When city musician Jono Heale challenged his singer-songwriter mate Sally Larkin from Bristol to make music recreating 1960s-style soul he did not realise it was the start of a blossoming relationship.
The pair who are both divorced spent three years chatting online while putting the seven-inch vinyl single together and eventually became a couple at the end of lockdown.
Naming themselves Sally Jones and the Heart Healers the pair are now preparing to release the single, with its first dancefloor airing on Friday night at the Canary Social Club in Thorpe Road.
Mr Heale said: “We’re ex-musicians with a passion for Northern Soul who are both divorced and we started chatting online during lockdown.
“We were setting each other challenges during lockdown to write music together and that brought us together and we fell in love.
“We started working on this single and we couldn’t wait for lockdown to end so we could go out to soul nights again and start recording.
“When it did we first went to the nights at the Canary Social Club and then on to Wigan Casino’s 50th anniversary event.”
The pair say the record, named ‘Soon As I Saw You’, has received a great response from DJs on the Northern Soul scene.
Mr Heale says the a side is a “Northern Soul anthemic standard” while the b side ‘He’s The One’ is “a Supremes inspired tale of a young lady finding a true gentleman”.
He added: “We’ve pressed 100 copies, we’re going to give quite a few away to friends and DJs then sell some.
“It’s not really a commercial thing, we just do it because we love the music.
“It was mastered at Abbey Road and we really got into the details of learning all of the recording techniques those musicians used on some of our favourite records in the 1960s.
“We’ve put our blood, sweat and tears into it.”
The first Sally Jones and the Heart Healers single will be released on November 5, with more records in the pipeline.
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