Mo' Soul: August 2013

Acclaimed photographer and director Elaine Constantine has brought the movement to life in her film Northern Soul - and that film was the starting point for this book, Northern Soul: An Illustrated History.

However, what started out as a project largely comprising of Constantine's stunning on-set photography, featuring her young, talented cast and highly authentic production, has turned into a unique illustrated history of Northern Soul. In its final form, the beautiful new photography holds the book together thematically, but its real depth lies in the material from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that Elaine and Gareth have researched and pulled together.

Of course, no book can claim to represent everything about a culture. But Northern Soul: An Illustrated History concentrates on individuals' personal stories from that heady era, as well as being crammed full of truly atmospheric contemporaneous photography - not from press photographers, but from the kids themselves. Be it snaps of soul fans in car parks, hitching a lift or mucking around in photo booths, the combination of real people plus real (and often very dramatic) stories - not to mention the complete absence of label scans and DJ's top tens - means that the book stands out as a very different proposition from anything yet published on Northern Soul.