A North­ern Soul

Steve is 42 and works as a line man­ag­er for safe­ty equip­ment sup­pli­er Arco. He has a young daugh­ter who is the cen­tre of his world, even though he doesn’t see her so often. He is sep­a­rat­ed from his sec­ond wife and liv­ing back at home with his mum, who has host of med­ical com­pli­ca­tions. (“I’m a sur­vivor!” she sings, shak­ing her hips as she car­ries the Destiny’s Child tune. Her light rebuff crys­tallis­es the way that A North­ern Soul name-checks suf­fer­ing with­out becom­ing maudlin)

Steve has a dream. When his city, Hull, is award­ed the City of Cul­ture lau­rel in 2017, this becomes the wave to bring his dream to the shores. He wants a hip-hop bus to dri­ve out to areas where cul­ture doesn’t usu­al­ly reach, to places where under-priv­i­leged kids live, and to awak­en their inter­est in music and creativity.

Direc­tor Sean McAl­lis­ter (A Syr­i­an Love Sto­ry) was trans­port­ed back to his home­town of Hull thanks to the same wave, and he directs the City of Cul­ture cel­e­bra­tions, along with this doc­u­men­tary. McAl­lis­ter worked fac­to­ry jobs until pick­ing up a cam­era and there is a clear fra­ter­ni­ty with his sub­ject. His brusque sense of humour and refusal to wring his hands over Steve’s increas­ing­ly dire straits lends a prag­mat­ic momen­tum to a film which, on one lev­el, is a tragedy about in-work poverty.

There is an alba­tross that comes with mak­ing a film about a less­er-seen type of per­son in a less­er-seen part of the world. Graft­ed onto the niche par­tic­u­lar­i­ties inher­ent to the sto­ry, and the many plucky adorable kids it con­tains, is the addi­tion­al dimen­sion of the film being an anti­dote to the many ghast­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the poor fuelled by the pow­ers-that-be in this age of austerity.

McAl­lis­ter switch­es focus between the socioe­co­nom­ic con­text of Steve’s cre­ation of the ​‘Beats Bus’, and the ide­al­is­tic endeav­ours of the Beats Bus itself. In one scene, he will be an idol vis­it­ing a kid at home for a pep talk that leaves them vis­i­bly bright­ened. In the next scene he will be por­ing over banks state­ments, the dark cir­cles around his eyes a tes­ta­ment to the anx­i­ety that comes with an absence of finan­cial peace of mind.

“How much does a fac­to­ry work­er earn?” mus­es McAllister’s father. ​“Between 15 and 18 thou­sand,” says McAllister.

Steve breaks down at one point, say­ing that he’s graft­ed all his life and has noth­ing to show for it. A North­ern Soul is a rebuff to the idea that hav­ing noth­ing finan­cial to show means you have noth­ing in your soul to show. With dark cir­cles around his eyes, a burly frame, and tat­toos, Steve doesn’t look like a suc­cess­ful cul­tur­al fig­ure, he doesn’t live like one, yet by show­ing how he changes the lives of the next gen­er­a­tion, McAl­lis­ter shows that he is one.

A North­ern Soul is a film pow­ered by sear­ing integri­ty that works across a num­ber of lev­els: it is a char­ac­ter study about a social under­dog, a case-study of how to cre­ative­ly empow­er kids, an indict­ment of finan­cial inequal­i­ty in this coun­try, and it is a vision of what it means to live a dream, divest­ed from the mate­ri­al­is­tic spoils that often fol­lows the liv­ing of this dream in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. To want to do good while know­ing it won’t bring improve­ment in one’s per­son­al sta­tus is sure­ly the purest type of artis­tic dri­ve there is.