THE DETROIT SPINNERS – “Working My Way Back To You”
This is one of those Number Ones that feels like a long-service medal: certainly you wouldn’t begrudge the band who made “Ghetto Child” and “Mighty Love” a hit this size, but “Working” isn’t quite up to that standard. It is what it is: a song out of time, wrenched out of an earlier era and brushed unsympathetically up to conform to current best practice.
Which meant disco, of course, but in the case of “Working” the disco framework feels too rigid for what’s quite a sinuous song. There should be room here for the song’s hesitation, regrets and triumphs to get across – as in the Four Seasons original – but the merciless beat levels these emotions out. Disco wasn’t emotionless music – quite the reverse! – but when applied by rote it could end up seeming that way. You half expect to see the suffix “’80” on the single sleeve.
That said, there’s enough quality and gusto here to make “Working” a very enjoyable record, and subtleties enough beyond the pumped-up chorus. The unhappy confession of emotional sadism and weakness; the supportive harmonies; the redemptive interpolation of “Forgive Me Girl” – a really effective use of the medley technique. Difficult to dislike.
6
I think that’s a fair comment, Tom. Nice to see a fine soul band get a number one even if they were years past their sell-by date and this wasn’t ever one of their most incisive offerings. As you say, difficult to dislike, in fact always good to bring a smile to the face. It was a chilly April if I remember rightly and something like this was cheering.
As featured, as it ‘appens boys and girls, on the X Factor just last Saturday.
Right about the long-service medal and the greatly superior “Ghetto Child”, Tom, and pretty much right about it being impossible to dislike. Although seeing this at number one is a bit like seeing Hull City near the top of the league – you don’t begrudge it its status by any means, but it’s some way higher than you’d expect to see it.
The medley with “Forgive Me Girl”, yes, that works well too, although you kind of suspect that the idea of merging two songs over the same disco beat gave somebody the idea that, hey, it might work if we take a load of songs by, say, Abba or the Beatles and stick them onto a disco beat – thus creating a phenomenon that was to blight the charts soon afterwards. Still, the principle is that you can’t necessarily blame a trendsetting record for what happened afterwards. “Forgive Me Girl” incidentally was written by Michael Zager and is a perfectly good song, even if, I’m sorry, the Michael Zager Band’s earlier “Let’s All Chant” epitomised what I loathed most about disco.
For our North American chums – you’d know this band as the Spinners, but their UK record company added “Detroit” to their name to avoid confusion with a woolly-jumpered Liverpool folk band called the Spinners that was hugely popular in this country, albeit in very different circles. The same happened to UK bands who found themselves renamed in the US as LONDON Suede and The ENGLISH Beat.
Another surprise at number one because its so lightweight. It sounds like the spinners are at a pratice session and there’s not much quality there. My dad had a perry como album where como sung song after song in a loop and when the spinners start to sing “i’m really sorry” I have to laugh as it reminds me of listening to the como album at Xmas as mum and dad started drinking sherry before dinner. After the food they were both finished and me and my brother had to watch the Queen to a sterio of snoring.
I generally have two thoughts when I hear this one; “Hm, this isn’t as interesting as The Four Seasons version” followed by “And ‘Forgive Me Girl’ isn’t as good a song as ‘Working My Way’, either” Even though its still quite a jolly thing, the combination of these two thoughts always make this an underwhelming thing to listen to.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard their #4 repeating of the medly formula later in 1980, ‘Cupid – I’ve Loved You For a Long Time’
Going back a bit further ‘It’s a Shame’ would also have been a much better chart-topper from their earliest British incarnation as The Motown Spinners.
the arrangement is lovely, but his voice is a wee bit phoned-in soul-by-numbers i think, and (as tom says) i think the no-pause-for-breath tiktok of the discobeat undermines the ethic of the song somewhat (unless you read the singer as some kind of driven and deluded stalkery type fellow)
I’m surprised to see that this was almost as big a hit in the US where it stalled at 2 (Cupid got to no.4 in both countries). Their third medley of 1980, which tanked here, featured The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More. Pur-lease.
