Would it happen now?

I bumped into my old friend Sean Doyle the other day. Always a joy because we have much in common. Similar age, similar backgrounds, similar occupations and similar tastes in music. Except that Sean is a huge Northern Soul fan – well, he’s from Manchester – and I’m not. Northern Soul records were revered simply because they were obscure. But many were obscure for good reason: they were rubbish. Nothing like the classics from Atlantic, Stax and Motown that they sought to emulate. This Motown-reject tune is probably the most revered of them all, principally because an original 1965 pressing once sold for £25,000. But with practically every tune in the world now available online to anyone, there is no longer such reverence for rarity so the Northern Soul scene would never flourish now. Sean would have got into disco and funk rather than Northern Soul. And we’d have even more in common.