
I'm Com'un Home In The Morn'un
- Publisher
- RRB Photobooks
- Year
- 2024
- ISBN
- 9781738516346
- Specifications
- Softcover
First Edition
64 pages
Standard and Special Editions
Full-colour photographs taken at Northern Soul venues in the mid-nineties
Text by Richard Benson (former editor of The Face magazine)
Produced to coincide with the exhibition I'm Com'un Home In The Morn'un at Martin Parr Foundation
I'm Com'un Home In The Morn'un is photographer Elaine Constantine's record of the Northern Soul scene in the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s. Made in venues including London's 100 Club, Manchester's Ritz, the Bretby Country Club and even more intimate spaces such as a lad called Steve's kitchen, the dynamic full-colour photographs capture revellers throwing themselves around dark dance floors with the high kicks, spins, glides and shuffles that the music demands. Northern Soul combines lesser-known up-tempo Motown and Black American soul records from the 1960s and 1970s with sweat-inducing dance moves; its 1990s revival was kept alive by a dwindling hardcore, often in their thirties and forties, who treated the all-nighter as ritual and devotional practice. Constantine had been involved in the scene herself before turning to photography; commissioned by The Face magazine to document the nightclubs, she returned to the basement of the 100 Club and rediscovered, in her own words, 'shadowy figures moving energetically in sync with each other'. The images sat in her archive for almost three decades until Martin Parr persuaded her to publish them as a unique document of a uniquely British subculture, where music, dance and style collide.