The Searchers "Hungry Hearts" (1989)

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The Seachers “Hungry Hearts” (1989)

Forever In Love/Love Lies Bleeding/Lonely Weekend/Somebody Told Me/Every Little Tear/Sweets For My Sweet ‘88/No Other Love/This Boy’s In Love/Fooled Myself Once Again/Baby I Do/Push Push/Needles and Pins ‘88

Welcome, dear readers, to one of the most obscure albums on this website. First up the bad news: like many a Hollies album it was only ever released in Germany (a country where they seem to have particularly good music tastes it has to be said). It was only ever released once, back in 1989 which is – gulp – ever so nearly thirty years ago so your odds of finding it are (how can I put this?) slim at best. At the current time of writing it is currently priced at just under £40 on Amazon and costs even more on Ebay. And do you really want to be paying that price for an album that, as well as being one of our most obscure, is also one of the most 1980s, with not just one synthesiser playing on most tracks but about half-a-dozen of the little blighters all doing their own thing and drowning out the Searchers sound. Not that there is much of a ‘Searchers sound’ on this record – this is the only one the band have so far made after losing founding member, lead singer and guitar player Mike Pender who left the band to, ahh, ‘search’ for his own solo fame somewhere in the mid-1980s. That’s the bad news – the good news is that, if by chance you happen to somehow comes across a copy (or maybe if they re-release it one day?) what you are getting is just enough of that Searchers style to make your time worthwhile. And this is, after all, a band who never did release many records – the thought of owning one eighth of a band’s album releases is enough to make more than just obsessive monkeynuts anorak-wearing collectors want to search for it. And it all makes sense that The Searchers should make us search for their complete catalogue doesn’t it?

What you get on the weirdly titled ‘Hungry Hearts’ isn’t that far removed from the ‘other’ releases in the ‘Hearts’ trilogy – 1979’s ‘The Searchers’ (which has a lot of song about hearts on it) and 1981’s ‘Hearts In Their Eyes’. The Searchers have ignored most of their Chris Curtis-driven mid-1960s experimentation and gone straight back to being what they were in 1963: practitioners of contemporary pop with an emphasis on jingly-jangly guitars. There’s nothing that groundbreaking here and nothing as timeless as was heard in the 1960s. But The Searchers always had good taste and that never changes in any era: most of their cover songs are solid choices (shame they don’t write more of their own stuff though) and they instinctively understand what the period is all about (this time round everything sounds BIG, like the songs are wearing shoulder-pads) far more than many of their still-struggling 1960s contemporaries do. As with their new wave albums it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine The Searchers in this brave new world of synths and electronics and if you were a teenager back in 1989 and you heard this album on the radio (if you were German, perhaps, the only country that ever really heard it) then you would probably be hard pressed to guess that it was made by a bunch of musicians who were probably older than your own parents. If I have to listen to late 1980s pop by anyone for the rest of my life then – dear God – shoot me now, but failing that The Searchers would probably be my pick: they get the feel, the vibe, the tone, the air of arrogance and surfaceness that went along with everything in that era from Madonna to The Backstreet Boys. In a way thank goodness there was never a mid-1990s Searchers album because if there was then I can guarantee they’d all be doing a pretty good impression of The Spice Girls too!

New fans who don’t know much about The Searchers are well catered for then. But what about older fans? This one is a harder sell, mostly for reasons outside the band’s control. They have for this new album a new lead singer in Spencer James. He was a new boy back in 1989 and he was in rather a unique position amongst 1960s acts, at least until Carl Wayne and then Peter Howarth took over lead singing duties for The Hollies in the 21^st century: how do you replace a frontman whose been established for decades not just years and everyone expects to see? Odd to say it, but Spencer has now been a Searcher for a decade longer than Mike Pender ever was and about six times longer than Chris Curtis was in the band and yet this is the only studio album we have to judge his talents on, recorded back when he was still a youngster learning the ropes and settling into his Searchers duties. It’s a real shame this band haven’t given us an album since because you suspect he’d make a much better job of it now he has the confidence and his own sizeable fanbase to back him up – but back in 1989 he sounds a little unsure of himself and uncomfortable, somewhere between doing a Mike Pender parody and singing with his own excellent vocals. Sometimes he comes across as a little OTT and cod-operatic (‘Somebody Told Me’ is dreadful, like a combination of Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe singing in the same body – it even sounds a bit like ‘Barcelona’). Sometimes he sounds like exactly what The Searchers need in 1989 – a singer of range and versatility who sounds utterly at home in the period setting (‘No Other Love’) and you sense he’s only just starting to get the hang of this recording lark as the album sessions were over. Overall though he does as good a job as anyone can of replacing an established twenty-two-year-career singer and still making the part his own (it doesn’t help that his higher-pitched vocals don’t sound anything like Mike’s).

I’m surprised in retrospect how few reminders there of the Searchers sound in here just to make the connection between old fans that bit more obvious. Frank Allen gets the odd voc al here and there (‘Every Little Tear’ and ‘Baby I Do’, which oddly enough are as retro as you’d expect…but for the ‘wrong’ decade, sounding very 1950s-ish again like a few songs from ‘Hearts In Their Eyes’. The ‘Grease’ ship that made that decade popular again had sailed long ago by 1989). But that’s about it: there are relatively few cases of those famous Searchers harmonies (a shame given that when Frank and Spencer do sing together it pretty much sounds terrific). There’s precious little of John McNally’s wonderful jingly-jangly guitar (and when you do hear it the sound is buried underneath an avalanche of synths). And there are no flashbacks or throwbacks to The Searchers’ illustrious past – well, with two exceptions. We’re used to hearing The Searchers updating their old hits for a new audience. They did it in the early 1970s, they still do this in concert today, but here in 1989 (with both recordings dubbed ’88 because that’s when they were made and released as a single before being added to this album) they sound particularly odd. Would the 1988 remake of ‘Needles and Pins’ have been as big a hit? Probably not – the song is as great as ever and the guitar riff is a classic, but all those synths are hard to take and Spencer sounds far less comfortable as a Mike Pender-clone than he does sounding like himself. And ‘Sweets For My Sweet ‘88’ is actually worse, The Searchers’ silliest hit now beefed up with quirky synths and fake drums that sounds more like a punishment for old fans for living into middle age than a genuine attempt to reinvent the wheel. Thankfully the Searchers continued to do both songs ‘properly’ live in this period, which would have made for a far more useful bonus feature. One wonder what they thought they were trying to do: these recordings sound too yesteryear to appeal to new fans and too hideously modern to please their old ones.

The real gems on the record come from the parts when The Searchers pick up on the best of their previous two albums and present an older, wiser face to us despite the continual rather desperately ‘yoof’ sound of the LP. There’s a neat theme here of being betrayed and abandoned and the narrator’s vows that they’re not going to let this happen to them again, ev-uh. The ‘secret theme’ of this record is that life is too short to settle for second-best, even if the ‘immediate sound’ of this album is ‘hey, we’re young, life’s great, let’s party!’ which makes for an interesting dichotomy that probably only the secretly trendy Searchers could have pulled off. ‘Forever In Love’ is about how you can never forget someone you fell in love with, even if circumstances mean things never quite work out. ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is about how awful it can feel to lose the one you love after thinking it would last forever. Album highlight ‘Lonely Weekend’ tires of having to go through quite so many empty nights in a half-relationship that neither partner quite means. ‘Don’t waste my time’ sighs Spencer with the weariness of a singer twice his age. ‘Every Little Tear’ remembers every detail decades later as the narrator, now older and wiser, worries about how he behaved back in his youth when he didn’t know any better. ‘No Other Love’ worries that a past romance was the one that was meant to be in their life and that they’re now doomed to a life of loneliness. ‘This Boy’s In Love (For The First Time)’ is actually about finding love late in life – only after finding someone he can adore the way his peers did decades ago does a narrator finally admit that all his previous loves weren’t really ‘the ones’ and he was only keeping up appearances. ‘Fooled Myself Once Again’ though makes it clear how desperate the narrator is to believe that after so many years of living alone. ‘Baby I Do’ is another guilty song about missing someone that you treated badly and hoping that you will make it up one day. And ‘Push Push’ is about the rows and arguments that drive couples apart, but which can equally be pushed out the way if you really want to be together, rather than being used as an ‘excuse’ to part. This is, in terms of lyrics, the most grown-up set of songs The Searchers ever performed outside the ‘Take Me For What I’m Worth’ album fourteen years earlier, each one (the 1960s re-treads aside) concerned with older narrators looking back on their past and working out where it went wrong and vowing to do better next time. The sound, though, screams being young and youthful and teenage and living in the moment – it’s an interesting combination, with the songs for this record clearly chosen with care.

The ‘problem’ is that this record is one that would only have worked at the time – to everyone else whose come to this album since 1989 it sounds painful. That period doesn’t scream ‘contemporary trendy pop’ to us anymore, it screams ‘mistakes we shouldn’t have made from our past’ which means that ‘Hungry Hearts’ is never going to be quite as successful as it would have sounded at the time. Instead of slipping older words of advice to a young audience it now sounds like The Searchers were mutton dressed as lamb who should have known better than to swamp everything with quite so many synthesisers. It sounds now as if The Searchers were part of the problem, not the solution: that they were just falling in the same trap as everyone else of trying desperately to look young and trendy and coming out of it looking a bit stupid – especially now that the youngsters of the day are no longer young and trendy themselves (and are, worryingly, older now than The Searchers would have been at the time). Somehow you can’t imagine the Backstreet Boys and Bros of this world re-uniting and adding a hip hop backbeat to their music, which makes The Searchers’ a particularly unique experiment, matched only by their attempts at new wave.

