Spare Hands

The Mick McGarry GMB Main Stage, Saturday, 13.00 – 13.40

Spare Hands are Hull’s foremost (some would say only!) maritime folk band. They are: Bill Sowerby, Les Ward, Steve Gardham, Tom Gaynard and Andy Buckton.

The Yorkshire Garland Group was formed in 2006 and, having successfully put in two lottery bids to promote folk song activities in the county and set up the website, a third bid was proposed in about 2009 with the aim of establishing various local projects. Unfortunately, this was not successful. The Hull project was proposed to produce recordings of appropriate heritage songs to be played as background to exhibits in Hull Maritime Museum.

Prior to this, Steve had been asked to sing shanties and sea songs in the Maritime Museum and had been involved in this for a couple of years. When he was later asked if he could provide some backing tracks of whaling songs for the exhibits in the whaling gallery, this, and the need for a Hull-based Yorkshire Garland project, determined Steve to bring together a group of local musicians and singers.

Bill was already part of the Yorkshire Garland Group and he immediately agreed to join, as did Mick McGarry (who died in March 2023) and Les Ward, who were already heavily involved in the organisation of the Hull Sea Fever Festival.

This quartet produced the first album, Where the Whalefish Blow, in 2014. When bookings began to come in, the group needed a name and at the time there was much mention in the local media about the trawlermen not receiving proper severance and benefit due to their casual status as “spare hands”. In addition, the format of the group was to be fairly loose in that any combination of the performers could go out and do bookings, so Spare Hands was seen as an ideal name.

The first album sold well and the group soon added a fifth member, whistle player and singer Tom Gaynard, with local singer/guitarist and Hull Folk and Maritime Festival stalwart Andy Buckton later completing the line-up.