Neither Philippe Wynne (Ghetto Child, Rubberband Man) or Bobby Smith (Could It Be I’m Falling In Love, I’ll Be Around) seems to be behind the halfhearted performance on WMWBTY. It could be Smith, but I’d rather think not – no flicker of a “burning love inside” to my ears.
As a song, it’s grand. As a cover it’s limp and seems almost totally redundant once you’ve heard the Four Seasons version. Still, I have to agree it’s hard to begrudge such a lovely vocal group a spell at the top. I just wish it had been one of their Thom Bell productions that made it.
You can express emotions through disco, but I can’t think of a record that manages disco and dignity, which is I think what the song really needs.
“I Will Survive”?
The X Factor versh Erithian mentions at #2 was interesting in that the performers – a grinny boyband troupe – managed to leech much more out of the song than even the Spinners did but it was still really pretty enjoyable, and from the judges’ comments kept them in the show. So there’s obviously something primally ‘good’ about the melody which stops even the most distracted version from being rubbish, to my ears at least.
Also: the X Factor cover was obviously of the Spinners’ medley version, which has become THE version. I didn’t even know it WAS a medley until I started doing a little research for this entry (prompting a hasty rewrite I admit!). I can’t think of any other graft that’s “taken” so strongly.
I’m never quite sure what to make of these late-career hits by soul acts who paid their dues with much better records (and The Spinners went back a very long way to the early 60s), on the one hand this a little by-the-numbers but it’s still a classy record by a band who clearly know how to deliver the goods and I like it more than the Four Seasons just because I prefer the sound of their harmonies. Because it’s them I’d be inclined to give it a high 7 – but it’s no ‘It’s A Shame’.
Re 9: Same here. I never realised it was a medley until years later too.
It’s a nice record, although as late-career soul hits go I always preferred The Four Tops’ When She Was My Girl and the Temptations’ Treat Her Like A Lady.
Re late-career soul hits – nor, indeed, as good as the other chart-topping one coming up in 1981…
this is the perfect example of a six pointer – good enough to feel positive about it after all these years if you heard it on the radio yet not so wonderful that you’d actually request it.
I’ve absolutely no memory of this being no 1, despite obviously recognising it sufficiently well to sing along to it were I to want to. Which in truth is unlikely. Certainly wouldn’t have placed it as 1980 if asked to guess. Pop music was important to me by this stage and I was quite obsessive about finding out what was no 1 every Tuesday, so I’m not sure how this passed me by while Fern Kinney stuck in my mind. It must have been on TOTP….
This wildly uneven little sequence of no 1′s does illustrate both how little they constitute a canon (even of massively popular trends) and how completely they miss what was going on in the lower echelons of and outside the charts – Human League’s Travelogue would come out the next month, which was much much more interesting. This really could have no 1 at any point in the years before and after with equally little relevance.
The accepted version of events was that when they left Motown, they had to change their name again, for obvious reasons.
Which doesn’t explain my (original) copy of “For all we know” by the Detroit Spinners, on Motown.
This is the only example I can think of where the American group was the one that had to change its name. I mean, who on earth were the American versions of Suede and The Beat?
Come to think of it, I think The Liverpool Spinners sounds quite good.
I can’t think of many examples at all, to be honest. We all know the (English) Drifters had to change their name because of the US original and changed it to The Shadows; and by the time anybody remembered the early-70s Irish folk band Nirvana, the US version was so big that confusion was pretty unlikely. Then again I do remember a Daily Mirror chart listing in the early 70s that included “Ghetto Child Detroit” by the Spinners. You can imagine that would have been a radical new direction for the folky Scousers.
I saw the (Liverpool) Spinners once – leading the community singing before the all-Merseyside 1989 Cup Final. It was the one that came a month after Hillsborough, and the “Merseyside United” feeling was tangible. So they did “The Leaving of Liverpool”, “Liverpool Lou”, “In My Liverpool Home” and so on… and speaking as a Manc, I sang along and loved every minute.
