“It did take on a life of its own, really,” Peach drawls in an instantly recognisable Liverpudlian accent. “We had been running some soul nights prior to starting at Cherry Bar. When it started here, it begun with a guy called Chris Chapple, back when Billy Walsh [Cosmic Psychos] first opened the bar. He left because of band commitments, and that’s when Pierre came on board. But it was always held in the basement, and it was always going to go for as long as it possibly could. I mean, it was very surprising to see it lasting even after the first year. We’d tried these things before, and none had gone for more than six or seven months. But everything just seemed to fall into place at Cherry Bar. They were queuing to get in after about three months – it was really amazing.”
Even without the success of Soul In The Basement, Peach could already claim to be Australia’s foremost champion of soul. For more than thirty years now, he’s been the host of Soul Time on PBS, which incidentally holds the record for the world’s longest running soul music radio program. You’d be forgiven for thinking the music is something of an obsession for Peach, and he’s amassed an astonishing personal collection over the years. “It’s like an addiction,” he says. “Once you start you can’t stop. I’d be better off on ice or heroin – it certainly wouldn’t cost me as much.”
A hallmark of the Northern soul movement was the relentless push for DJs to track down releases that had been overlooked or forgotten by the public. Once finding these elusive vinyls, they would return triumphant to the decks. Although it first took flight in the late ‘60s, that hunt has never truly subsided.
“I spend probably four hours a day at least on the internet looking for records,” says Peach. “Sometimes you’ll find something that makes you think, ‘Yes, this will definitely do the job,’ and then the people don’t dance to it, and you persist for a while, but in the end you have to look for something else. Even though I might like the record and think it’s brilliant, if you can’t get the audience to like it, well, you’re knocking your head on a brick wall.”
As the years have gone by, Peach has seen Northern soul swell from a low-key subculture into an enduring music and dance movement. “One thing that I have noticed in the last ten years or so is that young people have started buying Northern soul records and are now wanting to DJ with them,” he says. “That’s something I find really good, because it will see the music go on into the future. A lot of young bands are putting their own slant on it as well. Bands like Saskwatch, Cactus Channel, you can definitely see are influenced by this music. That’s something that’s certainly only happened in recent times. But the music itself has stayed consistent.
“The highlight of my day is still going to the post office and picking up a little brown package with a couple of records in it. That’s the biggest buzz you can give me. So many records still out there that I want, so many that I still haven’t even heard. That will be how it is until the day I die.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
