Young Soul Rebels: A Personal History of Northern Soul by Stuart Cosgrove

Author:Stuart Cosgrove [Cosgrove, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2016-05-19T06:00:00+00:00

The Mighty Bub at the decks in the Carlton Club, near Wakefield, 1983. © Derek Greenhof.

The story of pit closures parallels the high points of northern soul. When the Twisted Wheel was at its Modernist height between 1965 and 1970, the National Coal Board closed down over 250 collieries. One pit closed almost every week for five years. In South Wales alone, 135 pits had closed, and the year before the Golden Torch was forced to close its doors, the 1972 miners’ strike plunged Britain into darkness. A Doncaster miner, Freddie Matthews from Hatfield Main Colliery, was crushed to death under the wheels of a scab lorry outside Keadby Power Station in Lincolnshire. Matthews’ death was viewed as a martyrdom of sorts and helped secure the image of the Yorkshire miner as the vanguard of Britain’s most militant trades union.

Although Bub had yet to graduate to the big all-nighters, he was a regular at the Portcullis in Barnsley, his life already revolving around the twin pillars of Barnsley’s teenage culture – the northern soul scene and the NUM. The strike of 1972 was a baptism of fire for Bub and it bound him to the union for ever.

David Buttle’s gregarious personality set him apart but it was his bulk that made him unique. Even in his young days he tipped the scales at nearly twenty stone. His bed at home was propped up on house bricks and he once ruined a sofa at his friend Derek Greenhof’s flat simply by sitting on it. Bub struggled with his weight throughout his life, and after an asthma attack underground he was stretchered from the coal face of Dodworth Colliery and sent home on sick leave. Rather than accept redundancy due to ill health, he returned to the pit, this time to a job that kept him above ground. Although he tried to lose weight throughout his early teens, medically regulated diets failed, and rather than give in to depression, he turned his weight into a joke. His red record box was emblazoned with the words ‘Fat is Fun’, and he frequently joked that his box was his lunch; he was known to drink a crate of Pils lager during his DJ sets.

Bub would always steal the show. He had the self-deprecating habit of playing northern soul records that celebrated fatness, such as Chubby Checker, Fats Domino and especially the hectic Chicago dance record ‘The Fat Man/Working At The Go-Go’ by Butch Baker (St Lawrence, 1966). The words were intended to reflect back on himself – ‘Fat man is at the go-go and he’s stealing the show.’ He was an out-and-out populist who believed that the DJ was first and foremost an entertainer. Unlike almost every other northern soul DJ, he spoke at length between records, introducing them not with arcane label details but with jokes, drug innuendi and barbed insults aimed at the famous faces of the scene. He often played tricks on the dance floor, flicking the house lights on and pretending that a drugs raid was in progress.

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