The (Liverpool) Spinners had been around for donkey’s years as a Liverpool institution as venerable in its way as Ye Cracke, and although they were never actually ‘cool’ they performed a valuable service, preserving a great deal of working-class maritime culture – not just the culture of the docks and of the street but also of the great westward immigration. I went to their club at the Gregson’s Well pub (actually one of a pair of identically-named pubs, one Walker’s, one Higson’s, facing each other across the road) a couple of times in the interests of research for the student paper, you understand. It was always enjoyable with an enthusiastic and appreciative audience.)
And they were a multicultural ensemble long before Two-Tone!
Suede was a female solo singer from memory, The Beat I remember as a fairly successful R&B/Huey Lewis outfit.
I was going to say The Detroit Emeralds, but they were called that in the States too!
I can’t find much to say about this one. Dated for its time, but almost quaintly so. A thoroughly likeable wedding disco standard, whose chorus always makes me want to jab my right thumb back over my shoulder like a camp hitch-hiker (see also the quintuple horn stab in “YMCA” – it doesn’t take much). The medley works well, and the joins would have been invisible to many.
Like “Together We Are Beautiful” before it, this has its roots in the Wally Disco end of the spectrum, suggesting something of a schism in the genre’s dying days. Your Auntie Maureen would have shuffled politely to it in Cinderella Rockafellas, while digesting her chicken-in-a-basket (and good for her). There will be several more examples of this to come before the year is through.
Yes, I’d have preferred “It’s A Shame” to have reached the top (always one of my favourite Motown hits), or any of the sublime tunes that the Spinners cut with Thom Bell for Atlantic – “Mighty Love”, “I’ll Be Around”, “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love”, “Ghetto Child”, “Rubberband Man” – but them’s the breaks. In a sense, I’d compare their Michael Zager medley period to the run of 1970s hits from The Drifters: a bit past their peak, somewhat lacking in finesse, rather too heavy on the boom-thwack, but not without a certain velvet dickie-bowed charm.
OK, I had more to say than I thought.
(I had that Michael Zager in my toy shop, you know! He bought a moulded plastic castle, and I filled in the chitties to get it shipped. An honour.)
what size castle!? *boggles*
Re #9, the one even more successful medley-merging I can think of (unless someone tells me they were always one song) is Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody.
#21 – About three feet wide by two feet tall? It was an ugly specimen. We only had the one, and the box had long since gone missing. It was a bit dusty and unloved. I felt embarrassed to be selling it to him.
Mary’s Boy Child / Oh My Lord probably works just as well for those who were the right age at the time…
And if DJP were still a member of this parish, I’m sure he’d be reminding you that this is the fourth Frankie Valli cover to top the charts, following Silence Is Golden (Four Seasons), The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore (FV solo)and Bye Bye Baby (Four Seasons again).
I don’t begrudge them a number one but this song is almost as hideous as those hateful medleys that started to dominate the charts later in the year.
Bland, handclapping disco for mum and dad to enjoy.
Even though I can recognise that ‘Ghetto Child’ is a better record, and perhaps ‘Rubberband Man’ is too, I have an odd and not-wholly-explicable idea that they’d have become insufferable had they been the Number One(s), so I’m OK with this enjoyable-but-not-earth-shattering one to have made the grade instead. I’m a bit surprised to notice that ‘I’ll Be Around’ wasn’t a UK hit in its original form though. Is there a good best-of?
As I’ve probably mentioned before, I’ve never liked the Four Seasons sound, so somebody else singing their songs is usually preferable for me.
All this talk of music that’s for “mum and dad” seems to be slightly snobby and naive in a middle class student way. As a young teenager at this time things like this and especially Fern Kinney were bought by the average working class (usually female) teenager who I grew up with. The kind of girls who bought records and loved out-and-out pop music but thats where their interest ended and in this way similar to a large proportion of young people in general ie not the small proportion of people like us who obsess about pop and come on sites like this).