Another contradiction in this album is that the songs seem to have been chosen with care (all of them fitting the album ‘theme’, whether consciously or not) but at the same time seem to have been arranged and recorded in something of a rush. There are four producers credited for this album who all worked on their own three or four songs at different dates snatched between Searchers tourdates in Germany that year – never a good sign of a cohesive LP. My ‘favourites’ are produced by Tony Hendrik, best known for co-writing Haddaway hit single ‘What Is Love?’ and his own 1970 hit single ‘The Grooviest Girl In Town’. A relative contemporary of The Searchers, he ‘gets’ their need to sound young without losing their middle-aged-ness much more than the others who struggle slightly and overcook the synthesisers. Other producers include Theo Werdin from German heavy metal band ‘Vatra’, Hans Steignen who ended up a German film composer in later life and the singer ‘Levy’ (who has only recently found big fame now he’s the age The Searchers were then, with the album ‘Rotten Love’ starting a string of hits from 2005 onwards). What’s interesting is that The Searchers worked with such a range of producers – big names, little names, trendy names, not-yet-famous names, all of them German. However none of their producers ever meddle with their sound – there are no German-language songs on this album, no local hip and trendy German bands stuck randomly over the top and very little sense that this album has been made effectively a long way from home. Which is a good move I think: the German market wanted another Searchers album sounding the way they always did, just a little bit more contemporary if possible, and they got it.

This remains, however, the weakest Searchers album of the eight for all sorts of understandable reasons. Spencer James if a fine vocalist and is, if you see him in concert today, a fine Searchers vocalist who makes those old songs his own – but that wasn’t true back in 1989 when he made this record as the first new member of the band in two decades or so. The two re-treads especially sound like a horrid drunken pub tribute act rather than a true Searchers recording. All Searchers albums cling proudly to the year in which they were made and the fact that this one was made in such a God-awful period for music makes listening to it in any year after around 1990 painful to swallow. The songs are good for progressing the album theme of ‘I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger’ (to quote fellow AAA star Ronnie Lane) but aren’t really that distinctive and song by song are easily the weakest selection the band ever did (even though there are lots of highlights, particularly ‘Lonely Weekend’ which is impressively ahead of its times and ‘Baby I Do’, which is impressively behind them). This album lacks the sheer pizzaz and energy of the band’s new wave records from 1979 and 1981 which did, I think, supplement The Searchers’ more natural attack that much better. Given the ridiculous price this album currently costs to buy, you’re probably better off saving your money for something else – like eight books from the AAA series we’re still vaguely hoping to print next year, the Searchers box set ‘Hearts In Their Eyes’ or enough money to pay for the air miles to travel to both Donald Trump and Theresa May to slap them round the back of the head and say ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing? The people have spoken – go now, do not pass go, do not collect £20000, go fade into obscurity the way you deserve!’

‘Hungry Hearts’ remains, however, simultaneously a deeply under-rated album. Nobody paid much attention to it when it came out, even in Germany. No one seems to have even considered re-releasing it even though The Searchers have a whole new growing fanbase in this day and age who’d love to hear it at a price they can actually afford. Due, I suspect, mostly because of licensing rights, this album gets ignored almost every single time The Searchers release one of their quadruple-yearly ‘greatest hit’ sets (the opening track ‘Forever In Love’ and the horrific ‘Needles and Pins ‘88’ are the only two songs you have any chances of hearing). ‘Hungry Hearts’ isn’t a classic, no, but it deserves one hell of a lot better than the obscurity and limbo it currently walks in. The Searchers remain a terrific under-rated band and if this is as low as they fall then, well, that’s still pretty high – unlike most of their contemporaries they really do ‘get’ how to make this music and have the songs to back them up. I just wish there had been a tiny bit more of the ‘old’ Searchers sound on here too in order to make it easier for us fans to navigate as well.

‘Forever In Love’ is perhaps not the best place to start. Imagine the most 1980s sound you’ve ever heard in your life. Maybe Guns and Roses backing Madonna on a Stock-Aitken-Waterman production with Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan dancing. Quadruple it. That still isn’t enough warning for how 1980s this soppy synth-fest is going to be. Clearly The Searchers are being ‘relevant’ here and yet what’s odd is that there’s not one note on this opening track that sounds anything like the Searchers of old – along with the new vocalist (and Spencer James tried hard but really isn’t this sort of a vocalist) there’s nothing here that remotely sounds the way the band did on their last recordings in 1981, never mind the 1960s. That’s a shame because, in another parallel universe, this could have been quite a fun Searchers song – it’s about undying devotion which was always a big Searchers theme and could have sounded good with some Rickenbacker guitars. Performed like this though the song is just too soppy, too synth-based that you need to cut through eleven pairs of shoulder-pads and endless synth work to work out whether the song is worth your while paying attention to – and, really, it isn’t. What’s more the song isn’t even that original but seems to have been ripped off Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady In Red’ – and when a song you write is ripped off one of the worst songs in history and yet doesn’t even sound that good, you know you’ve got problems. One of the worst horrors on the album and indeed in this book. Horrid.

Good luck if you managed to get through that last song without choking. Luckily ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is your reward and as anonymous as it is, at least it sounds like a song that The Searchers should be doing. The muscly backing kinda sounds like Merseybeat if you shut your eyes, there’s a fun descending riff that’s kinda creepy (though typically for the period it loses a lot of its impact played on a synth on the ‘twinkly’ setting’ and there’s a typically Searcher-esque lyric about how love has gone wrong and lies bleeding on the floor. There are even some harmonies on this one and it’s just so good to hear Frank in the vocals again, as proof that The Searchers are in there somewhere. It’s a shame that Frank didn’t sing lead on this song though because this is one of those tracks that needs to strike a bit of a sour note, it’s a dark dangerous creepy journey through love and Spencer, good as he is on straightforward love songs, is less sure of himself on songs like this one. Still there’s a shouty chorus that makes everything (temporarily) sound alright and Billy Adamson celebrates his twentieth anniversary with the band by playing one of his better, boomier drum parts too. Add a few Rickebackers to this lot and I’d be happy.

‘Lonely Weekend’ is by far the album highlight. The Searchers were always good at ballads, but this one gains from having the muscle and might of their Merseybeat days over the top of everything and John McNally’s guitars front and centre where they should be, drowning out the synths for once. Loneliness and despair features in many a Searchers ditty and this one particularly suits the band, as Spencer sounds really good singing about another lonely evening spent on his own with no one to see. He sensibly plays this song cool and light, making out that it’s no biggie, I mean he’s spent every other night alone as well so why not this one too? But oh that backing really offers up a sense of the real despair behind that façade: McNally’s wailing guitar is desperate, angry, snarling, unable to hide the passion at its centre. Even the synth backing works quite well here, with only two of them on this track – one that plays some really sad minor chords a la Rick Wright’s work with Pink Floyd and one that sounds, aptly enough, like a doorbell, as if offering the hope that the narrator’s luck is going to change and he’s going to be surrounded by visitors any minute.  But no, this isn’t that clichéd a song and instead this song is full of lots of drawn out sounds, with ‘ro-o-o-o-om’ now the antithesis of the excitement of ‘When You Walk In The Room’, now turned into a life where no one is going to walk into that room and where the room is in fact trapping the narrator and confining him to a lonely grave. An exquisite song expertly played, this should have been the template for the rest of the record. Good as the song is, see how much better things are when The Searchers get their guitars out of their cases?!

‘Somebody Told Me’ is, alas, the sound of Englebert Humperdinck singing an Andrew Lloyd Webber entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s so cheesy all the supermarkets in France wouldn’t contain as much dairy as this and everybody in the band seems to be going the extra mile to make all this torturous. Spencer is the worst victim, assuming that this slow dramatic weepie is best sung in an OTT slow dramatic voice that borders on the operatic. I’m really not so sure I agree and that goes triple for my ears which are still ringing from playing this song yesterday. However he’s not the only one – the synths are so plodding, the bass work so generic, the drums so tinny, the guitars so weak, that everything adds up to what surely must be the second most depressingly poor song in The Searchers’ catalogue – only next to ‘Forever In Love’ does this song sound good as at least it isn’t obviously ripped off something icky (instead it feels like lots of yukky songs thrown together into a pot and melted into a grey-brown stew). As for the song itself, I’m not sure what it’s trying to say. Not that I play this song very often, but the first few times I thought it was a ‘Please Please Me’ song – a third party song where the narrator was trying to get two friends hitched. But the more I play it and attempt to untangle the words (this is one of the few AAA albums so obscure there isn’t a lyric page dedicated to it on the internet) the more I figure that it’s set a bit after that and is about somebody telling the narrator what the love of his life has been up to since they parted. That might explain why Spencer sounds so miserable singing this song, but it still doesn’t give him a right to frighten all pets within a ten mile radius every time you play this song. Once again horrific, but at least that will be it now for the album’s lesser moments and things get very much better from here.

‘Every Little Tear’ is a fun quirky little song that’s much like Frank’s material from the last two Searchers albums, as he figures – mostly rightly – that the 1980s music scene is just a more elaborate version of the simple pop songs he grew up on in the 1950s. This odd but catchy little song is like two Searchers templates stuck together: we’ve got the bouncy can’t-sit-still rock and roll sort, which sounds mighty good even if for the most part the riffs have been given over to the synths again and not the guitars or bass. And then over the top we’ve got a sad little lyric about how the narrator remembers every little hurt he’s ever been sent which recalls such previous weepies as ‘A Tear Fell’. The two never quite meet up in the middle as well as they should, but it is at least a clever idea with Frank seemingly the only person whose even noticed the hurts and the insults thrown his way as he weeps sadly on one of his two lead vocals on the album in the middle of this song while everyone else parties. This song also makes the single best use of synthesiser on the album as the many quick-flowing notes really do sound like little tear-drops. Though Spencer has the more obvious ‘lead singer’ voice (and is, I suspect, understandably nervous on his first trip inside a recording studio here) Frank is a much more instinctive vocalist and adds a great deal of extra passion and feeling into his work. It’s a real shame the Searchers didn’t give him more space for quirky songs like this after Mike Pender left because this song and ‘Baby I Do’ sound much more obviously Searchers-ish.

