Indeed I Do, Indeed He Shouldn't Have

I should tell you upfront that I think Northern Soul is, musically speaking, a filing error. Somewhere in the 1960s, a load of American B-sides that nobody in America wanted got shipped to Manchester, and instead of everyone agreeing "yeah, fair enough, bin it," an entire subculture grew up around dancing to them until 4 am on a diet of amphetamines and talcum powder. I say this as someone who has sat through approximately one thousand hours of it against my will, propped against a wall at Wigan-adjacent events, holding two coats and a plastic cup of warm lager, waiting for it to be over.

And then there's Frank Wilson. Bloody Frank Wilson.

"Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" shouldn't even exist as a record you can buy, which is sort of the whole point. Wilson recorded it for Motown in 1965, got cold feet about being a performer rather than a songwriter, and had almost every copy destroyed. About four survived. One of them sold at auction for £25,742 in 2009, which, and I want to be fair here, is an insane amount of money for three minutes of a man promising a woman he does, in fact, love her, indeed he does. You could buy a small flat in most of the North for that. You could buy several husbands.

But here's my problem, and it's an annoying one, because it means I'm wrong about something: the record is genuinely brilliant. The horns come in like they've got somewhere better to be. Wilson's voice does this thing where it sounds desperate and completely in control at the same time, which shouldn't be possible, and there's a handclap in there that I have, on more than one deeply unwilling occasion, found myself doing along to while pretending to check my phone. The whole thing is two minutes fifty-eight seconds long and doesn't waste a single one of them. It's the sound of somebody who knows the song is good, recorded it in a hurry, and then tried to make it disappear anyway. There's something almost romantic about a man trying to bury his own masterpiece. I hate that I find that romantic.

I need to talk about my husband, because he is the reason I know all this, and he is also the reason I now associate this song with a chiropractor's waiting room.

He is seventy years old. He discovered Northern Soul in the actual 1970s, at the actual all-nighters, when his spine was still under warranty, and some part of his brain has never updated the file. He still believes, with the total unshakeable confidence of a man who has never once looked in a mirror mid-manoeuvre, that he can do the backdrop. For anyone lucky enough not to know: this involves dropping to the floor, flat on your back, legs in the air, then springing back up as if gravity is a rumour that applies to other people. It requires the joints of a twenty-two-year-old and the judgment of someone who has never had a twenty-two-year-old's joints.

At his daughter's wedding, four drinks in, "Do I Love You" came on, because of course it did; he'd requested it, he'd probably paid the DJ extra, and he went down.

He did not come back up in one movement.

There was a pause. A genuinely theatrical pause, the kind you'd get in a play right before someone announces a death, except what we actually got was a groan so loud it competed with the horn section, followed by him lying on the marquee floor of going "I'm fine, I'm fine, someone help me up, I'm fine." Three guests helped. His brother-in-law pulled something in his shoulder while doing it. His daughter, in her wedding dress, stood over him saying "Dad. Dad. It's my wedding, Dad," in the exact tone she used to use as a stroppy teenager, except now she was also holding a glass of prosecco and looking down at a man doing his best impression of a fallen skittle.

He was in a back brace for about a fortnight. He still says it was worth it. He still, to this day, thinks he "nearly landed it," which is the sort of sentence that tells you everything you need to know about seventy-year-old men who peaked at Wigan Casino.

So here I am, a woman who came into this genre sideways, dragged in by marriage, holding coats, actively resenting the whole scene, and I cannot, in good conscience, tell you this song is bad. It isn't. It's three minutes of a nearly-lost single-take miracle that a man tried to destroy and couldn't quite manage, and it will apparently make grown men in their eighth decade attempt gymnastics on laminate flooring at family occasions.

I don't forgive it for that. But I do, indeed, love it.