Every genre of music has made its mark on Manchester, including dialect ballads, classical, TV theme tunes and all the strands of post-punk. Welcome to the north-west sound Myth distorts any city’s musical history, and in Manchester myth looms as large as the new Co-op Live, a £365m, 23,500-capacity mega-venue that opens today and will soon be staging big-name acts, including Take That. So, for every occasion a music fan mentions the hit-making boy band or, for that matter, 10cc or the Hollies, a thousand more bark back: Joy Division, the Fall, Happy Mondays. Not that 10cc were a small Manc ba ..read more

Hull Truck theatre, Hull; and touringThree struggling twentysomethings find solace in dance in the writer-director’s well performed if not quite satisfying new work I caught the John Godber Company’s latest touring production at Hull Truck, the theatre whose reputation the writer helped to build and consolidate over his years there as artistic director; ever-popular hits include Up ’n’ Under, Bouncers (touring next year) and Teechers (recently updated). In Do I Love You?, three Hull-based twentysomethings are trying to find their feet, post-Covid. Natalie (Chloe Mcdonald) and Kyle (Emilio Enci ..read more

The poet grew up listening to Bill Haley & His Comets and plays northern soul to kickstart a party, but whose blues does he find too painful to hear? The first song I remember hearing I remember my mum singing along to You Belong to Me by Jo Stafford. She’d have the radio on doing the housework and would sing along to the classics from the Great American Songbook, like Bei Mir Bist Du Schön by the Andrew Sisters, which I always thought was called My Beer Mr Shane. Phonetically, it’s quite an intelligent mistake. The song I secretly like, but tell everyone I hateI don’t really have guilty p ..read more

Arterton’s bottle-blonde Barbara Parker ditches Blackpool for swinging 60s London in this Nick Hornby adaptation. Plus, Grayson Perry boards the soul train to Wigan. Here’s what to watch this evening ..read more

Who saved Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) from Motown oblivion? When Bruce Springsteen performed his new single on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on 14 November, it was to rapturous applause and the ecstatic US talkshow host leaping from his seat to declare that the Boss had “crushed it!” But 3,300 miles away, Springsteen’s performance of the lost Motown classic Do I Love You (Indeed I Do), from his new album of soul covers, Only The Strong Survive, was reigniting a debate that has raged for almost half a century ..read more

From winning dance competitions to confronting Nazis, black veterans of the 70s soul all-nighters share their stories – and counter the idea that the movement was exclusively white In the run-up to Christmas in 1977, viewers of Granada TV were offered a glimpse inside a little-understood world. The documentary maker Tony Palmer had ventured inside the Wigan Casino, the centre of the northern soul scene, to shoot a 30-minute film called This England. Palmer didn’t know anything about the club, the scene or the music when he arrived in Wigan – but over the course of a couple of nights he capture ..read more

US singer whose 1960s song I’m on My Way became a cherished anthem of northern soul Dean Parrish was the name temporarily adopted by Phil Anastasi in the 1960s when he became one of a host of good-looking Italian American boys keen to emulate the singing success of Bobby Darin (born Robert Cassotto), Johnny Maestro (John Mastrangelo), Frankie Valli (Francesco Castelluccio) and Bobby Rydell (Robert Ridarelli). Long after Anastasi, who has died aged 78, had set it aside, it was the name by which he ascended, quite unknowingly, to a hero’s status among the UK’s northern soul fans, who adopted his ..read more

For 40 years, one all-nighter has brought the heaviest, most obscure soul classics to London’s 100 Club – and its middle-aged crowd doesn’t quit On a crisp, newly autumnal night on Oxford Street in London, the 100 Club has a line of mostly old-school mods and skinheads wearing denim jackets and Fred Perry polo shirts, carrying 1970s-styled holdalls. The queue stretches across the front of several chain stores with people from all over the country – and even Italy – waiting to be let in. The 100 Club might be better known for its punk rock history, but the 6Ts Rhythm and Soul Society nights are ..read more

First Direct Arena, Leeds The 84-year-old Jersey Boy delivers a two-hour show stocked with hits and laced with a bone-dry wit The 77-year-old singer-songwriter David Crosby’s argument that performing keeps musicians youthful certainly applies to Frankie Valli. The legendary New Jersey singer is 84, yet pulls off a two-hour show with more than two dozen songs, many of them standards, delivering a joyous celebration of pop music at its sweetest and purest. Valli doesn’t need new material when his catalogue of smashes ranges from the doo-wop days to the disco era and – with the original Four Seas ..read more

The design critic on Maggie Nelson’s beguiling writing, a truly creepy sculpture and a northern soul classic Born in Manchester, Alice Rawsthorn has been described as “the best design critic in the entire world”. She studied art history at the University of Cambridge before beginning her career as a journalist for publications including the New York Times, the Financial Times and Frieze. From 2001 to 2006 she was director of the Design Museum. She has published several books including a biography of Yves Saint Laurent and Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. Her latest, Design as an Atti ..read more