The biggest difference in vocals can be heard on ‘Sweets For My Sweet ‘88’, the first of two recycled recordings from the previous year included on this record. Like many a re-recording it’s pointless, bordering on blasphemous, and seems to be here more as a way of conning fans into buying this album to hear a song they might recognise or as an advert for the fact that the touring band still sounds surprisingly close to the real thing, even if most of the new album doesn’t. I do however prefer this version to the re-recording the band made of the song back in 1972. Back then, with only the rhythm section not there for the original recording, it seemed even more pointless, especially slowed down for no apparent reason. This recording is closer to what would have happened if The Searchers had really been a new band in 1988, young and hungry for the current pop dynamics and if nothing else this new arrangement proves how well they understand the pop market of 1988: instead of being direct this version is sly, instead of being pure and innocent it’s slightly knowing, instead of being pure joy it’s all slightly sour, but those harmonies (missing for much of the record) still sound great and the song is still played with bags of energy, unusual for a band who must have been truly sick of playing this song after a quarter century of doing it most shows they ever played. I still don’t get why it’s on this album though where it only shows up how poor most of the band’s material now is (and let’s face it, ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ may have been one of the most successful Searchers songs, but it was never the greatest or deepest track the band ever did. We’ve had three versions of this song now and still Tony Jackson’s breathlessly exciting original is the best by sheer character alone, even if Mike and Spencer may well technically be better vocalists. Though only John McNally played on all three he has less to do on this version than ever before, with a very perfunctory guitar solo, which is a shame. Sweeter than some other recordings perhaps, but not as much of a treat as you suspect it should have been.

‘No Other Love’ finds us back in more familiar 1989 territory and shows off both sides of Spencer’s singing. The verses are genuinely good as he sings with the control of Mike Pender and builds up to a crescendo…it’s that climax that’s awful, OTT and unbelievable as he seems to take The Searchers’ histrionic recording of ‘Solitaire’ as his template for how to sing with this band. Still, those few seconds of every chorus aside, this is one of the better songs on the album that’s genuinely sweet as Spencer becomes the perfect boyfriend, promising to always be there for his girl, to always stand beside her, to forever dry her eyes. Not since ‘Til I Met You’ have The Searchers been quite this openly romantic and it’s good to hear, love songs being one of their better suits down the years. There’s a restless riff that works quite well too, although it’s slightly edgy paranoid feeling is ever so slightly wrong for this track I feel: this song should bounce with the loved-up happy-go-luckyness of ‘When You Walk In The Room’, not glower in the corner like ‘Goodbye My Love’. This is also one of the songs on the album I would love to remix on the album the most because this is a timeless song that would work well in any era – it’s just such a shame that it happened to be made in 1989 when it works the least well, with all those synths set on what seem to be the setting ‘ugly’ just get in the way. Still, even with that problem, this is a cracking tune that sounds as if The Searchers are the right band to be singing it.

‘This Boy’s In Love’ is the closest track in feel to the new wave songs of the 1979-1981 ‘Sire’ period. It’s another 1950s sounding song updated to the slightly more fashionable sound of the early 1980s and actually all the better for it, as The Searchers get to play with the gusto and energy of old and sound very much like a youthful energetic band compared to most of their peers. This song isn’t quite as deep as perhaps it ought to be though. The song doesn’t really say much more than the title, but there is at least the feeling that this song comes as a ‘shock’. This is a middle-aged narrator whose spent his whole life, uhh, ‘searching’ for the one while all his peers were playing the field and he’s so overjoyed that this wonderful thing he’s been dreaming of for so many years has finally happened to him that he can’t contain his excitement anymore. I’d have liked to have heard more about why and what happened in the past, but I guess this narrator is too excited to think rationally so I’ll let him off that one! The Searchers sound mighty good here. Spencer sounds at his best on these straightforward gusts of energy like this song and he sounds better still when surrounded by Searchers harmonies, his straightforward voice sounding particularly good alongside Frank’s slightly more arch and sour harmonies. It’s all good fun this track and it’s good to hear the band so enthusiastic about their music again after so many years away from the studio – even if they’re effectively only doing this for their American audience.

The country-rock weepie ‘Fooled Myself Once Again’ is the best of this album’s slow songs, mostly thanks to some more excellent harmonies between the pair of singers, though it has to be said that’s a relative measure. The Searchers’ ballads can be divided in two – the songs like ‘Til I Met You’ and ‘Sea Of Heartbreak’ that are as gorgeous as any slow songs by anybody out there and the rather boring dull ones like ‘Too Many Miles’ and ‘A Tear Fell’ where not much is happening. This alas is one of the latter, where the chorus takes so many seconds to sing and is repeated so many times across the song that it feels like time is standing still, while you know where all the lyrics are going from the title alone. Basically the narrator is so desperate for love he’s fallen in love with the wrong chick, again! ‘Goodbye My Love’ this ain’t, as there’s no sense of anything ‘real’ in this song and it’s clearly written to appeal to as many teenage girls as possible, not stretch The Searchers or their sound. However a very strong band performance almost rescues this, with Spencer singing properly this time and the appearance – at long last – of some classic McNally Rickenbacker, which plays ‘across’ the song in a U2 type way rather than simply doubling what the synths are doing. You wouldn’t want to hear this track too many times, but in context it’s not bad at all.

‘Baby I Do’ is a fun second Frank vocal and an even more 1950s derivative song that in other circumstances would come surrounded in a bunch of ‘shooby-dooby-doos’. The tune sounds a little like Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’, but don’t hold that against this track as the song is much more inventive, with a busy synth-bass riff that’s almost surely played by Frank and the first ‘woahs’ I’ve heard on an AAA album in some time. The lyric is as simple as it gets – Frank tries to pluck up the courage to get a girl’s number and when she asks if he loves him replies ‘Baby I do!’ But better simple and fitting than complicated and wrong; The Searchers know exactly what they’re doing and turn in their best band performance of the record, gathering round the central synth riff and everyone performing at their best. Billy’s drums, real this time, sound especially good on this song whilst Frank’s lead vocal is a delight, twinkling with mischief throughout as he tries to act pure and innocent even though by this point he’s come a long way from the young sheltered life he had before becoming a Searcher. The 1950s revival was just growing cold in 1989 as people realised just how dumb and misogynistic the story of ‘Grease’ was and how bad many of the songs actually were. This song should have inspired a whole new explosion of love for the other decade that taste forgot as it’s such infectious good fun. You sense even in 1964, though, The Searchers might have rejected this for being too ‘simple’!

‘Push Push’ is the album’s most groundbreaking song. Not necessarily good – it all sounds a bit awkward with its stop-start structure and McNally’s flamenco guitar and a cold-hearted synth and artificial drum beat are not natural bedfellows. But at least it’s a sign that The Searchers were still trying to expand their sound right up to the end of their life as a recording band (they still continue touring to this day, with everybody but Billy still in the band from this line-up). Spencer sings sweetly about needing to ‘push’ through a relationship. In the song it’s about a romance that’s grown a bit stale and where the couples have just stopped talking in quite the same billing and cooing way they did when they first met. In context, here at the end of the album The Searchers knew was going to be their last for a while, it sounds more like a message to fans that the band can’t sit still and want to push hard to break new ground the way they always used to. This is certainly a song that’s trying hard to ‘push’ boundaries, but alas it’s not that memorable, just weird. There’s also the odd aspect that as well as ‘pushing’ on, the narrator is ‘pushing’ down, keeping a lid on feelings that are rising to the surface because he doesn’t want to think about the faults in his relationship. That seems an even odder message to leave us with: while I can imagine Mike Pender writing this song based on what he thought about the band and their direction in the 1980s (there’s a lot of similarly snarky songs on his period album – or rather albums given how many times it was re-issued with ‘extra tracks down the years - which is around as good, no better or worse, than this album), this seems a very odd and troubling message for a band who should be trying to put on a united front. Maybe The Searchers pushed just a little too far with this oddly unlikeable song?

The album ends with ‘Needles and Pins ’88. Slightly more together than ‘Sweets For My Sweet ‘88’ but still rather pointless, it seems very odd hearing Spencer singing where Mike once did and yet trying to follow his style to the letter. To be fair Spencer does a really good job in a difficult situation: Many fans hadn’t realised Mike had left the band when they heard this song on the radio so close are they are they. It’s all a little fast though, performed with the same breathless enthusiasm of ‘Sweets For My Sweets ‘88’, even though it’s not really that kind of a song. It should be slow, depressed and vulnerable but the production coating gives everything a surface sheen that coats everything in some sort of a fog and the performance isn’t so much guilty and sorrowful as bright eyed and bushy-tailed. What was, in 1964, one of the most daring and pioneering singles of its day, proving that there was more to Merseybeat groups than pure adrenalin and noise, has by 1989 become part of the furniture, just another pop song that nobody really means anymore designed to sell records. Even more than ‘Sweets’, this re-recording is a real shame. Even McNally’s guitar part – the major selling point of the Searchers’ original – is reduced to a cameo and swamped with synths. Whilst proving that The Searchers are still a good band, they’ll do this song much better in period concerts and this new arrangement is a farce, the Windows Ten of AAA updates offering things that nobody wanted in the first place without asking us and taking everything that made the original inventive and quirky.

