Doing the Swansea Shuffle

From Planet 180

Spencer Davis: A Rock 'n' Roll profile by Nigel Jenkins

It could be, in Swansea terms, an old rock star’s definition of the blues: having nowhere to keep a pint of milk cool in the sweltering Tawe Delta heatwave of July 2006. Not only is Spencer “Keep on Running” Davis bereft of a fridge, he doesn’t have a washing machine or anything else much in the house he has inherited from his mother in Mulberry Avenue, West Cross, and in which he finds himself more or less camping with a few sticks of furniture. Following her death three years ago, there was a somewhat “uneven” (and acrimonious) division of the spoils, which resulted in the house being divested, in his absence, of all that was moveable and saleable — which is why we are meeting at 8.00 a.m. at the Bay Wash Laundromat on the seafront at West Cross: he wants his wheelie-bag’s worth of dirty washing done in time for a gig in Germany the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, he has arrangements to make at the Grand Theatre about a charity performance there in October for Macmillan Cancer Support (both his parents died of cancer), and he has kindly agreed to walk and talk me through the working-class community of Bonymaen, in north-east Swansea, where he was brought up.

Spencer Davis (b. 1939; the “e” was dropped as the result of a spelling mistake on the pressing of his first single) moved to the United States in 1970 and lives these days on Catalina Island (about forty kilometres south-west of Los Angeles), in the seaside town of Avalon which, he says, is rather like Swansea and whose name the locals mistakenly believe to be Spanish in origin; the Welshman knows better. Since the first rush of fame in the 1960s, with major hits such as “Keep on Running”, “Somebody Help Me”, “Gimme Some Lovin” and “I’m a Man”, he has toured almost constantly. By the end of this year (2006), he will have played more than 70 gigs in countries such as Holland, Belgium, Denmark, England, Trinidad, the United States, Wales, Australia and, above all, Germany, where audiences delight in his fluent command of their language.

But no matter how packed his schedule, he has not forgotten his Welsh roots (he’s a supporter and honorary member of Plaid Cymru) and he has always found time for Swansea; he probably manages to spend as much time here as Bonnie Tyler, his rock-star near neighbour in West Cross, who has a palatial establishment near the sea’s edge (as well as a house in Portugal). His mother’s death at the age of 89, far from proposing any severance of the Swansea connection, seems to have reaffirmed his commitment to the area, in both practical and artistic terms. He’s keeping on the former council house in Mulberry Avenue, having converted the loft into a spacious studio with a superb view over Swansea Bay, and he has campaigned on a number of local urban environment issues. His recently released 12-track album So Far marks a new departure, in that his writing has taken a distinctly autobiographical turn, with the home patch featuring on many of the songs: when he’s not gigging “From door to door, coast to coast/Shakin’ more hands than a talk-show host” we find him “Down in Wind Street on a Saturday night/When the glass is full and the moon is bright/Doing the Swansea shuffle.”

The laundry deposited, we taxi up to Bonymaen, the dense traffic on Mumbles Road being a reminder of that folly of Swansea follies, the destruction, in 1960, of the Mumbles railway. “If they’d kept the Mumbles train, it would have contributed hugely to relieving the pressure of all this traffic,” says Spencer, who pays fond homage on the new album to that “rockin’ and a-rollin” train to paradise. “With the new development in SA1 they’re surely going to have to introduce a light railway — maybe from Port Talbot to Mumbles.”

On the crawl through the car-clogged city centre we talk of his beginnings. He was born in Mountpleasant, at 71 North Hill Road. The family later lived at 13 Norfolk Street, which was destroyed in a bombing raid shortly after they’d left for Birkenhead and other towns in England, his father being in the army during the war. He was five when the family returned to Swansea and, eventually, a new home in Bonymaen. At Dynevor Boys School in the city centre — alma mater of other Swansea achievers such as Harry Secombe, Rowan Williams and Bernard Knight — he studied German, French and Spanish, and also did well at chemistry and English literature. “The music master was a man called Weber who, with Dewi Johns, the physics master, took great delight in physical punishment. Weber told me, ‘you will never do anything in music’.”

Music, nevertheless, had him in its thrall from the moment in early childhood when his Uncle Herman called round with his mandolin. “Time stood still and the sun shone bright/On that dark and stormy night,” Spencer sings on the jaunty, folk-inflected “Uncle Herman’s Mandolin”. The “far-off lands and sights” of which his uncle sang sent young Spencer travelling too — on a journey that has never ended. Later, someone gave him a harmonica: “I never put it down from the moment I got it.” He asked his parents for a guitar for Christmas, “but they gave me a piano accordion. Hardly the same thing. But I managed to pick up a few carol tunes and I went round Bonymaen, aged about 11 or 12, making enough money to buy shoes and trousers, which gave me the taste for being a professional musician.” Four or five years later, he got his first guitar and was soon playing American country music and blues with art college students and others. He performed regularly at venues such as the King’s Arms in High Street and Rob’s (all-night) Café in St Helen’s Road. “I was playing with a harmonica bracket around my neck before I’d ever heard of Bob Dylan.” The blues has remained a seminal influence: “Hooker and Leadbelly taught me how to be a man,” he sings on a country-blues homage to the music that shaped his life.