So after having a couple of months of promising you tracks to soundtrack your BBQ’s, your road trips to the beach and general sunshine based frivolity, it seems rather depressingly that summer has decided to go and do one…

Like all good things that are British, it promised so much and yet delivered so little…Think all English football over the last 20 years (football was never really is or was coming home however much we all liked Gareth and his waistcoat last summer) or the ill-fated idea that the summer is a continuously pleasant 25c.

As English twentysomething’s, we’ve kinda got used to the inevitable disappointment that comes around in August when you realise it’s all over and we are all left with de nada, no trophy, no tan, just a bank balance in the red and a broken promise of a good time. NOT WITH THIS PLAYLIST.

We’ve decided to rummage through our own DJing archives to dust off some of our favourite set openers in the always reliable, always delightful, toe tapping gloriousness that is Northern Soul and 60s Motown.

As the London Art School scene started delving down the rabbit hole of psychedelics and the youth grew out of the promiscuity and violence of rock’n’roll. T’up North, with the move into more repetitive jobs, the factory production line and the office admin tasks, the Northern Soul scene emerged like a dancing phoenix from the boring flames of the working week.

Classic Motown hits had a re-birth. Track selectors disappeared to the States in order to find rare cuts in dirty old Floridian or Detroit record shops.

These all night (and often all weekend) gatherings garnered a faithful following as you hopped into ya mates Transit van, stole a load of amphetamines from some rural pharmacy and had a good ol’ boogie in the dance halls of Wigan or Blackpool.

This is all context though; we don’t need to know all this. What we do need to know though is that Northern Soul is a shed ton a fun and has been having something of a renaissance for the last couple of years and crucially, unlike all those summer disco tracks, its music where you don’t need sunshine for it to be enjoyed.

In fact, it might be more fun, getting a little bit boozy with ya mates in a grotty living room somewhere whilst it shits it down with rain outside. It’s comforting and come rain or shine; it puts a smile on your face.

What Northern Soul also is though is that it is a hark back to the past when the U.K used to make some things. The guys and gals, who wanted to escape inner city Wakefield, were the ones who were working in factory production lines or in the offices of companies who used to make stuff here in Blighty.

Whilst the U.K rightly got a bit of a shit reputation for striking all the time and producing stuff that kinda fell apart in the 70s and 80s, that is far from the case now. In the Northern industrial heartlands, cottage industries and artisanal craftsmen have re-stroked the fires of making and put firmly to bed the dirty connotations of ‘Made in the U.K.’.

Something that always has been a driving motive behind Goose Studios is the idea of reducing our carbon footprint as a company and to try and champion a new, better way of how garments are produced and consumed.

You’ve read or heard us talk through about some ideas that we feel are important in this consumerist age. Whether it is buying less and buying better or reducing how much plastic we consume as individuals or as a company but we have a bigger picture in mind.

The big picture for Goose Studios is for us, as a company, to reduce the environmental and societal impact on how our clothes are produced and to foster and champion a new way for clothing to be made and consumed.

We always and only used what we thought were the best most ethical of companies, producing the most ethical of garments abroad but we want to take that one step forward and start working together with companies and start producing Goose Studios stock here in the U.K.

Recently, as you may have seen on our Instagram stories (watch again in our highlighted stories!), Sam visited a fabric knitter in Leicestershire and this is the start of our and hopefully your journey with us into sourcing and producing clothes here in the U.K. It will mean that your Goose Studios t-shirt or sweatshirt will be knitted in the U.K, dyed here in the U.K, sewn together here in the U.K and printed by our good friends Memory Screen in, you guessed it, here in the U.K.

We will have complete control on fit, weight, colour, pattern direction and seam types.

In short, it will be impeccable quality, durable, organic, with as little environment impact as possible.

It will be reasonably priced, it will be relevant, it will be made in the U.K and it may well be the damn future.

So get your friends over, have a beer, have a dance, listen to the playlist but most importantly, keep your eyes peeled because this shit just got exciting…