Overall, then, ‘Hungry Hearts’ is the weakest Searchers album. It makes sense that this is the album recorded in Germany as the band’s career plummeted and bashed out as quickly as possible in four goes with four different producers – it sounds fragmented and a little desperate, as any band would after seven years without a record contract. However there are nuggets of greatness throughout as The Searchers prove occasionally that they still very much have what it takes to match any other band around in 1989. The bursts of enthusiasm on a song like ‘Baby I Do’, the new pioneering sound of ‘Push Push’, the shoulda-been-a-hit of ‘Lonely Weekend’, the cleverness of the happy-yet-sadness of ‘Every Little Tear’ – there’s enough here (just about) to satisfy old-timers while if you were the main demographic for this album on release in 1989 (young teenage Germans who had a respect and interest in ‘oldie’ music but also a deep intense knowledge of the current music scene) then you’d have gone home from the shops very happy indeed. It’s now in our modern age this album has become a bit of a problem: fans who adore The Searchers in concert (as they should) naturally look for the only album by the current line-up (drummer aside) and ‘Hungry Hearts’ comes as a shock, with Spencer sounding uncomfortable and over-singing. Plus 1989 is hardly an era most fans would want to revisit and yet this album is so of its time it pretty much comes with a rubber stamp, having dated far more in thirty years than the original Searchers quintet have in fifty. Not to mention the fact that, all these decades on, it seems likely now that The Searchers’ reputation and legacy will rest here, compilations aside, rather than on a more substantial and original work. There are many reasons to hate this album now, then (the current expensive price tag being another major point against this CD) but at the time, with this album a possible stepping stone to greater things, there was and is still much to admire. The Searchers are hungry desperate for attention and even if they don’t always go about getting that attention in the right way, it’s just good to hear them at all. It would have been nice if it had ‘Sounded Like Searchers’ just a little more, but even taken for what it’s worth, as one eighth of the output of one of Britain’s greatest ever bands, most of the time it’s enough.

A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF SEARCHERS AND RELATED ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:

'Meet The Searchers' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-133.html

'Sugar and Spice' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/news-views-and-music-issue-57-searchers.html

'It's The Searchers' (1964) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/its-searchers-1964.html

‘Sounds Like Searchers’ (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-searchers-sounds-like-searchers-1965.html

'Take Me For What I'm Worth' (1965)  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-5-searchers-take-me-for-what-im.html

'The Searchers' (1979/1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-searchers-19791980.html

'Play For Today' aka 'Love's Melodies' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-searchers-play-for-today-aka-loves.html

'Play The System' (B sides and rarities) (1988) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-89-searchers-play-system-1988.html

‘Hungry Hearts’ (1988) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-searchers-hungry-hearts-1989.html

Surviving TV Clips  and The Best Unreleased Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-surviving-tv-clips-1963.html

Solo Recordings 1964-1967 and 1984 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-solo-recordings-1964-1967.html

Non-Album Recordings Part One 1963-1967  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-non-album-recordings-part.html  

Non-Album Recordings Part Two  1968-2012 

http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-non-album-recordings-part_20.html

Live/Solo/Compilation/US LPs/'Re-Recordings In Stereo’ Part One: 1964-1987 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-searchers-livesolocompilationus.html

Live/Solo/Compilation/Rarities Albums Part Two:  1990-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-beach-boys-15-big-ones-1976.html

Searchers Essay: It’s All Been A Dream http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-searchers-essay-its-all-been-dream.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-searchers-five-landmark-concerts.html

The Searchers "Meet The Searchers" (1963) (News, Views and Music 133)

You can now buy 'Once Upon A Time - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Searchers' in e-book form by clicking here!

The Searchers “Meet The Searchers” (1963)

Sweets For My Sweet/Alright/Love Potion No 9/Farmer John/Stand By
Me/Money//Da Doo Da Ron/Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya/Since You Broke My Heart/Tricky
Dicky/Where Have All The Flowers Gone?/Twist and Shout

‘A million little tunes I shared, went through your heart and through your head…'

‘Meet The Searchers’ is a real wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing. The tacky and retro (even then) front cover, the ‘likes and
dislikes’ questionnaire on the back cover and especially the lead-off hit
single were an attempt by management to make the Searchers look like even more
clean cut kids than The Beatles. The Searchers are grinning inanely the way all
good boy bands should and this looks less like a roll and roll cover than a
pin-up poster of a bunch of film stars. Everyone bought this record on the back
of ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ expecting the same pop confectionary – but that was
never who The Searchers really were. That image has dogged the band ever since,
arguably damaging them even more than The Hollies, despite the fact that
neither band were that clean cut at all (nor were The Beatles come to that).
The Searchers were from the rougher end of Liverpool (as was Ringo), they all
had a variety of hard jobs they continued with when music came into their lives
(unlike the art student Beatles, of which only George had to give up a job for
Hamburg, one he was going to get fired from any minute) and the band would have
been laughed out at town had they played ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ on stage before
actually making a record (a rare event for anyone in those days). But if you
shut your ears and open up your ears a little bit louder then The Searchers
were as great as anyone in the 1963-65 period when music was still sunshiney
pop and rock that was primal and rough around the edges – and as we’ve argued
elsewhere on this site The Searchers were showing just as much progress as any
other group when Pye quietly dropped them when their five-album contract was up
(had the band been under a long-term offer, as per The Hollies at EMI, they’d
be much better known today without question). Those of you brought up on The
Stones and The Who from a couple of years later might not hear it, but there’s
a raw animal quality to even The Searchers’ most polished work that belies
everything their management wanted to tell you about them. Meet The Searchers
for yourselves not by playing the first two icky hit singles (‘Sweets For My
Sweet’ and [23] ‘Sugar and Spice’, which were made under duress to become
much-needed hits) but by listening to the band’s output as a whole. And, even
if this debut is not the best record they made (because of circumstances, it
might well be the worst) it is still worth hearing and pretty darn impressive
for the times.




Before I go any further, here’s a bit of background
as to why I’m writing this review now and why I’m arguing this so hard. There I
was plugging my site on Yahoo Answers the other day when I came across the
daftest question I’ve ever seen (well, outside the hundreds of ‘why do people
still listen to The Beatles when there’s Justin Bieber records around to buy?’
questions which are clearly trolls trit-trotting under some bridge somewhere).
Someone was asking, genuinely I think, why The Searchers were so famous and
sold out so many arenas when they were all ugly and a poor second to The
Beatles (as if beauty was the only reason The Beatles sold so many record
rather than brains). As I hope you’ve seen elsewhere on my site it wasn’t from
lack of talent but lack of luck. The Searchers were never that famous, they
were always playing second fiddle to The Beatles, not through lack of talent
because they were unfortunate enough that Brian Epstein happened to choose the
Cavern Club to walk into, rather than The Iron Door Club a few yards further
down Matthew Street (in fact, Epstein did look into signing The Searchers not
long after signing The Beatles, but in typical Searchers luck nobody told the
band, who’d spent most of the afternoon in the local pub The Grapes and weren’t
at their best that night – ironically had Epstein seen The Beatles as the
drunks they usually were circa 1960 chances are he wouldn’t have had anything
to do with them either). They were also unfortunate enough to end up with Pye
as a record label, one that didn’t really understand the whole teenage craze
for rock and roll and were still expecting to make a quick buck before the
whole genre collapsed by 1970. Like fellow label-mates The Kinks, The Searchers
were worked into the ground with a rigid record contract and a strict schedule,
without the chance to grow the way The Beatles did even though their early
songwriting promise suggests that Chris Curtis, at least, could hold his own
with anyone in the early-to-mid 1960s. The Searchers never broke into the big
time, despite a great run of singles (and an even more terrific run of
B-sides), being seen as below even Gerry and the Pacemakers (who had another
fine and under-rated run of singles, but not much else to offer) and its one of
the major discrepancies of music collecting in the 1960s that today The
Searchers are as forgotten as they ever have been. Frankly, I’m furious that
The Searchers (and to a lesser extent The Swinging Blue Jeans) are still passed
over the way that they are and I long for the day that they do play the arenas
my fellow Yahoo seems to have imagined in his sleep (the best the band get
today is in the cabaret circuit).And as for being ugly, well, they look pretty
darn good to me, what do we care when bands sound this good (that’s why they
became musicians, not fashion models) and, anyway, have you seen Ringo?




The reason all this matters is that The Searchers had
the potential to lead the pack. In fact, had you asked an average teenager in
the street in Liverpool circa 1960 what local bands they’d seen playing live
chances are they’d a) look at you blankly because they never dared to go down
the filthy backroads of Liverpool’s club scene and b) they’d have told you Rory
Storm and the Hurricanes, The Big Three – or Johnny Sandon and The Searchers.
They’d probably never heard of The Beatles, whatever band name they were using
at the time. It’s worth remembering that when The Searchers started they saw
themselves as a backing band, a la the bands of the day like The Shadows, and
only started singing songs themselves when Sandon suddenly – and to them
inexplicably – left them in 1962 after a terrific run of local performances
(and a stint in Hamburg just as tiring and arguably more popular than The
Beatles’). In that short space of time The Searchers had successfully managed
to do what few other bands of their vintage had done - balance the rock and folk and country parts to
their set, adding Jimmy Reed and Johnny Cash covers which was unique for the
day among the Liverpool club scene and brought the Searchers a lot of respect
from people back in the days when pure rock was seen as a backwards and
unfashionable step. In an alternative universe somewhere its not too hard to
think The Searchers would be the household name and I’d have to spend my time
telling you what an under-rated band The Beatles were, with only a handful of
records to their name. In any event, with the world now flocking to see The
Beatles the gigs dried up and the band got desperate, starting to add more of
their own vocals into the set and the band only really broke through to the
country at large in the wake of the fab four’s success, with everything that
sounded vaguely Liverpudlian being snapped up by record companies everywhere
(I’m amazed EMI signed Gerry and the Pacemakers but not The Searchers and
Swinging Blue Jeans, incidentally, both much bigger draws in 1962/63).




