Tony Davis
Teacher who became de facto leader and ‘Pied Piper’ of the Liverpool folk group, the Spinners
TONY DAVIS, who has died aged 86, was the de facto leader of the Spinners, the popular Liverpool-based folk group, and although he rejected the title and insisted that they were a cooperative of equals, he was – at 6ft 7 in – indubitably the tallest.
During their 30 years as a touring and recording quartet, the Spinners were influential in introducing folk music to a far wider public than the hard-core club circuit and during the 1960s and 1970s became something of an institution.
Along with Davis, a qualified teacher, the Spinners comprised Mick Groves (a former science master), a Jamaican electrician, Cliff Hall, and Hugh Jones, a one-time storeman and an authority on sea shanties which became a staple of their repertoire. A supernumerary, their bass player “Count” John McCormick, always stood to one side at the back.
With Davis up front, often on banjo, tambourine or tin whistle (he was often called their Pied Piper), the group could persuade the most jaded live audience to sing along on such nostalgic, sad or salty numbers as The Leaving Of Liverpool, In My Liverpool Home and The Family of Man, as well as their signature number Fried Bread and Brandy-O!, an old Liverpool playground rhyme.
Davis led the group to national attention with sell-out concerts at the Albert and Queen Elizabeth Halls in London, and with regular appearances on television, uniformly dressed in smart yellow mandarin-collared tunics.
In concert in their native city, in more casual clothes, they would lead a capacity house at the Philharmonic Hall in a rousing rendition of Maggie May, then reduce them to a hush in the pianissimo chorus of Ellen Vannin, recalling the 1909 sinking of a mail steamer of that name, Mersey-bound from the Isle of Man.
Even when they had established themselves as international artists, the Spinners continued to perform most weeks in a room in a Liverpool pub, Gregson’s Well, where space was so tight that the audience was limited to 150. Meanwhile their annual sell-out Folk at the Phil concerts became a popular fixture on the Liverpool cultural calendar.
The son of an insurance agent, Antony John Davis was born on August 24 1930 in Blackburn, but moved with his family to Merseyside aged three. Evacuated to Anglesey and later to the Lake District during the Liverpool blitz, he later enrolled at Wallasey Grammar School where he played the clarinet and helped establish a jazz appreciation society.
On leaving school he drifted through several office jobs, including at the Atomic Energy Authority’s enrichment site at Capenhurst, Wirral, where he first met Cliff Hall, then working as an electrician.
As a young man Davis formed various jazz groups such as the Rivington Ramblers and the Storyville Stompers, but during the 1950s, while training as a teacher, he embraced the skiffle craze and, with his new wife Beryl formed the Gin Mill skiffle group. Davis taught himself to play Beryl’s guitar and passed on his skills to the group’s washboard player Mick Groves. The group established itself as resident favourites at the Cavern Club in Liverpool in its pre-Beatles days, giving traditional songs like A-Roving and John Peel a new twist with banjo and penny whistle.
Realising that the jazz and skiffle crazes were waning, rather than following the general drift towards rock, Davis cast around for a new idiom in the folk tradition. In May 1958 an expanded version of the Gin Mill line-up performed at a Conservative Party fete at Liverpool cricket club as the Spinners, and the following September established the city’s first folk club in the basement of Samson & Barlow’s restaurant in the city centre. They turned professional in 1964.
One of the group’s best loved songs, In My Liverpool Home, written by Pete McGovern, tells of Scousers who “speak with an accent exceedingly rare” and “meet under a statue exceedingly bare” outside Lewis’s department store. From 1961 until his death in 2006 McGovern kept adding new verses – reputedly some 300 in all – and in 1991 the Spinners featured on a 70-minute version of the song with Mike McCartney, the beat poet Adrian Henri and Michael Starke, who played Sinbad the window-cleaner in the Channel 4 soap Brookside.
The Spinners formally retired in 1988.
Davis is survived by his wife Beryl and by two daughters. Tony Davis, born August 24 1930, died February 10 2017