3B48 - Part 1

May 30th: 3B48 Part 1

Looking back, it's plain to see the different paths we'd take.

Davie had it all, he possessed enough skill in his right foot, but he had THAT gifted left peg which could curl in a cross so wicked it would have made David Beckham's face turn the same colour as his bird shit hairstyle. He used to stay out late into the evening practicing his keepie-up skills while the rest of us got bored and disappeared from the attraction of the three-a-sides on Montgomery Road to hang out by Haas the Iranian's chip shop and the pleasures that brought. How we three hated the normality of our late pass curfew and having to be home before eight.

He seemed to be getting there as well. Invited down to Man U for a trial - turning out for the Aberdeen youth team against the dizzy heights of Montrose, Arbroath and Forfar before dazzling all at Dundee Utd, he was the schoolboy protégé with the ball and the world firmly at his feet. It wasn't a matter of where, just when. Then fate took a hand.

He never saw the bus - it came hurtling round the corner of Market Street where it turned onto Union Street. He was outside Burton's where he'd been buying some fashionable shirt for the Boys Brigade disco, when bang! Stood too close to the kerb the wing mirror caught him smack on the side of the head. Cruel.

His death affected all of us who hung out together but in particular Kev and I. Somehow football never had the same attraction for us after that - the ball had burst. No more three-a-sides, no other soul could take his place. We needed something else.

In the end it was easy to get into. At school, whilst waiting to go into Techie Drawing before the end of our dinner break we'd see Dougan, Gogsie Legge and Dave Morris practicing all their moves on the old wooden floor that was Old Aberdeen Secondary, the overspill annexe of Linksfield Academy. Their dance style was a more or less fixed step combination, with some acrobatic moves that they called 'breakdance'. We tried to imitate them in my bedroom whilst my Ma would laugh loud then show us the 'slosh' and say it was much better.

They looked the business as they glided from side to side, gracefully covering the floor and talking of nothing other than when they'd be on the next bus trip to Wigan Casino and future all-nighters. All the talk was about the brilliance of the 'three before eight'. Kev and I were intrigued. This meant something to us. We'd also heard that they’d shagged quite a few girls and as for staying up all night!

We started to copy their style, without it being too noticeable. But we soon found out that Northern Soul is not a style in the usual way. They did not dress in any kind of uniform. Their dress depended on which music they were into, for Kev and I the 'Mod' fashion was the jacket that would fit us best. At the school discos we'd ask for loads of different music and Dougan who at the time fancied himself as a DJ would normally sneer but play it all the same, and then we'd ask for Soul and he'd smile as well! It was important that we didn't incur their ridicule. After all we were only thirteen and they were sixteen. The others said it would never last 12 months, then they said it would never last two years but from this early beginning our love of music was to bring us down a road we could never have imagined.

There was no set of musical characteristics that classified a sound as belonging to their mode. They taught us that. The attachment of a song to the category 'Northern Soul' was made by them from their experience as fans and their frequent trips to Wigan Casino. As such it varied and I could listen for hours as they discussed the merits of Marvin Gaye or Candy and the Kisses and any other Epic, Columbia or Tamla Motown recording star. They educated us about how Wigan Casino was more than music and that it was a subculture from the past but at the same time one that never grew old. We learned how the DJs of the time decided not to play the popular soul music going around but instead concentrated on rare soul records from small independent record labels with a stronger more original sound always finishing an all nighter with three great tunes before time up at eight. We discovered how this rare soul attracted more and more people and how the press picked up on it and called it 'Northern Soul'.

Adopting this attitude the two of us grew together and developed our very own subculture. It included the long gone Davie because to us he was always there, enjoying the sounds, sharing our lives and living in both our minds over the years to come. Whilst discovering alcohol we used to sing 'Ghost of a young man' by the Jasmine Minks as some kind of wicked attempt to include Davie, but it helped us - it kept us together. Then it happened, cultural differences kicked in and it all somehow went wrong.

By this time we had completed our fifth and final year at school. Dougan and the others had departed from our little world into a diverse range of jobs - heating engineer, fish filleter and used car salesman. Not for them the world of academia, they had their education via the universities of Wigan Casino and The Twisted Wheel of Manchester.

Kev went off to Edinburgh Uni to study chemistry whilst I drifted via poor Higher results into a computing course at the local institute of technology. For a while it was great making trips up and down the road to see the odd gig, but very soon trips turned to letters and then we gradually lost contact as we discovered a love of new girls, student unions and having a good time in general. We also had part time jobs to contend with (a necessary evil to supplement our meagre grants and expanding record collections), which didn't help. Time for each other seemed to diminish amongst it all and we lost touch temporarily until the Christmas reunion of 1988 when we almost lost touch forever.

It just kind of happened, both of us had far too much to drink, got in way too deep about Davie, the past, the state of the Creation scene which I was defending and we had a huge row. It all became a bit mental and soon we were having a drunken fist fight over our music, the very sounds that were the beat of the heart that had held us together for so long. It was perverse, the very soul that was the essence of the three of us back on the hallowed turf of Montgomery Road, had turned on us and was tearing us apart. I should have sensed that Kev wasn't the Kev of old, his studies were taking him in a different direction, he didn't seem reasonable - his pupils were way too dilated.