This week’s album review is a case in point for, on
the one hand, how much talent and charisma the band had and yet how much of it
was frittered away by a production team that failed to grasp the importance of
what they had on their hands the way George Martin did. Fans today still reel
in amazement that The Beatles managed to record a full ten tracks (and one
unreleased song) in a single multi-hour session in 1963, squeezed in between
gigs. Well, The Searchers went one better with this debut LP, recording eleven
of the twelve songs (‘Sweets For My Sweet’ having been taped earlier alongside
non-album B-side [44] ‘It’s All Been A Dream’) within five hours. Like ‘Please
Please Me’, you can hear flashes of the genius that are to come but what you
hear most are the rawness and energy of a band pushed to the limits and still
unsure of themselves in a recording studio, a place where they’d never been
before. Like the first (self-titled) Grateful Dead record everyone is so
nervous that the performances are played at twice-speed, giving this album a
nervous rush of energy and excitement that’s quite unlike the style the later,
mature Searchers settle down to playing from 1964 onwards. Sometimes this hurts
the songs with some crappy performances that should never have been released
(the band buckle under the pressure of recording ‘Twist and Shout’, a song they
barely know, in similar circumstances to The Beatles and have never sounded
worse); then again sometimes it improves them (‘Since You Broke My Heart’,
surprisingly a bit of a dirge in the Everly Brothers’ hands, sounds fantastic
here with the band right on the edge and living every word). You have to say too
that delivered at such a speed a bit of variety would have suited this album,
which rather breezes past in one long half-hour long whoosh (even the ballads).





There’s also a rumour doing the rounds that this
first album was due to be recorded live in the Iron Door Club (George Martin
also discussed recording ‘Please Please Me’ live at the Cavern but thought the
microphones would short out with all the sweat and mildew and nixed the idea;
presumably The Searchers’ idea was dropped for the same reasons). It’s a shame
they never did because it might have been terrific hearing the band’s rockier
material from the first two albums (all regular parts of the stage set back
then) played at a ‘proper’ speed with real audience atmosphere where The
Searchers felt safest and most comfortable. Instead there’s a feeling across
this album that this band have never quite settled their nerves and that they
spent the entire five hours about to break into nervous laughter at any moment.
Most people think the idea of a live recording this early on was ridiculous,
but to these ears it’s a great idea: with the band’s loyal audience in the room
cheering them on what better way to lose the nerves? And the period technology
wasn’t necessarily as bad as we think. To hear what I mean, look out for the
Big Three’s EP ‘Live At The Cavern’, perhaps the best of all these primitive
early recordings from Merseybeat bands recorded between 1962-63; if The
Searchers’ debut had been half as great as that record I’d have been thrilled. As
it is, the one fault with this album is that all sounds terribly rushed, as if
the band have been urged to record their songs as quickly as possible without
any chance for re-takes and with as little time as possible spent making them
comfortable with the recording equipment (which is probably exactly what
happened; the difference is that it shocked everyone when the statistics about
the making of ‘Please Please Me’ came out because it doesn’t like an album that
was quite so rushed). Good as ‘Meet The Searchers’ sounds at times, you can’t
help but think how good it might have sounded if made at a later date in the
same more piecemeal way over the later albums (which were made in shock horror
– one whole week not a day).




That said, given that the band had a grand total of
five hours to make this album, it’s surprising how much subtlety they do manage
to inject it with the clock ticking. Tony Jackson is in his element fronting
the band, before the power struggles of the next two albums (that see him
silenced by early 1964 and ousted by 1965) and unlike some collectors I’ve
heard I love his high-pitched tones, which is to the early 1960s what Elvis is
to 1956, Marc Bolan is 1971 and Liam Gallagher is 1994, breezy effortless pop
perfect for capturing the feel of the era and caught somewhere between
hard-edged fire and singalong smooth. Mike Pender, the figure most people were
expecting to become the lead singer, is a fine second to Jackson, with a jangly
rhythm guitar very similar to John Lennon’s and a richer, deeper sound to add
to the Searchers’ usual mix. John McNally becomes an instant guitar hero the
way that George Harrison did after ‘Please Please Me’, updating and often
speeding up the guitar sound of the original songs into a distinctive
recognisable sound with his Rickenbacker, the sound that everyone thinks Roger
McGuinn invented in 1965 (McGuinn included) but here two years early. Best of
all, Chris Curtis is the greatest drummer of the era – along with The Hollies’
Bobby Elliott – charging the band on with the looseness and originality of
Ringo and the power of Charlie Watts. I’ve always been surprised that more
people don’t rate his drumming higher – even John McNally in the sleevenotes to
the ‘Iron Door Sessions’ talks about how much better he was as a showman than a
drummer, which seems cruel for someone so inventive and powerful and, well,
original as Curtis. Despite the attempts by Pye to groom Jackson as ‘the star’,
back in the days when most bands still came with a singer’s name listed before
their band, its notable that three of the group get their own vocals on this
record, with Curtis tackling ‘Stand By Me’ and
Pender ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ It is, however, Tony’s
greatest hour in many ways and he’s the band member who sounds most comfortable
here, the one most eager to seize this chance at stardom by the horns and make
the most of it. We’ll be getting to hear much more of The Searchers being
themselves on later albums, as we will with pretty much all the bands around in
1963, not yet aware how long their career will last or how much competition
they will have, pleased just to be recording anything and have a record to show
to their friends and family.




There is ambition on this record too, though. Back
in August 1963, when The Beatles weren’t yet a household name (with just one
top ten hit) Merseybeat was newer and rawer and so much more dangerous than,
say, hip-hop is today. By the end of the year, pretty much everyone in Britain
under thirty is going to have a go at sounding like this record but for a few
short months The Searchers (only the third AAA band after The Beach Boys and
Beatles to release a record, beating The Hollies by a few weeks) are pioneering
the art of making what had passed for ‘black’ music in the 1950s sound faintly
acceptable to parents’ ears and what used to sound respectable sound new and
dangerous. The Searchers’ choice of material to cover was always more obvious
than The Beatles (who used to look for obscure B-sides and album tracks in case
another Liverpool band did them in their act too), but they cast their net
wider in their early days. This album features songs originally cut as Motown,
as folk, as novelty pop and pure rock and roll and it’s all treated with the
same coating of hurried harmonies and driving hi-hat drumming. This gives ‘Meet
The Searchers’ an eclectic range that belies its vintage, with Pete Seeger’s
‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ a deeply unusual choice for a ‘rock band’ to
record, here alongside The Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and rock and roll songs
both period and stretching back a decade. In 1963 this was still unusual,
bordering on revolutionary and marked the Searchers out as an intelligent band
beneath all that power and drive.




You can also hear a development even at this early
stage in their career. If you can get hold of the now-sadly-out-of-print ‘Iron
Door Sessions’ (the long-lost Searchers demo tape, recorded at their ‘local’
venue and then left to rot in Tony Jackson’s attic for forty-odd years) then it
makes for an interesting comparison to this album, being even rawer than this
record. Amazingly only one song from their debut album was being played in
these early days and that’s ‘Sweets For My Sweet’, still back then a brand new
song the band have been asked to learn. While the finished product is light on
its feet (in fact, a bit too light on its feet), this early version is a
struggle from beginning to end, the band clearly unused to it and not yet able
to perfect the ‘ooh’ing backing vocals or, in Jackson’s case, play the bass
whilst singing lead (still a novelty to him after years as a backing vocalist
to Sandon). Of the other songs, two of them get re-used for second album ‘Sugar
and Spice’ (an altogether more balanced affair – see news and views no 57), one
made it to third album ‘It’s The Searchers’, one made it to fourth album
‘Sounds Like Searchers’ and the rest were never returned to: a shame in the
case of the driving [3] ‘Jamabalya’ (the one great Larry Williams song John
Lennon never recorded), Chuck Berry’s [6] ‘Maybelline’ treated as a unique
jazz-funk-rock hybrid, a sweaty version of [11] ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ much
rougher and more exciting than both The Beatles (BBC) and The Hollies’ versions
and finally best of all [9] ‘Let’s Stomp’ which, well, out-stomps every other
rocker and this record (and shows how raw the band could be at their best).
Compare it back to back with The Beatles’ Decca Audition Tapes (heard in part
on Anthology One) and its clear which band have the greater talent (although
admittedly this set was taped in January 1963, not January 62 as per The
Beatles’ version) and this debut album might have been better had the band
stuck to re-recording these songs instead of some of the lesser material they
use here. Having said that, enjoyable as these tapes are (still the earliest
recordings of The Searchers known to exist) in a Beatles-Hamburg type way, the
improvement in clarity of arrangement and musicianship is huge. The Searchers
have clearly put a lot of practice into these arrangements, even if the nerves
of the studio puts them off a little, and the speed with which they grow is,
like The Beatles, perhaps the most impressive part of their whole story.




Detractors of The Searchers complain about how there
isn’t a single song written by the group on this album – a true point, but
that’s because the Searchers’ material had all been used up on the B-sides of
the band’s early singles (Curtis’ ‘It’s All Been A Dream’, out as the flipside
of the first single, is the equal of anything on this record) and Pye simply
had less faith in the band than EMI had in The Beatles (The Stones didn’t start
releasing their own songs on albums till 1965 as a point of reference, by the
way). The biggest talking points of this record today are the #1 hit single (chosen
purely to show that the band could do ‘commercial’) and the covers of two songs
the Beatles also did, ‘Twist and Shout’ (mocked then for coming so soon after
the fab four’s version) and ‘Money’ (mocked now by people who don’t realise The
Searchers covered this Barrett Strong single some three months before the fab
four). Those who know their Beatles may also notice a cover of ‘Stand By Me’ on
this record, already something of a Merseyside standard some eleven years
before John Lennon’s cover on his lost weekend solo album ‘Rock and Roll’. The
other eight tracks, though, are the real Searchers, as eclectic a band as any
the times would allow, with a power that was seen as verging on raw in the days
before the Rolling Stones became household names and making what used to sound
clichéd and dull a few years before sound exciting and ‘now’. ‘Alright’ is a
fiery feisty rocker, ‘Farmer John’ is rattled off with good cheer, ‘Love Potion
No 9’ is good fun’ (though like the band I’m surprised it was quite as big
Stateside as it was), Tony shines on the sweet and sour structure of ‘Ain’t
Gonna Kiss Ya’ and The Searchers excel on the exquisite ‘Since You Broke My
Heart’.




