yet To Come in that broad church that is described as Northern Soul, a scene that  can include the likes The Theme From Joe 90 or Nosmo King and other records vastly inferior to this recording by Bessie Banks.

Bessie Banks has featured here before with one of my all time twenty one favourite tracks, Go Now. Don't You Worry Baby is a completely different beast. Released in 1976, it is a baw hair away from disco and is probably more at home in the modern room than on Northern dance floors. It was however a mainstay in Colin Curtis' sets on a Saturday night in the Highland Room and if it was good enough for Mr Curtis then it is good enough for me. I just wish that Bessie Banks had been rather more prolific during her recording career as she has an absolutely amazing voice.

Bessie Banks - Don't You Worry Baby The Best Is Yet To Come

Cashing In

Another track which Ian Levine must get the credit for breaking. Due to the music policy in the Blackpool Mecca being a lot less insular than that of the Casino new soul records such as Cashing In were played as well as the more exclusive 60s tracks.

The track was released on Just Sunshine Records in 1973 and was a Leroy Hutson/Curtis Mayfield production that went on to be an anthem in the Highland Room showing that the Blackpool crowd had impeccable taste.

Voices of East Harlem - Cashing In