This was 1980 when the average “mum and dad” (notwithstanding the odd dance to chart stuff like this at a wedding disco)would have still been listening to Tom Jones or Englebert Humperdink and whatever else was on Radio Two – the stuff the acts used to do in the local pub/working mans club back then or maybe a bit of Sinatra or that type of easy listening if we’re getting a bit more classy.ie stuff that even the stereotypical council estate teenage girl I mentioned above would have viewed as old-fashioned and “for your mum and dad”.
A lot of it’s back-projection – because the song is a wedding disco staple now it’s hard to imagine it feeling any different. The anachronism of that doesn’t bother me particularly – pop’s contemporary context is fascinating and vital but I wouldn’t want to seal it there.
Not sure on back-projection, Tom. By 1980 Radio 2 certainly weren’t playing Tom/Engelbert, they were playing this single, Dr Hook, Fern Kinney and other smooth disco-flavoured pop. Anybody with the Hamilton’s Hot Shots comp on Warwick from ’76 will know that daytime Radio 2 even made room for the Detroit Spinners’ UK flop Games People Play.
This was never a cool club record, either, it was immediate wedding party fodder with an eye cocked towards folks who might remember the song from the first time around. So, maybe “mum and dad” is an imprecise way of putting it – “young mums and shopgirls” sound any better? Thought not. But I’m sure you get the gist.
I can only speak as someone who was 13 at the time and my mother had long stopped buying Tom Jones records (as had the rest of the British population) and was more into Boney M and Village People. I spent a lot of time at various friends’ houses and their parents seemed the same. Perhaps if you had a mum and dad who were 50+ ? But then I’m just naive in a middle class student way and ever so slightly snobby :-).
No 30 actually on second thoughts you’re completely right about Radio 2 they werent playing much Tom Jones by then it was more Dr Hook, Kenny Rogers, bit of Abba maybe etc and yes “young mums and shopgirls” is a better decription of who I meant. But surely “mums and dads” when used on “Popular” (and not just about this number 1) is used in a context that applies to the “square” parents of late70s/early80s teenagers who would tend to be at least in their early 30s. And isnt it accepted in the music business that the vast majority of “pop” singles buyers (as opposed to more speciaised musical forms) are teenagers as opposed to those in their late 20s or early 30s.
But you’ve (no31) just summed up what I was saying myself in my previous post by saying “BUYING records” (and I presume we’re talking about singles here).I doubt anyone was buying Tom Jones etc singles by that time (that’s obvious from those kind of singers absence from the chart).Just because they had the odd Boney M album for parties etc are you saying they were really on it big style on the Boney M tip?
Or put simply to say that “parents” rather than their teenage offspring (who were after all all obviously only into “happening” music-press sanctioned music)were wholly responsible for putting stuff like this at No1 is extremely dubious.
I remember some of the stuff played at youth club discos back then especially if the girls brought their own records in it sometimes got as dodgy as the Dooleys, the Nolans and Brown Sauce(don’t ask).
Always room for a spot of Nolans and Dooleys in my house, AP. Obviously not their entire oeuvre(s), but to my ears Honey I’m Lost and Think I’m Gonna Fall In Love With You are classy UK pop-soul (Findon/Shelley, if I remember correctly, who were also responsible for Billy Ocean’s best singles) and Attention To Me was lauded in Record Mirror as a New Pop pinnacle. It’s the shopgirl in me.
Brown Sauce flip, on an embarrassingly arcane note, is the very good early 80s Swap Shop theme.
Nothing wrong with Brown Sauce.
Oh yes my mother and her Boney M affair. It started when she went to Kelly’s radio (our old chain of electrical and record shops at that time) and asked for “The record by those nice black people” which started her Boney M collection. She had previously asked for “I lost my heart to a deep sea diver” and “sister sludge” so she was always on to a winner. (see one, feel one, touch one)
On to the very knowledgeable Wichita lineman’s point above, Ben Findon wrote Billy Ocean’s hits with a Mr Leslie Charles who now has long grey dreadlocks and calls himself Billy Ocean. “Shop girl” you may be, and just think you could have been called “Rhinestone Cowboy” .
