When Ben E. King asked the question What is Soul? he probably didn’t factor Huddersfield or Hastings into the equation. For every Jimmy James or Geno Washington — genuine American soul singers based in Britain in the Sixties and Seventies — there were three score British bands on the circuit, playing working men’s clubs, factory socials and Mecca ballrooms.

Often these bands would press their own albums, in fairly limited numbers, to sell at their chicken-in-a-basket shows and generate a little pocket money in what could be a gruelling five, six, even seven-day week. The sleeves reek of stale smoke and non-EU regulated oil heaters.

“Most of them were rubbish,” admits Ed Griffiths, a collector. “For every 50 you buy from car-boot fairs, I reckon one will be any good.” Fortunately his collection is brimful of Georgie Fame imitators as well as Engelbert wannabes and he has cherry-picked 18 standout tracks for Working Man’s Soul, a CD on his Licorice Soul imprint. There’s the understated vibes playing of Alan Randall, a one-time George Formby impersonator; the mysterious Collection, tearing through the fuzz-rocker Vehicle with a raucous singer known to history only as “Brenda”; the Bob Bernard Quartet, live in residence at the Ashes restaurant in Kent’s Utopian Seventies suburb New Ash Green; and the drummer Eric Delaney, who delivers a bone-crunching version of Mongo Santamaria’s Watermelon Man that Joe Meek or the Chemical Brothers would have been proud to put on their mantelpiece.

Delaney’s lineage is a case study. He began with Geraldo’s big band in the Forties, later played on the original Top of the Pops theme in 1964, and appeared at several Royal Variety Performances. His story is not unusual. These musicians may have earned their dough at unglamorous holiday camps and miners’ welfare clubs, but if they’d been amateurs they would have been heckled to Hayling Island and back. An evening’s entertainment involved top live musicians, jazzers on the whole, who could swing hard, as well as deliver the requisite slowies for Nan.

“I played at the Hilton and the Dorchester, too,” recalls Bob Rogers. He is represented on Working Man’s Soul by the driving instrumental Meadowbank, recorded at Combe Haven Caravan Park, near Hastings. Previously, he had played with George Melly and in the John Barry Seven. While the Seven’s other guitarist, Vic Flick, was writing his name into history with the signature riff on the James Bond theme, Rogers formed his own outfit — Sounds Bob Rogers — and played on Radio 2’s Country Club.

“Everybody knew Combe Haven back then. Michael Barrymore did a season with us; his name was tiny at the bottom of the bill and mine was across the top,” Rogers beams. “We used to do the summer seasons there and recorded an album as a local production for the camp. Meadowbank was the name of the club house — we just bashed that instrumental out at the end of a three-hour session to fill up the album.”

You would hope Sounds Bob Rogers were at least given their own chalet. “Oh no. Most nights I came back to Orpington.”

Combe Haven lacked glamour but it was a sweet gig. “In most clubs you were lucky to get everything working. The hum would be bad, or you would get shocks off the damn equipment. Not at Combe Haven.” Now in his eighties, Rogers has compiled his own CD of his close- harmony BBC work, salvaged where so much was erased — from Peter Cook to Pink Floyd — thanks to his own quickwittedness. “You could slip the engineer a fiver and get a tape. I kept them all.” Late in life, he has escaped session-man anonymity and become a familiar face to millions as one of Frank Skinner’s Skinnerettes.

No such brush with fame for Rod Mason, of the Northern Jazz Orchestra. A tenor player, Mason was a student at Huddersfield University. “It was all classical stuff, but being saxophone players we formed a big band. We’d rehearse on Tuesday and play local pubs, the odd working men’s club.” Being true Seventies lank-haired students, they would meet in the pub and have a committee meeting about what their set should include, usually arty Prog over Artie Shaw.

“No commercial rubbish, we wanted to play interesting music. Our lecturer wrote us a two-part suite — quite modern. Quite rude, too.”

The NJO would play Glen Miller and Stan Kenton, leavened with originals such as the Working Man’s Soul cut Hip Flask and current heavy items such as Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. “When we played stuff like Genesis in the working men’s clubs we’d sometimes get, ‘What the bloody hell’s this rubbish?’ Once in Leeds the opening bars of In the Mood seemed to be the cue for a riot. The two sides of the room just seemed to meet in the middle.” Mason and his fellow students grabbed their gear and legged it mid-song.

The musicians’ union had a stranglehold on the club circuit in the Sixties and Seventies, which meant that DJs, discos and jukeboxes were virtually outlawed. It made big bands bankable, and places such as Batley Variety Club could afford to pull in stars such as the Bee Gees, Shirley Bassey and the Hollies: there was gold in cabaret, brass in black forest gateau.

Ed Griffiths is proud of his CD, a social history document that has breathed life into a forgotten era of Formica when — away from Bolan, Bowie and TOTP — everything came in several shades of brown. Though largely instrumental, Working Man's Soul has also awakened interest in a few dormant singing careers. There’s the fiery Carol Lee Scott, for instance, who cut Little Bit of Love a few years before she teamed up with Rod Hull and Emu, donned green make-up and became Grotbags the Witch. Griffiths particularly cherishes an item that slipped out of his copy of Scott’s In Time album. It’s a supper-club menu that a previous owner had kept for posterity. Dessert is the ubiquitous gateau. “Can you guess what the starter is?” he asks, teasingly. “I’ll give you a clue. It’s pink and fishy.”

Working Man’s Soul is out on Monday. The Bob Bernard Quartet play at the album launch party, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London E2, on Dec 11. www.licoricesoul.com