Twisted Wheel: How a Manchester venue rediscovered Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Beloved by everybody from Paul McCartney to Nina Simone, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is among the most enigmatic and yet vitally important R&B musicians to ever cross into the realm of rock and roll rebellion. Were it not for the efforts of one legendary Mancunian music venue, though, the legacy of the shock rock pioneer might have been lost forever.
It was in 1956 – fittingly, around Halloween – that Okeh Records unleashed ‘I Put A Spell On You’, thus launching the endearingly bone-chilling sounds of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins into the collective consciousness. Although that version of the single was never a chart hit, it sold enough to give Hawkins a following, and the masterpiece debut album, At Home with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, followed shortly thereafter in 1958. However, neither that LP nor any of Hawkins’ follow-up singles managed to recapture the success of ‘I Put A Spell On You’.
At risk of being tarnished with the ever-dreaded moniker of being a one-hit wonder, Hawkins left Okeh after the release of that album, and his recording career quickly dried up. His story could very well have ended there, doomed to be remembered solely through cover versions of his defining moment. However, a group of young R&B obsessives in northern England came to his unlikely rescue.
Years before it became the breeding ground for the northern soul revolution, Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club was the go-to place for any young blues, soul, and R&B obsessives in the industrial city. Back in 1965, a group of those devotees of Black American music turned their attention to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and, namely, what on earth had happened to him since ‘I Put A Spell On You’.
Hawkins had never made much of an impact on British airwaves, and that fateful 1956 single failed to find any UK distribution upon its initial release, but – crucially – Twisted Wheel DJ Roger Eagle had heard of him. Thus, Eagle and a few of the club’s regulars began a quest to track him down and rescue the performer from his apparent rock and roll exile.
As one of the members of this quest, Wheel regular and photographer Brian Smith once recalled to Record Collector, “We saw Little Richard when he toured in 1964, and he had Don & Dewey backing him. I asked Don [Sugarcane Harris] the same question, and he said he was a great friend of Jay’s.” Explaining, “He’d just seen him in Honolulu, where he was living, at the Forbidden City, a downtown club run by local promoter Jack Cione.”
From there, the group wrote fan mail to Hawkins, urging him to visit the UK and, in particular, the Twisted Wheel. Without much of a shot at regaining his R&B star power elsewhere, Hawkins took the chance, and a ramshackle tour was organised that would finally bring the unmistakable bellows of the Ohio-born artist to adoring audiences in Manchester.
That tour, as well as being full of bizarre anecdotes about Hawkins shooting blanks at passers-by from a moving car, and even disrupting a – presumably bewildered – wedding party in his full stage get-up, re-established Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as the R&B hero he truly was. He had his mojo back, and that tour led a multitude of his previous recordings to be reissued in Europe, as well as spurring Hawkins on to create some new recordings, too.
As far as venues go, the music world already has a lot to thank the Twisted Wheel for, but the fact that the Manchester venue rediscovered one of the greatest R&B stars of all time, years before it became the hang-out of sweaty, amphetamine-fueled soulies, is an aspect of the venue’s history that is often overlooked.
