f42 Spin Doctors


They played at the Cavern, for CND, anti-apartheid and more, were a multi-cultural world music band way before anybody, and counted the cream of traditional singers among their friends. It’s about time we took a fresh look at the Spinners, says Colin Irwin.


“T


he first folk record I ever heard was The Spinners and I’m always worried when people diss them


because they inspired me and got me very excited about lots of kinds of music. They may have worn matching shirts but then I spent a lot of my life in matching shirts so it’s OK…” (Ben Mandelson, Mustapha, Bloke, world music guru, fRoots, 2001)


Damn the curse of popularity. Show me any specialist music act breaking out of their genre to gain mainstream popularity and I’ll show you a hail of vitriol hurled in their direction. The assumption that any- one who sells vast quantities of records must have sold their soul to the devil is by no means exclusive to folk music but, be it Unthanks, Kate Rusby, Seth Lakeman, Fish- erman’s Friends or whoever, popular approval is still widely equated in many quarters with a lowering of standards.


Sometimes, of course, that’s right… but more often it’s due to talent, hard work and good fortune. Of all the artists who emerged in the early wave of modern folk revivalists in the 1960s, none was more successful than The Spinners.


Whatever their technical limitations, The Spinners cultivated a surefire winning formula as wholesome entertainers who pulled in family audiences by the lorryload, resulting in their own long-running TV series, regular daily radio play, best- selling records and sell-out tours playing the biggest theatres in the land. Pre-Fairport, Steeleye and the whole folk-rock thing,


The Spinners were the flag-bearers and matching shirt wearers who popularised Dirty Old Town when Shane MacGowan still had teeth, had the whole Royal Albert Hall audience in uproar singing When The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire, wrote at least one song (The Ellen Vannin Tragedy, recently covered by ex-Pulp man Richard Hawley) now widely assumed to be tradi- tional and – with Cuban-born Jamaican Cliff Hall in the ranks – introduced the notion of world music decades before it became an accepted term.


In the face of such an abundance of popular acclaim, large elements of the hardcore folk fraternity, which they helped establish and to which they remained remarkably loyal throughout their time together, did indeed diss them. In some quarters – especially when folk- rock came along to underline their middle- of-the-road lack of cool – they became an object of ridicule for their simplistic approach, their jolly singalongs, their gen- tle geniality and yes, their matching shirts.


I know this because, as Tony Davis cor- dially reminds me when I catch up with him, I was one of them. I feel bad about that now, recalling the singers’ night at our local folk club when The Spinners were playing in town at the Civic Hall and came straight off stage at the big hall up the road to factor in a short, unscheduled appearance at our little singers’ night. Unpaid and unbilled, they would also reg- ularly attend and perform at various folk festivals. It wasn’t, Tony Davis tells me, a sense of duty, it was simply that they loved the music and they loved to sing.


The Spinners, then, have been harshly treated by history, but it’s never too late to make amends and the opportunity for re-appraisals occurs when the three sur- viving Spinners – Tony Davis, Mick Groves and Hughie Jones – gather together for the first time in nearly two decades at Uttoxeter Racecourse on May 22 to per- form at the Acoustic Music Festival of Britain and be presented with a Lifetime Achievement award. They’ve not kept close touch since their split, but all three still perform regularly.


Aged 80 and now confined to a


wheelchair, the 6’7” Tony Davis remains an animated character still singing with The Tony Davis Band alongside old school- friend, pianist Ken Binns. Ellen Vannin writer Hughie Jones lost a lung in a battle with cancer, but sings his sea songs as lusti- ly as ever, regularly touring America and running the only remaining folk club in Liverpool’s city centre. Mick Groves, who went on to become a Labour councillor and chair of Liverpool’s education commit- tee now lives in Devon, where he still regu- larly performs, going out with a show built around the life and songs of Ewan Mac- Coll, with whom he shares a Salford birth- place. Last year Groves released an album, Still Spinning, produced by Phil Beer, with contributions from a younger generation of Devon-based musicians, including Jackie Oates, Jim Causley and Becki Driscoll, and featuring an updated version of one of the songs which helped make his name in the first place, Flowers Of Manchester, a trib- ute to the ‘Busby Babes’ who perished in the 1958 Munich air disaster.


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