Talking of eclectic, just check out the back cover
where the band talk about their music collections. Tony Jackson’s favourites
range from ‘rhythm and blues and country and western to opera’. Mike Pender
like rhythm and blues and country and western too, although curiously as the
only member of the Searchers not to have worn a beard at some point, he counts
shaving as his greatest dislike! John McNally like rhythm and blues and
ballads. Meanwhile Chris Curtis likes ‘records and mad magazines’ (he’d have
loved Alan’s Album Archives then, while his record collection was said to be
huge!) As with the rest of The Searchers’ output, you’ll find yourself
wondering how this disparate band of individuals ever ended up coming from the
same home town, never mind ended up in the same band, but for 1963 at least
this range of tastes and styles means that The Searchers are ahead of the pack
and only a smidgeon behind The Beatles. Sure this album is rushed, it all needs
to be played slower and there’s perhaps a bum note or a missed cue too many to
make meeting The Searchers on ‘Meet The Searchers’ the rewarding experience
that listening to our AAA classic albums ‘Play The System’ and ‘Take Me For
What I’m Worth’. But there’s surely enough even in this early album to disprove
the idea given on Yahoo Answers that The Searchers didn’t deserve to be famous.
Not bad for five hours’ work by a band who’ve never played in front of
recording equipment before! On the contrary, they deserve to be better known,
better loved and better appreciated. Let’s meet them all over again...




The
Songs:




The album starts with the hit single [1b] ‘Sweets For My
Sweet’, a song chosen by producer Tony Hatch from the band's recent
repertoire as their best chance of a hit - much to their annoyance given that
they disliked the song by and large and one that, for all its instant success,
the band probably wishes they’d never heard after years of playing it live and
fans thinking it was all they could do. As a one-off novelty song in the band’s
set it’s actually a fine performance of an OK song, originally a minor hit for
The Drifters in 1961 but dressed up to sound more exciting, more flamboyant and
more, well, ‘now’ (back when now was 1963). There’s an electric chug familiar
from The Beatles, but this is also a song that’s light on its feet, the very definition
of a wolf in sheep’s clothing as all the lyrics and cutesy harmonies point
towards a sweet romantic relationship but the primal backing and especially the
jittery guitars point towards sex. It is, had it been a one-off the band had
needed to get out of their system, great as evidence of just how far the sheer
brutality of The Searchers’ music could have been turned into prettiness. But
as the band’s first big hit and the first track on their debut record it gives
off all the wrong signals, marking the band as a novelty pop cover act with
syrupy overtones, something that follow-up copycat hit [23] ‘Sugar and Spice’
didn’t help (in the same way, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ long term hopes were
doomed as soon as ‘How Do You Do It?’ became a hit, however good their later
material, and I thank my lucky stars again that George Martin had the sense to
reject the song after hearing how little faith the Beatles had in it). This is
not the sort of ‘acting’ song you want to do at the start of a career when
nobody knows who you are yet, but more the throw of the dice you send out to
keep your audience on their toes; sadly given that no one outside of Liverpool
knew who this band were just yet everyone assumed ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ was the
whole cake, not the sugary icing on top. That said, even this song has a
rawness The Beatles had already passed on by this time: the drum sound to this
song particularly is wonderful, from the opening drum roll to the heavy
rat-tat-tatting on the cymbals during the song’s main riff hinting at the sheer
weight of lust going on behind this song’s cutesy lyrics (the oom-pah beat
after the line ‘thrills me so’, as if the narrator’s heat is beating faster, is
such a clever touch). Tony does a great job at sounding sincere on lyrics which,
frankly, are beneath him and exist only for the pun on the ‘sweets’ being
brought for the ‘sweet’ loved one and which are basically busked past the title
(if the narrator really cared about his girl he wouldn’t bring her so many
candies to rot her teeth!) Good as Tony is though, its Pender and Curtis’
tongue-in-cheek backing vocals that steal the show, innocent enough to make it
to the record but sarcastic enough to show their hearts aren’t fully in this
song. Pretty darn good for a band at their first recording session, co-writer
Schuman recognising that this sped-up arrangement – so different to how the
song was planned and how The Drifters did it – was ‘infectious’, perfect pop
confectionary that doesn’t think too hard or for too long. All in all, it’s a
better song and performance all round than ‘Sugar and Spice’ and this song so
reeks of 1963’s joy and optimism with earthy rootsy backing I’m not surprised
it was a number one hit – though you
still end up wishing that The Searchers hadn’t done it and had made something
more, well, substantial as their first single and then they might have added
another hundred odd songs to this book instead of dying out when songs like
this become the most unfashionable thing you can imagine.




[23] ‘Alright’ is more like it and exactly the sort
of track that would have gone down well had the band played this album live. I
wish I knew more about this song, which was written by unknown composers Jerry
Ross and Lester Venadaore and which doesn’t seem to have been recorded by
another band. Were they, perhaps, friends of Tony Hatch desperate to get some
money out of his young charges (is it, just possibly, another Hatch pseudonym?
It seems odd that there’s so little known about these writers). This sounds, a
little like the last track, a piece written by people who have no idea how rock
and roll works but want to have a hit anyway so recycle bits from different
places: there’s a chorus chant of ‘Hey Hey Hey Hey’ that’s a direct steal from
Little Richard, lots of cries of ‘alright alright alright!’ that had long been
a favourite of first blues and then rock and roll songs and lots of ‘yeah yeah
yeah yeahs’ nicked from The Beatles. For all that, though, somehow The
Searchers turn this clichéd empty song into a track that sounds as if it means
everything. Tony is totally believable as the smitten narrator desperately
trying to get the girl of his dreams to notice him, a tight backing track has
Chris flying all round his kit and the two guitarists are bang on the money, a
mixture of careful rehearsal and inspired improvisation, not to mention Mike’s
delightful hollered harmony part. The song’s stop-start structure would have
confused lesser bands but Chris is firmly in charge and everyone just follows
without question, the song ending a triumphant peal of cymbals that’s truly
exciting. Even more than ‘Sweet’s this is an infectious song that you can’t
take your ears off for a second, perfect both for the clubs where the Searchers
would have been trying to draw in the crowds to buy a drink and for the all
important second track on the first Searchers album that proves just what this
band can do away from the singles chart. Given how 60s these performance tricks
are and how 50s the song is (cool, calm and detached), the effect must have been
even more exciting to hear at the time, the real sound of something new
arriving. In all, one of the best of The Searchers’ early days and their best
rocker on this record.




[24a] ‘Love Potion Number 9’ is the ‘other’ song from this album best known to collectors
today, although contrary to most thoughts it was only ever a hit in America,
not in Britain (where it became a kind of ‘bonus’ single in the wake of ‘Sweets
For My Sweet’ in the same way that ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eight Days A Week’ were for
The Beatles). It’s one of those fun novelty songs Leiber and Stoller used to do
as a break from writing their ‘serious’ songs about a teenager down on his luck
buying a bottle of love potion from a mysterious gypsy seller and using it on
the girl he’s fallen in love with. He tells us he’s been ‘a flop since 1956’ –
the first of many Searchers narrators down on their luck in the love stakes –
although oddly the band don’t update this timing the way other bands do even
though they’d have been all of fifteen for the most part (though Tony was
eighteen that year). Alas a policeman walks by before he has a chance to meet
up with his girl and hilarity ensues (though The Searchers follow The Coasters
in dropping the original ending: ‘I had so much fun I’m going back again, I
wonder what will happen with love potion ten?!?’) Had this been a later song
than its 1950s vintage and by a less gentlemanly writing act I’d put this down
as a ‘drug song’ (especially the ‘drug bust’ ending), but chances are it’s just
a cute novelty number. Not quite as funny or as subtle as Leiber and Stoller’s
similar song ‘Fortune Teller’ (as recorded by AAA bands The Hollies and The
Who), this song still has a sweet daftness about it that suits The Searchers’
earnest deadpan delivery. Lyrically it’s a good fit for The Searchers, a band
who always sounded as if they were going to make a joke with you before
stealing your lunch money (unlike the sheer ugliness or the pure brutality of
The Rolling Stones and Who). Musically though it seems odd: it’s a music hall
patter song a million miles away from The Searchers’ musical twist on sheer
blunt force and after you know how the band should sound in time to come leaves
you waiting for the pay-off: the cynical middle eight or the bonkers guitar
solo or the sudden power charge near the end. Instead this song just sits
there, wise-cracking, from first note to last. In many ways The Searchers
struggle in years to come because they sold the public another dummy with this
song (released as a single in the USA against their knowledge); once again
everyone assumed this was the ‘real’ sounds like Searchers and fans will get
more and more disappointed with every single as the band revert to type (even
if I, for one, think the real underlying Searchers sound is better). However
even given this song’s high cute factor I’m surprised that this song took off
quite the way it did as The Searchers did similar song much better: while
Jackson and Pender have terrific voices separately, heard together here
(without Curtis’ harmonies for some reason) it just sounds a mess, Curtis’
drumming slows down painfully by the middle and the guitar solo in the middle
must be the tiredest sounding in Merseybeat (outside The Beatles’ cover of
‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’ perhaps), a simple ten note phrase repeated
twice over. Sadly I don’t know in which order these songs were recorded (Pye
weren’t as obsessive with their cataloguing system as EMI) but I’m willing to
bet its near the end somewhere, with The Searchers just too tired to be light
on their feet the way this comical song demands. Yet again it sadly had The
Searchers penned as being a novelty band akin to Freddie and the Dreamers
rather than the rockers they were at heart, the right song for the wrong band.
Mind you, has anybody really nailed this song? The Clovers original and The
Coasters’ better known covers don’t quite get this song’s ironic sigh quite
right either. I’m amazed this song was quite as big as it was, The Searchers’
biggest American hit at #3, but there you go.




