Page 11 - June Issue 2021

‘n’ Blues Quartet- quickly took off,
playing the smoky venues around the
city, and gathering an enthusiastic
following -among them a young
muso with aspirations of future fame:
Noddy Holder. Within a year, they
had attracted the attention of Island
Records producer, Chris Blackwell,
who offered to manage them. About
this time the band changed its name to
the Spencer Davis Group. According to
Muff Winwood, this wasn’t Davis’ idea,
but a ploy by the other band members
to lumber him with the tiresome press
interviews that were now -as a result of
Blackwell’s management- beginning to
irk them. Unlike his mates, Davis enjoyed talking to journalists. Giving the outfit his name would single him out as spokesman.
The band’s first single, a cover of bluesman, John Lee Hooker’s Dimples, sold only moderately -as did the two 45s that followed (plus an album of r ‘n’ b covers released in June 1965). However, the live gigs they were now performing up and down the country, along with a cinema movie, Beat, which featured them playing one of their LP tracks, My Babe, had raised public awareness of them as an energetic new act, worth watching. The breakthrough came in November of that year with the launch of Keep On Running, a stomping masterpiece written by Jamaican ska singer, Jackie Edwards. One of the first records -along with the Stones’ Satisfaction- to utilise fuzz box, it leapt up the British charts, knocking the Beatles from the number 1 position.
This was merely the start. The follow up, Somebody Help Me, another stomper, also written by Edwards, reached the Brit ‘Top Spot’ in the spring of 66, and, although the next offering, When
I Come Home, was less successful, the band had now achieved wide international recognition with entries in the singles charts of Europe and North11
America -and the release of two more albums. They ended the year with Gimme Some Lovin’ an anthem of rhythmic bass and vibrant Hammond riffs, and compounded the formula afew months later with the blues-driven pile driver, I’m A Man. At this, the height of their success, Steve Winwood, who had provided the lead vocals on each of the hits, announced his intention to leave the combo to form his own band, Traffic.
Although Winwood’s departure effectively pulled the plug on the group as a hit-making machine, Davis continued -along with many other projects- to front the band in various sporadic incarnations well into the 21st century. Liked, admired, and respected by all in the music industry, he continued to make his presence felt as a writer, musician, and executive. It is these roles, as much as his status as a sixties r ‘n’ b guitarist, that have earned him the status of rock icon. He will be sorely missed.
Rob Atkins