I met someone a few years ago who said that their friend had Billy Ocean as their landlord in the late 90s – they were a believable kind of person so I thought this was sort of a surreal as they said he was a proper “hands-on” rent collecting/ring him about repairs landlord. Anybody know if this could be true?
Well, when SCowell berated some X-Factor finalist for doing a Billy Ocean song, as he wasn’t ‘current’ enough..
(!)
and (!) again…
..some mention was made afterwards about him being ‘a landlord now’…
#30 wichita lineman – at the time the Hamilton hotshots album came out, David Hamilton was still a Radio 1 DJ, although his show was also heard on Radio 2, as many shows were back then, partly because of financial cutbacks, and partly because of limited frequencies.
When he left Radio 2 in November that year 1986, he claimed that their music policy had become “geriatric” and that “there’s only so much Max Bygraves and Vera Lynn you can play.
So I would go along with andypandy’s original thoughts that Radio 2, as a separate entity at least, was pretty much out of touch at that time (notwithstanding the occasional “Floral Dance” or similar aberration)
I thought it was probably true as my acquaintance said it more in a “do you remember Billy Ocean?” way than in a “how about this my friend’s landlord…” way
Confession time – firstly I haven’t been round these parts for nigh on 6 months and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then – so some catching up to do. Secondly this song sticks in memory mainly for being an ‘action’ song. I distinctly recall dancing somewhat awkwardly to it at a friends wedding (in fact he was the first one of us from school to get married – way too young of course) and starting a ‘spade digging’ action (possibly mimicked from TOTP ?) during the ‘working my way back to you’ chorus refrain. This led to the whole dancefloor ‘digging’ in synch with me. What a triumph it was. I don’t think I ever did it again. At least I hope I didn’t. As always with 80s onward ‘soul’ recordings, the production lets the whole thing down especially the anaemic rhythm section.
No one really expected the Detroit Spinners to get to number one in 1980; their last major hit, “The Rubberband Man,” had been in 1976, their divine original lead singer Phillipe Wynne had long since defected to Funkadelic, and by the time Atlantic hooked them up with Michael “Let’s All Chant” Zager as producer they were one sidestep away from the cabaret circuit.
In truth 1972-6 was their golden era; although not at the centre of the Philly Sound, Thom Bell did bequest them some of his finest songs and productions – “I’ll Be Around,” “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love?,” “Ghetto Child” – and the group performed them with elegant passion. There was something of a shudder that they had been “reduced” to going Eurodisco. Yet this became their biggest British hit and also reached #2 in the States, presumably courtesy of a young crowd who knew or cared little about their previous work.
The Four Seasons cover – and yes, this was the fourth Four Seasons cover version to get to number one in Britain while never having been a hit for the group themselves – is despatched with Teutonic efficiency; lead singer John Edwards gamely gives it his best effort over a hugely unsubtle drum machine thud, and the song is strong enough to withstand the assault. However, the segue into Zager’s own song, the notably less impressive “Forgive Me Girl,” is contrived and brief, and the original song soon comes back into focus. It was clearly danceable enough to satisfy its buyers, but it is disco as studium writ large, and after another similar effort, coupling Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” with the anonymous “I’ve Loved You For A Long Time,” which promptly went top five, the Detroit Spinners did indeed make their delayed descent into nightclub revivalism. To cite their first Motown hit from a decade earlier, it’s a shame.
@AndyPandy # 28:
I completely agree. People seem to forget that while songs like this went down well with most middle-class parents because they were catchy and unthreatening, it was always young people who determined the number one song from week to week. And like you, I could always see that the people buying records like this were primarily young girls, who liked good-looking boys and catchy tunes (preferably together, but if not, then one or the other would do).