[25a] ‘Farmer John’ is
a mess too, but in a much more exciting almost punkish way, with instruments
colliding up against each other in the mix and a frantic, hurried garbled vocal
from Jackson and Pender, both of whom are only just about hanging onto this
track by their fingernails as it rattles along just outside their control. The
‘wo-ah-yeah, ah-hah-hah’s in the chorus quickly become tiring and the garbled
chorus is repeated too many times for comfort (even if John’s first
professional vocal, a stern cameo saying ‘now look a here!’ as the dad, steals
the show). All that said there’s an urgent pace to this recording that’s
genuinely thrilling and again I’d have loved to have heard this song recorded
live as there’s nothing wrong with the song or arrangement, just the
performance where the band aren’t quite connecting to each other but are still
too inexperienced to ask for a re-take. Like much of the LP, poor ‘Farmer John’
is taken at about twice the speed as normal compared, to say, Don and Dewey’s
little heard original from 1959 (though it was he Premiers who turned it into a
hit) although this franticness does quite suit this song about the teenaged
narrator who is deep in lust. After all, this isn’t just any girl but one with
‘champagne eyes’ on a delightfully over-written lyric that conjures up the mad
rush of the melody, the narrator falling headlong into a song that has him so
stirred up by love that he isn’t thinking straight. Just look at the lyric
after all: how well does he know this girl? The lyric doesn’t even provide her
name to us, even though it has every description of her under the sun. Have
they even met and is this a stalking song? (There is a line about how she
‘tells me lies’, but for all we know the ‘lie’ is that she doesn’t want to go
out with the narrator). It certainly seems premature for him to go to her own
father to ask to take her out (and what does the narrator want to achieve by
this anyway – his agreement? Her hand in marriage? Or, more the way it’s
written here, for him to get her on side to agree to go out with him?) This is
a teen so in love he’s not thinking straight at all, with Pender’s guitar
buzzing around his head like a bee while Jackson’s bass and Curtis’ drums have
the narrator trapped, sending him down a tight Chuck Berry style groove that
seems to have him entranced and is never letting him go. Alas writers Terry and
Harris seem to have given up on their song after a first flush of inspiration
and there’s none of the clever twist-in-the-tail ending that made other comedy
songs of the day like ‘Fortune Teller’ and indeed ‘Love Potion No 9’ so
memorable (when done right). As a result, we never find out what happens to
this couple or what the farmer thinks about this sudden interest in his
daughter ‘with the champagne eyes’. Incidentally you can hear the polar
opposite of this performance’s mad rush on fellow AAA band Neil Young and Crazy
Horse’s ‘Ragged Glory’ from 1990 where everything is slowed to a crawl – a mess
as The Searchers’ version is, at least their energy suits the song rather
better.




As for [26] ‘Stand By Me’, it’s surprising that this
Ben E King song – a big hit in America but not Britain in the late 1950s –
became such a key song to Liverpool bands. A regular in The Beatles’ set list,
John Lennon had a big hit with this song in 1974 as part of his ‘Rock and Roll’
covers album and the fab four may well have done their own version on one of
their first records had The Searchers not beaten them to it here (there was an
unspoken rule that one band never copied another’s material, although ‘Twist
and Shout’ ‘Money’ and [36] ‘Some Other Guy’ all ended up being special cases).
Chris Curtis slows the tempo down slightly for his cover version and, rich as
his voice is in comparison to Tony Jackson’s, he simply can’t match the power
of the original and seems to realise this, dropping his slot as the ‘romantic
one’ for wilder rock and roll on future albums. He also seems to understandably
having problems playing the drums while singing at the same time – a necessity
of these rushed sessions where overdubbing was a luxury too far (the recording
slows down painfully in the middle, so much so that you can hear Pinder
struggling to work out where to place the opening notes of his guitar solo).
Curtis does seem to have identified with this lyric though; perhaps as a
mistake or maybe from a gut feeling that he was already suffering from the
manic depression that was left undiagnosed for so long, he changes the words
here, urging ‘whenever I’m in trouble…’ rather than the more usual ‘when you’re
in trouble…’, turning this song into a heartfelt plea not to be abandoned. This
makes, given the way Chris’ and indeed Tony’s life turns out, this song seem
something of a retrospective cry for help but the odd thing is that Chris isn’t
crying but being reverential, copying the sombre tone of the original to the
letter (the only time on the album The Searchers do this). This version simply
sounds hollow now after Lennon’s throat-ripping exercise on this song, which
needs to be heartfelt and desperate – how typically that on this most
passionate band’s most passionate album they choose here to become detached and
distant from us! The Searchers’ version isn’t bad, especially for the time
period, it’s just lacking something - mostly another take when the band might
have been fine.




The first side of the album ends with The Searchers’
version of Barrett’s Strong’s lone hit [27] ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’. While the
original is a kind of leisurely laidback discussion of how money can solve all the
world’s problems, The Beatles’ November 1963 version is a howl of
poverty-ridden despair. This earlier version, most likely from March 1963, is
the stepping stone between the two, an urgent call to arms about need and greed
that can’t match The Beatles’ much discussed version but is still pretty darn
impressive. Whilst the fab four’s version goes in peaks and troughs, The
Searchers stick to a steady beat for most of the way, building up a head of
steam rather than playing cat and mouse with the listener. Tony again tries
well with the vocal, but declarations of love and hurt pride are more his thing
than greed and this deep primal song doesn’t suit him very well – by contrast
its McNally’s howling bass-heavy guitar, circling the song like a hawk, that displays
the most passion in this performance. They should have given this song to
Curtis to sing, as his take on the similarly driving angst-rock of [10] ‘Ain’t
That (Just Like Me)’ on the next album knocks spots off this recording.
Actually the song doesn’t suit any of the band that well; The Searchers were
searching for many things during their career but unusually for a 1960s band I
never felt riches were it (or why would the band self-destruct at all the wrong
moments and follow their head over their heart?) It’s an unusual 1960s indeed
that calls for greed over love (that may be why the 1979 cover by The Flying
Lizards did so well: this is a much more 1980s song although funnily enough,
given The Searchers’ high standing with new wave acts, they were as likely to
learn the song from The Searchers as The Beatles). Lacking the threat and
acting of the fab four version, this is another case of right song, wrong band,
definitely the wrong take.




[28] ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ is a real curio. Surprisingly
this is the only Merseybeat take on a Motown song that was another one every
Northern British band played in their setlists in the early 1960s and is
similar in many ways to ‘Boys’, the ‘other’ Phil Spector-written/produced song
everyone did. Unlike ‘Boys’, at least the band updated the lyrics from girl
band to boy band so that the Searchers are singing her about ‘Jill’ (not ‘Bill’
as per the The Crystals’ version) and also add a cute guitar-drum battle after
every chorus that’s the highlight of the song, Pender and Curtis really pushing
each other to the limits. Even with the similar re-stylings on ‘Please Please
Me’ it still would have sounded deeply odd to the rock and roll knowledgeable
public to hear four white boys sing a black girls’ song and even though its
decidedly less gender-heavy than ‘Boys’ the band can’t quite throw off the
feeling that lyrically this song is not for them. Musically they cope better
with a sense of drama that comes to a head at the end of each line, the track
suddenly switching to double time (and ending on a cute tah-dah ending). In
fact Curtis’ eccentric drumming steals the show, especially the one
-two-three-four-whackity-whack-whack ending which suits this cute and (even by
1963 standards) naive song about falling in love, perhaps chosen for the record
because lyrically its the closest thing in The Searchers’ catalogue to the daft
cuteness of ‘Sweets For My Sweet’. Of course the title ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ means
nothing and shouldn’t really fit but, like many of Spector’s 1960s songs, it
somehow does. Cute but not up to the best of this album, it’s interesting to
hear that The Searchers’ fascination with Spector (which exploded into life on
fifth album ‘Take Me For What I’m Worth’) started so early.




[29] ‘Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya’ is much more like it, a
much more ‘Searchers’ kind of song on which they sound much more comfortable,
despite this being yet another song originally written for a girl band (The
Ribbons, an act only known nowadays for this song). Jackson’s lead is bright
and full, Pender’s mirrored second vocal gives the vocals depth and Curtis’
half-mocking ‘woo-ooh’s at the back give the song a really original flavour.
Like many of the best Searchers’ best arrangements there’s a real contrast
between the semi-serious and single-note verses and the funny, melodious
choruses that make the song sound like a real journey every time we travel from
one to the other. Basically it’s a narrator in a huff, someone whose been kept
waiting by the girl he loves and who keeps running around with someone else.
Rather than hate her, though, the song keeps switching from the minor key to
the major key, his adoration showing through and giving him away long before he
hits the ‘just crazy about you’ line (his line ‘you won’t even know if I care
at all’ is clearly a bluff). Again, it would have been fun to hear this song
played live or at a later date when the band are more used to the studio as tis
version is still terribly scrappy and more than a little fast, but all in all
this is one of the band’s better performances of the period and with a ‘style’
uniquely Searchers, not just something The Beatles or Gerry and the Pacemakers
might have done, perhaps because it treads that thin line between heartfelt and
hilarious so well. This is, you could say, the missing link between the
Searchers as heard in the single charts and the ‘real’ them as heard on album.




