As the resident DJ at the Swindon’s Bird Nest club sometime back in 1975, I started spinning northern soul tracks on a Wednesday night for a few months, for a bunch of lads that came in from Newbury, Oxford, Salisbury, Reading and eventually further afield as news spread, until the manager took a dislike to their style of, as he called it, “poofter dancing” because they didn’t dance with girls, or in fact anybody but the music. Troglodyte, although that isn’t what I called him at the time.

For a while at least, it was a little piece of the northern soul scene in the south …

This mix set is fairly representative of the tracks I played back then, though I’ve added a few I didn’t know at the time, like the brilliant John Leach ‘put that woman down’, but would have been regular floor fillers if I’d had them back then.

The quality of some tracks is not great as they are 40-50 year old vinyl!

Keep the Faith.