feeling listless

Music
To: letters@guardian.co.uk

I’m very pleased that The Guardian thought the late Cliff Hall significant enough to grant him a fulsome obituary in today’s paper.  I was understandably saddened by his recent death since his folk group, The Spinners, were the first musicians I really paid attention to growing up.  My parents were amongst those who would visit the folk clubs listed in the article and knew the players personally.  We have signed records and programmes somewhere.  I remember the house filling with their music every Sunday when I was pre-teen and their Christmas concerts at The Phil were the cornerstone of the festive season, as important as a real tree and home made mince pies.

Even now I can say that I loved them more than The Beatles.  Whereas the ‘fab’ four seemed to sing about a fantastical land which looked nothing like the place I was growing up in, the songs The Spinners chose to make famous had the real Liverpool and its culture running through them.  In My Liverpool Home offered a foundation to my city’s history and The Leaving of Liverpool captured better than any other song the emotions I felt going away to university the first time (even though obviously it's about the great Irish emigration to the new world).  I do hope someone decides to commemorate his loss by curating a proper collection of their songs on cd -- the current selection is a disappointment -- and Amazon perenially confuse them with some men from Detroit.

Stuart Ian Burns,
Liverpool