The Mule Spinner: Music’s tiny temple

A multi-purpose creative space founded by Hamilton music veterans Glen Marshall and the late Bob Lanois, the former stable at the Cotton Factory hosts intimate live performances and recording sessions.

It looks like a film set. A set for something set in the early 1900s, perhaps. Industrial turn-of-the-century brick, a tower and a smokestack rising above it all. You’re waiting for someone to yell “action” and then men in suspenders will roll barrels across the courtyard. 

Of course, it is a film set, sometimes. This is the space behind the Cotton Factory, the former Imperial Cotton Company, refurbished into a multi-purpose creative space about a decade ago. It’s also where HAMILTON CITY Magazine finds Glen Marshall, Hamilton musician, entrepreneur, producer, and owner of the Mule Spinner.

The Mule Spinner is a music and entertainment venue, a creative co-working space, recording studio, occasional film and television location, and artistic hub, founded by Marshall and the late producer/musician Bob Lanois in 2017.

Marshall sits in a recently overhauled storage room, now a studio and mixing space nicknamed “the Bunker” located across the courtyard from the Mule Spinner’s main room. When he talks about the Mule Spinner, he possesses the same easy-going enthusiasm he has brought to all of his projects. Over the years, Marshall booked musicians for the Regal Hotel, ran a vintage clothing shop, fronted a rock band, and produced countless records for musicians from around the world. Somehow, at 60, his enthusiasm has not waned.

“Originally, this was a storage room,” Marshall gestures around the Bunker. “We realized that we had really nice, beautiful, high, wood ceilings and the shape of the room is kind of perfect. The room sounds great.” 

The Mule Spinner is a 100-person capacity room. In the dim afternoon light, it retains a warmth and character uncommon to many such spaces. Though the room is often used as a live venue, for Marshall, the space is about recording. “We do a lot of shows, but shows are really predicated on us capturing live music. It’s a workshop, a laboratory.”

The name comes from a large machine used to spin cotton and other textiles, says Marshall. 

"The young Irish children that kept the machine threaded and working were referred to as mule spinners. We thought, out of respect to those young people working adult jobs, that we would name our space to honour them.”

Once upon a time, Marshall was the leader of Hamilton alternative pop legends Altogether Morris. He was also the self-described “coffee boy” at Grant Avenue Studios, owned by Bob and brother Dan Lanois (who would become world-renowned for his work with Peter Gabriel, U2, Bob Dylan and many others). 

“I watched all kinds of amazing recording sessions,” Marshall recalls. “I saw Brian Eno and Dan making Apollo (Atmospheres and Soundtracks). How could you not get hooked? You've got, like, one of the most brilliant artists of the 20th century, Brian Eno, working with Lanois, a fantastic musician and arranger.”

As Bob Lanois was scaling back and planning to sell the studio, Marshall offered a sum of money to use all of the studio’s downtime for his own purposes, recording his band and projects for friends. Bob accepted, and Marshall went to work. The experience eventually led to him opening his own space, Catherine North Studios, in his home (for keen-eyed Hamiltonians, yes, it’s spelled differently than the street). 

Years later, the studios moved to Murray Street, and later, Marshall himself moved to New York, where he worked with friend and musician/producer Rufus Cappadocia. 

The partnership with Bob Lanois, however, was still ongoing. The pair had a studio in Brantford for a time, but Marshall, concerned about Lanois’ late-night drives back to Hamilton, suggested they try to find something in the city.

The Mule Spinner was originally the stables for the textile factory, and after that, the space was fashioned into a mechanic shop. At first glance, it was just a dirty space filled with junk making it look smaller “and frankly, terrible.” There was no simple clean-up, either, but rather a total remediation.

“It was a nightmare,” Marshall recalls. “Nothing but grease and 50 layers of latex paint. Just a gross, hideous thing that I don't think anyone thought could be even rehabilitated. The floors were steeped with oil.”

A month of washing and re-washing (and sealing away the remaining dirt with heavy-duty floor paint) brought the Mule Spinner into existence. “There’s some cute furniture in there, tapestries that double the sound baffling and the whole nine yards,” Marshall says of the space, which has a comfortable, cozy vibe. 

What matters to Marshall, however, is not what it looks like, but what it sounds like, and how it feels.

“If you've got a good band and a good room, you get something really special from that,” he says. “When you're in a little box, everything's kind of closed in. It's not necessarily inspiring.”

Inspiration, of course, is crucial. While quality audio equipment and recording gear is important, it’s never simply about how it sounds in the microphones. It's in the performance, too, and that is affected by the environment.

“People really like that room,” says Marshall. “People making movies really like it. Well, it's got a good vibe.”

Once it was ready, Marshall and Lanois set about to create a multi-use space that would encourage people and projects to come together physically. “Think of an art gallery,” he explains. “You walk by it a hundred times a day and see there's art on the walls, but at ten o'clock at night, it's closed. At ten o’clock in the morning, it’s closed. It seems so crazy when space is so expensive and rare now.”

In essence, they wanted to have a room that could be turned over to others. Marshall would use it to conduct his own activities, but also support other people who could use it as a sort of base of operations for their projects. As such, the Mule Spinner would feature people who worked separately but who might come together to assist one another as well. 

“Maybe some people make videos,” he says. “I help support them. I've got lights and people who can run them. I just have all these tools, and they're set up to be practical and be useful. We share them with people. Consequently, we've got lots of people working in this little ecosystem. I always build the process around the need or build the space around the need. But I don't really think about it too much. It's very intuitive.”

All this talk of workspace seems to suggest the Mule Spinner isn’t a venue. It is – just not primarily so. “It looks like a venue, because the work that we do is predicated on capturing live music with human beings,” says Marshall, explaining how recording in that room with an audience changes the timbre of the recording. “If there's an audience in front of you, that changes what you're doing on stage, or what you’re recording, entirely. One of the nice things about it is if there's an audience there, it makes them forget about the recording.”

Some shows at the Mule Spinner are simply shows, of course, not recording sessions. The first presentation was kept “in the family” quite literally when Marshall hosted a performance by Daniel Lanois. Since then the space has hosted major acts like the Trews and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings on top of many other bands both local and international.

“For me, it's a little temple for music,” Marshall says, “for people that really care about music, who are really dedicated and want to reach to a higher bar than wherever they are.”