In case you missed it (and there has been a bit of media coverage over the last few weeks), the Searchers are finally calling it a day this evening with a spot at Glastonbury. It is in the Acoustic Tent at 8pm, and it is the end of the road for a band that has been performing for over 60 years – arguably the longest continuous run of any group (as we used to call them!).
They have always been close to my heart – they were second only to the Beatles around the end of 1963 and into 1964 – and I still play them regularly at home. Their first 3 albums were pure Merseybeat, but also included folk songs and unusual material which, whilst audibly recorded in a hurry, stand up well today, unlike most other bands of that era. They were influential on the likes of the Byrds, Tom Petty and all the jingle janglers that came afterwards. It was the singles that were their real strength – Sweets for My Sweet, Sugar and Spice, Needles and Pins, Don’t Throw Your Love Away and the peerless When You Walk In The Room to name but a few.
By 1966 it was more or less over – their lack of strong songwriting skills and an image that was suddenly out of date led to them being dropped by Pye, but they continued playing live, eventually playing the chicken in a basket cabaret circuit. In the late 70s they started to be recognised for their influence on pop and rock and got themselves signed to Sire records and made a couple of of cracking albums, but it was to little avail. Mike Pender flounced acrimoniously in 1985, and the front line that had been extant since 1964 was no more. Soldiering on with replacement Spencer James, they became part of 60s revival tours, but more importantly started to undertake solo tours, playing theatres and large venues for over 2 hours, featuring not only the hits, but some deep cuts from the catalogue and new material. The loyal fan base and their legendary name meant they could continue making a living right into their later years. Jon McNally is still there from the very beginning, Frank Allen from 1964, plus Spencer, and they continue to be a terrific live act.
I hope the BBC get to show some of the set, but I’m not holding my breath!
I’ll post a link to a recent Frank Allen interview below….
http://www.the-searchers.co.uk/
Those early 60’s singles were wondrous. But I also remember buying their single, Hearts In Their Eyes, in the early 70’s, purchasing then the album that Sire hoped would re-launch them as the architects of power pop jangle. It didn’t but remains a corker, if mixed perhaps a tad trebly.
If I were at that there Glastonbury I’d be there, but I’m not, praise be, so I won’t.
Yes, you are right about the mix – actually late 70’s. In the early 70s they had a deal with RCA and re-recorded the early hits for some weird reason ( terribly as it turned out) after a short term deal with Liberty.
The second Sire album is arguably even better.
Think I’ve told this tale before. Around 1977 I was PTA Secretary for the local village school. We were continually fund-raising – jumble sales, fish & chips evenings, raffles etc. lots and lots of hard work and we’d maybe clear £50 profit.
Brainwave time. “Let’s have a 1960s disco, fancy dress..hey, even better, maybe I can find some ancient group like Freddie & The Dreamers to play for us. Wonder if they are still going? Bet they’d be glad of a Bob or two” says I .
Little bit of research showed The Searchers had played Scunthorpe (?) Community Centre a few weeks back. Rang the CC up, got the agent’s number and rang him up.
“Yes, we could do 18th April. £1200 plus local accomodation.”
“Ah, was thinking more of a couple of hundred at most..don’t suppose, good cause?”
Long silence at the other end. “The Searchers play 5 nights a week, 40 weeks a year. ” The phone went dead.
They weren’t totally averse to to doing charity events – every few years they used to do an event for Appreciation Society members, which they would do free as a ‘thank you’ and it would also be a charity fund raiser. They would contribute stuff for auction and so on. It was also an interesting day for fans – they would often do a Q&A and then do a set in the evening which would be much a more relaxed affair than the usual concert set.
Not saying they weren’t top blokes – I was just mightily surprised that a group I thought were long gone were playing virtually every night and, in comparative terms, raking it in. Fair Play and all that
They do a fabulous cover of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’ve Been Looking For
I’m a huge Jackie DeShannon fan, and they made the definitive versions of many of her songs.
