8 May 1980
That’s The Spinners, for those of you in America – an English folk group of that name required the US outfit to amend their name on this side of the Atlantic. Those opening oohs and handclaps are easy on the ear and set the scene for the rest of this record: working one’s way back to you is about as fraught and high-stakes as working one’s way through a particularly nice sandwich. Philly soul, with its lush strings and bubbling rhythm, was always prone to slipping into aural candy floss like this – and when performed by an old-school vocal group, even in 1980 it must have sounded doubly behind the times.
This record is in fact a medley, as its middle section is a song called ‘Forgive Me Girl’ by Michael Zager, who had a minor disco hit with a track that went “Ooh-a ooh-a! Let’s all chant!” ad infinitum. The original ‘Working My Way Back To You’ was a mid-’60s hit for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in an unconvincing Motown style before the group actually moved to the Motown label and released far better material like ‘The Night’. A later cover of this song would live on in infamy as the debut single by another vocal group: Boyzone. ‘Working My Way Back To You’ just seems to have been hard-coded with blandness.
