It is the ultimate northern soul anthem.
Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” has captured the imagination of soul fans for decades. No other record on the northern soul scene has filled as many dance floors, drained as many talcum powder tins or reduced the burliest of men to ecstatic tears. Northern soul’s most famous venue, England’s Wigan Casino, opened 39 years ago this week. From its first spin at the club, “Do I Love You” enraptured dancers and entrenched itself in northern soul DNA like no other song before.
“It’s got everything,” John Manship, a rare soul dealer from the U.K., tells me. “It’s got the drum rolls, it’s got the girls, it’s got the brass, it’s got the horns, it’s just got everything you need in it, and he sings it word-perfect at a very fast pace.”
But if you want to own an original copy of the record, make sure you’ve got a spare $40,000 in your back pocket. Not only is Wilson’s “Do I Love You” northern soul’s most popular anthem, it is also the world’s most expensive 45. And that has a lot to do with the song’s back story.
Martin Koppel, owner of local Toronto record store Kops Records, is part of that story. He told me the track’s tale.
A Motown reject
In the mid-’60s, Frank Wilson was a writer for Motown. In 1965, he penned a song for the label’s so-called “blond bombshell,” Chris Clark.
“Motown used to like writers to present the songs so they could decide if they [were] suitable for an artist,” Koppel explained. “Motown didn’t like acetates or tapes they actually wanted a record … with full production.”
That’s how Wilson’s “Do I Love You” came into being. According to Koppel, five copies of the record would have been pressed, as standard procedure for Motown’s quality control setup. After that, a panel would have listened to the record to see if the song had a future.
For whatever reasons, “Do I Love You” didn’t have one at Motown. The label passed on the song and, although Clark did end up recording a version, it wasn’t released.
The U.K. connection
That’s where the song’s story should have ended, forgotten in time. Luckily, though, Motown kept one version of the Wilson track in its archives. That copy was discovered by a British record dealer in the early 1970s, while he was rummaging through the record collection of a Motown historian in L.A.
This dealer bootlegged the song and sent it over to the U.K. under a different name and label. The bootlegged version, now credited to singer Eddie Foster, quickly became a massive hit at northern soul’s mecca, the Wigan Casino.
“This was just a perfect record,” said Koppell. “When that came on the turntable, it was a cut above.”
Eventually, people worked out that the record was by Wilson and this began a massive search to find original copies of the track.
“Now everyone in the world is looking for this record,” Koppel explained. “It’s on wants lists, because most people, including me at the time, thought it was just another Motown type of assigned number, and it should turn up. It was a promotional copy, so should have been sent to radio stations, copies have got to be found. But it never turned up.”
Despite having an actual assigned number and “promotional copy” written on the label, Koppel says no extra copies of the song were ever made. The only original record known to exist was the one from the Motown archive, and this was eventually bought by British record dealer Tim Brown, who owns it to this day. End of story.
The second copy
Unbeknownst at the time, there was a second copy.
“Fast-forward to the mid-’80s,” continued Koppel. “I’m in contact with a friend of mine in Detroit called Ron Murphy.”
Murphy was a serious Motown record collector. He managed to find a quality control engineer from Motown’s pressing plant in Owosso, Mich., and had a peek at his collection.
“He’s got a load of records that never came out, acetates, unreleased records,” Koppel said, of the engineer. “And in there is another copy of Frank Wilson.”
Koppel bought this second copy from Murphy and, in 1999, he sold it to British DJ Kenny Burrell for £15,000, which was about $36,000 Cdn at the time. Now, that may seem like a huge amount of money for a 45 record, particularly one that you can pick up for $10 as a reissue. Not according to Koppel.
“The concept is that you actually own the Holy Grail,” he explained. “Why would someone buy a Monet for all that money when they can own an identical copy? They want to own the Holy Grail, they want to own the special one.”
Burrell may have wanted to own northern soul’s Holy Grail, but he wasn’t very good at taking care of it, unfortunately. In 2001, Wilson performed a one-off concert at the Togetherness Weekender soul event in Fleetwood, England, and Burrell, so excited to meet his hero, got Wilson to sign this incredibly rare record on the actual label.
“It’s like someone getting a penny black stamp and drawing a moustache on the Queen,” said Koppel. “It’s dumb.”
Luckily for Burrell, this defacement doesn’t seem to have affected the record’s price. The DJ sold his copy through U.K. soul record dealer John Manship in 2009 for, according to Manship, £25,742 – over $40,000 Cdn.
“The person who actually won it bought it for his girlfriend,” Manship told me. “But since then they’ve split up, so who knows, we might see the record back on the market.”
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