Needles and Pins is credited to Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono, but Jackie claims she was there and it sounds like a JDeS song to me.
And I enjoyed those Sire albums. I must give them another spin.
I know I have posted this before. At least 15 years ago, maybe even 20 I was talking to a guy who knew Bobby Elliott, the drummer from the Hollies. When I expressed surprise that they were still a going concern he told me that Bobby was making 300k a year.
A Merseybeat reunion..!?
Lovely post Nigel and I concur completely with your assessment of The Searchers. Over the years through work I’ve seen all the 60s revival bands that were doing the circuit through the 80s and beyond and The Searchers were in a league of their own. ‘When You Walk in the Room’ is a magnificent single. Really hope they enjoyed the Glastonbury experience
About 15 years or so ago my Canadian agent was visiting the UK and would be in Birmingham over the weekend. I was looking for a gig or a theatre performance that we could take him to. There wasn’t much that appealed but The Searchers were playing at what was Ronnie Scotts. We got tickets and went with low expectations. We had a fantastic night and they honestly blew me away with their performance.
Highlight for my Canadian agent who loves the 60’s British beat bands was their cover of Four Strong Winds which was a massive hit in Canada.
The fan base is fuming and seems about to storm the BBC with pitchforks and torches because there was no coverage of their set. I have gently pointed out that actually very few acts of the hundreds playing actually make it onto the tellybox, and then only from a very few of the multiplicity of stages. If anyone is to blame, it is the Glasto organisers – they would have actually been really good to have on one of the larger stages in, say, the early afternoon, like they did with John Fogerty (who I thought was fairly poor, by the way).
I’m not aware of any of the Acoustic Stage acts ever being covered on telly.
The huge marquee is on the edge of the site, a fair distance away from the main triangle of Pyramid, Other and Left Field stages. You’d need a very long extension cable.
https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/info/#map
Exactly. The infrastructure for broadcasting is, presumably, only in place at a few stages.
Looking at some of the fan comments, apparently it’s all a terrible conspiracy by the lefty BBC.
Well, it was a lead news story on BBC Radio 4 for most of the day. So perhaps only BBC TV are a bunch of conspiritorial lefties.
The BBC response to Bob Vylan was a bit shrill to say the least. Never happened in Edgar Broughton’s day.
I “caught” 20 minutes of Bob Dylan at Bearded Theory last year. Enormously popular with the agit prop weekend anarchist brigade. I thought the duo noisy crowd stirring nonsense, of little merit. Shouting fuck and calling it art.
Never trust a teetotal vegan, I say. No wonder they’re angry.
I saw the Searchers perhaps 15 years ago at the Mansfield Palace Theatre. May have been Newark, to be fair. Somewhere in north Notts, definitely. Anyway…
2 notable things.
The drummer at that time was Eddie Rothe, ex of Mud and Liquid Gold (apparently, according to the interweb. Was it him playing the bones that time on ToTP?) and later life husband of Jane Mcdonald of Cruising fame (sadly Eddie died in 2021), and
The local Rotary Club drew a raffle in the between set break. The only time that’s ever happened at a gig I’ve been to.
An oustanding evening in all respects.
They have got through a number of drummers! Chris Curtis was the original, and was responsible for finding a lot of the early songs. Sadly, he suffered from what we would now know as mental health issues in 1966 and was replaced by John Blunt for a couple of years. Billy Adamson was then the drummer right through to the 90s, and then Eddie Rothe took the drum stool through to 2010. Scott Ottaway drummed for them up until really recently, but was not offered the gig for the recent ‘Thank You’ tours in somewhat controversial circumstances – Spencer James got his drummer from his own band on board, much to the disappointment of many fans as Scott was a popular figure. I have my own theory – Scott had been pictured with former Searcher Mike Pender and that wouldn’t have gone down well, and also Spencer will be carrying on as something like ‘The Sound of the Searchers’ trading on his time with the band since 1985, so having the Searchers’ last drummer with him adds a bit of value.
