The Spinners – aka The Detroit Spinners – enjoyed their only UK number one in 1980, a quarter of a century after they first formed.

It took me a while to discover that the group I knew as The Detroit Spinners were the same guys Americans knew as The Spinners. Largely because I’d never heard of the English group of the same name.

Even when I found out, it was impossible to confuse them because the group I knew primarily for this song had nothing in common with the Liverpudlian folk quartet.

They were three white lads and one black fella who wore yellow shirts, had their own BBC television show in the early ’70s, and sang songs with titles like Fried Bread And Brandy-O.

The Detroit Spinners, by contrast, were a vocal soul group of five black men (none from Liverpool), though they had long left Detroit by the time I first heard this song in 1980.

And while they might have kept their hometown name (at least in the UK), after a decade of struggle at Motown they moved away from Detroit and came to define the rival Philly soul sound.

They’d started out in the mid-’50s as a doo-wop group called The Domingoes but changed their name to The Spinners in 1961, and spent the rest of the decade under contract to Motown.

After an encouraging start – but not a single Top Ten hit – the label relegated the group’s members to jobs as road managers, chaperones, shipping clerks and chauffeurs for their other groups.

At the dawn of the ’70s, despite minor success with a cover of Stevie Wonder’s song It’s A Shame, they quit Motown – on the advice of Aretha Franklin – and joined her label, Atlantic Records.

They found immediate success after teaming up with legendary Philly songwriter Thom Bell, going on to become one of the biggest soul groups of the decade with hits including the glorious Ghetto Child.

This was one of their last hit singles, and their only UK chart topper, a cover of a song by The Four Seasons.

In 2024 their last surviving original member, Henry Fambrough, died, bringing an end to The Spinners – and any confusion over their name.