Band politics, eh..?!!
Gives the various Sham 69s (Shams 69…?) a run for their money!
I saw Clive Gregson at a local village hall a few years back and there was a raffle during the interval, in which I was lucky enough to win some pot pourri.
That’s a legacy of his folk club years. All folk clubs have a raffle between one the embarrassing regulars and the booked headline act. First prize is a cd the booked artist has been cajoled to contribute, second prize one of the last of the stockpiled cds from when one of the regulars self-released his “Live at the Jug O’Punch” cd, 3rd prize 2 tickets for next week.
As often happened with the Hamburg crowd who suddenly struck it rich, after the Searchers’ Sweets for My Sweet hit in 1963 Phillips shoved out a couple of live recordings from the Star Club: Sweet Nothings/What’d I Say.
No 12-string jangling of course, just extremely fab and gear Merseybeat by a band that had done their time. I thought it was great and I bought it. As it happened I preferred the b-side – it used to go down a storm at the youth club. Just about every group around played it, but this still sounds pretty good.
The album Live at the Star Club is remarkably well recorded and a genuinely fine listen. There are also recordings called The Iron Door Sessions which were made as demos,before they were signed to Pye and are also well worth a listen, if only to show just how good they were back then. Given the dodgy quality of early Beatles material of the era, they are quite exceptional.
Never come across the Iron Door Sessions – that’s very good. I’ve always thought Tony Jackson’s bass gave them significant extra welly on the early stuff.
There is/was a BBC sessions album, but that has disappointingly light on early recordings, and I can’t find it on Spotify. There is a Live On Air 64/67 album on there which I wasn’t aware of, but it might be a compilation of previously released stuff.
Tony Jackson was the original lead singer of course, and their change of direction from Merseybeat to a more folk/rock jingle jangle sound coincided with him going. I have a great affection for both eras.
On Merseybeat, reference @deramdaze below, it became an irrelevant label very quickly in 1964 as people realised there were actually groups from elsewhere as well. I always preferred the ‘Beat Boom’ description for that time, but the pop world changed very quickly from cheery, grinning besuited groups to something altogether more earthy and rootsy with bands like the Stones, the Animals et al.
I’ve said before that not many Merseybeat bands made much of lasting worth, particularly those in the Epstein stable. Some good singles for sure, but even George Martin couldn’t do much with the likes of the Swinging Blue Jeans or the Fourmost. It is intriguing to think what Martin would have done with the Searchers (Epstein passed on them) – John McNally always bemoaned the way they were treated by Pye and how little studio time they were afforded.
Anecdote: in 1966 I was in a soul band that played at the Hertford College summer ball in Oxford. (The soc.sec. was a mate.) Also on the bill were none other than the Swinging Blue Jeans. We got paid £60, they got £40. How are the mighty, etc…
One of the Swinging Blue Jeans runs a music shop on an industrial estate near me outside Cambridge.
In the first Record Collector magazines I bought, the two genres in the back pages which seemed to really generate interest were Rock ‘n’ Roll and Merseybeat. We’re talking about forty years ago.
Merseybeat (the biggest pop act ever by miles, aside) then seemed to fall off the radar completely, chariddee versions of You’ll Never Walk Alone and Ferry Cross the Mersey probably not helping, and has never really recovered.
Meanwhile, Pysch/Mod/Freakbeat 45s, largely ignored previously, took over the reigns.
I suspect, if minded to, you’d get a significant amount of vinlys for your wedge now if you hunted down those (200 or so?) Merseybeat 45s.
Although the beeb weren’t able to broadcast their Glastonbury set, someone has posted this closing medley on YouTube
https://youtu.be/hARqTYwA3pM?si=Z4U90cRZYf2OuoYa
That was lovely!
Fab!