My favourite song on the album, though, is [30] ‘Since You Broke
My Heart’. The Everly Brothers’ folky original was always ripe for
re-picking in a rock format with its great big open sobbing chords and angry
accusatory lyrics and its perfect for a band who get by through the sheer
weight of their emotional commitment. This is the one song here where The
Searchers improve quite a deal on the original (and I say that as an Everly’s
fan), perhaps because this song could have been written for them (The Searchers
were always more comfortable in songs where things go wrong than when they are
winning!) Pender and Jackson fit together better than usual on the close harmonies,
each of them heading in separate directions (Tony’s sneer and Mike’s tears) but
meeting in the middle more often than normal. Curtis gets plenty of chances for
his eccentric drumming that rattles around the song like a man trapped trying
to find his way out. McNally’s guitar urges the song on, restlessly chugging
away, looking for a chink in the armour, so caught up in his own emotion that
he’s stuck in place. Above it all soars Pender’s lead guitar, the sound of
howling as it picks up on a phrase that’s a lot more heavy-handed on the
original but sounds a perfect part of the arrangement here. As for the song
itself it is impressively deep for 1963 (or indeed 1959 when the Everlys did it
as the flipside to hit single ‘Let It Be Me’): it feels as if the narrator is
crying genuine tears on a song that’s dark and sombre. Everyone keeps giving
him advice, telling him that his romance was just a silly crush, the way every
other teen romance is in pop songs. They even tell him to stop crying and man
up. But the narrator ‘kinda feel I never will’ as all he sees is gloom and
despondency, the loss of the love of his life going so much deeper than usual
pop fare. The song then seems to be heading for the usual trite
things-will-be-alright scenario with a picture of the girl back in his arms but
even then something strange happens, with the narrator sighing ‘but I have the
feeling I never will’, quite a brave thing to say to a teenage audience back
then! The Searchers always excel when there’s real emotion in a song and this
is one of the best of their earliest achievements, gritty yet pretty, and
totally believable. Interestingly there are lots of lyrical references to ‘the
blues’, often listed as an influence for both The Everlys and The Searchers,
but both versions of the song are pure rock and roll (perhaps with a touch of
folk). This song should have been a big hit, both times over.




After a relative improvement on side two, [31] ‘Tricky Dicky’is back to the tired arrangements and performances of the first half of the
record, being a rather undistinguished Leiber/Stoller rocker about a teenager
having his girlfriend stolen from under his nose. The Searchers didn’t have to
look too far for this song: it’s the B-side to Ritchie Barrett’s [36] ‘Some
Other Guy’, a favourite amongst Liverpudlian bands then and now. However
there’s a reason this song never took off in quite the same way: it’s a mess as
a story, the narrator switching from first person to third as we first see him
breaking out of prison enviously as we work on a chain gang and then are him
being betrayed by a girl he stops to chat up on the way. This odd lyric, which
is never quite sure if Tricky Dicky is a true villain or lovable rogue,
includes an early reference to being ‘stoned’; while The Searchers were almost
as clean-cut in this regard as their reputation, it is true that Chris for one
was already quite a pill addict and would surely have been familiar with the
hidden meaning behind the word (when Dicky is drugged) even if it wasn’t really
part of the world he lived in just yet. The Searchers try to liven up the
original with a rocky arrangement, something that works fine in the case of the
shrill harmonies and McNally’s almost grungy guitar, but Curtis’ characteristic
drum rolls just sound like they’re intruding into the wrong song. The whole
thing sounds awfully short too, even for the period, although at (2:08) it’s
actually only the fourth shortest song on the LP! There’s really not much more
to say about this recording, which tries to go for effect rather than subtlety
and, like much of this record, would have been better served by the later, more
experienced Searchers as there are some good touches on the arrangement but
they’re kind of lost in the speed and nerves of this delivery.




[32] ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ is, in retrospect, this
album’s most important moment and the one track that none of their peers would have ever
considered putting onto an LP in 1963. Most of the Merseybeat era bands, The
Beatles included, won’t be getting into folk until 1964 and won’t really touch
true melancholy until 1964 at the earliest and yet it’s the put-down,
laughed-at, soon-to-be-mocked-for-staying-still Searchers who got there first.
Admittedly their performance of this Pete Seeger classic doesn’t do him or them
any real favours, but just for a pop and rock band not known for their subtlety
to be considering doing a song like this from the purist folk world is huge.
The Searchers don’t even change this arrangement that much: the acoustic guitar
is switched for electric and there’s a bit of drumming but it’s the harmonies
(between Mike and Chris) that drive the song on, while there’s no attempt to
dumb the lyric down which was always one of Seeger’s best. Indeed, this could
be considered the earliest AAA recording about war, with haunting images of
young soldiers died too soon, their graves turned to new life when flowers grow
out of them (the unspoken and worrying thought being that dead and decomposing
bodies are great for compost though Seeger probably had the poppy fields of the
first world war on his mind when he wrote this). The clever part of the song is
that it never specifies which war, the pained chorus sighing ‘when will they
ever learn?’ as if the narrator is immortal and apart from the human race,
looking over as each generation seems doomed to repeat the same mistakes. This
is very much a hippie song which – combined with the band’s understanding of
the early genre on songs like [99] ‘He’s Got No Love’ – makes it even more of a
crime that Pye never let the band make a psychedelic record (I reckon it would
have been their best). Just having this song on an album in 1963 meant for
teenagers is a brave move, but alas the performance isn’t as special as the
decision to sing it. The Searchers will go on to do many more folk tunes and
generally with more care and attention than this rather slapdash performance,
singing this piece oddly with less sincerity than ‘Sweets For My Sweet’.




The album then ends with its safest way of ensuring
a sure-fire hit. [33] ‘Twist and Shout’ was the most popular song of 1963 bar none
thanks to The Beatles’ release in June that year and the public took this song
to their hearts more so than even ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Please Please Me’ (it
never was the single but did become the title track of a Beatles EP that was in
the charts for well over a year). What few people outside Liverpool knew was
that The Beatles’ arrangement of this Isley Brothers song was only one of
dozens of different versions being played up and down Merseyside. The
Searchers’ attempt to jump on the Beatles bandwagon is probably less
copycatness, as some people claim, as petulant jealousy that they didn’t get to
release their own raucous version of the song first, coupled with management
pleas for them to sound like their rivals in an epic misunderstanding of the
rivalry between all the bands back then. The Searchers don’t know this song
that well – chances are they backed off singing it the minute The Beatles
started becoming famous for doing it and were never as protective as they were
over ‘Money’ or [36] ‘Some Other Guy’ (which both bands continued to do).
However this is the band’s second ever time in a recording studio, their
producer has no interest in getting anything out of them other than sales and
no one understands the unspoken rule that one band will never do another band’s
song;. So The Searchers dust this song down and sound deeply uncomfortable
about the whole exercise. For a start they’re a band, much more so than The
Beatles, built on emotion and there isn’t really any in this song. They’re also
a band who, even compared to their rivals, are British through and through;
raucous and wild as their Hamburg tapes are its notable how little shouting,
whooping or yelling they do and they’re certainly not going to do that in front
of a producer and engineer rolling their eyes at them for being juvenile.
Instead what we get is a very dry performance with Tony on lead while Mike and
Chris sing behind, one that’s driven by a sanitised version of The Isley
brothers’ riff. The ‘ahhhs’, which The Beatles turned into a call-and-response
scream of joy and energy, sound particularly tired, with Pender for one
sounding like he’s opening his mouth up wide for the dentist’s drill. There’s
no passion in this performance, no excitement, no rock and roll or indeed twist
and shout; it’s not that The Searchers’ performance is bad (perhaps because
they’re still learning it they turn in the tidiest performance on the album
behind the hit single), just that they aren’t living this song. And if you
don’t live and breathe this song then it’s a dumb song about dancing, nothing
more. The one part of this song that does work is the finale: rather than climb
to a huge climax The Searchers go a different way to their rivals and stick on
a gruff guitar part that brings the song to an assertive halting stop (which is
actually much better for dancing to).




As ever, then, this album ends with The Searchers
clearly in The Beatles’ shadow on territory the fab four had marked as their
own. For most people, then and now, The Searchers never quite escaped that
shadow – and yet I’d like to think that they easily could have done had the
people around them given them the confidence to be themselves a bit quicker.
Few bands have the brilliance of three first-class vocalists the way The
Searchers do and yet they don’t often use that harmonic blend on these songs,
singing in ones or twos. Few bands have the sheer oompah power of The
Searchers, but they’re not often allowed to let it roll, always being made to
tidy it up or sing songs that then settle down for a cuter chorus or key change
instead of just letting go. The Searchers have two of the finest guitarists in
the business yet the longest guitar solo here last just six seconds (‘Alright’).
The Searchers can do ballads, particularly folk ballads, better than almost
anyone else with a subtly unusual for the era, but they simply don’t have the
time in five nervous hours to re-create in the recording studio what they’ve
carefully honed for years back in the clubs. The Searchers needed nothing more
than a bit of extra help, but in their song choices and especially single
choices the people around them were nothing more than a hindrance. Rushed as
this record is, even in comparison to ‘Please Please Me’, there’s an undeniable
something about this band which means that they could and should have been much
bigger than they were. I guess this whole article has just been my way of
explaining to the guy who posted that question on Yahoo Answers that The
Searchers never got the chance to play stadiums, not because of any deficit on
their part but because of how the cards fell and how badly and quickly
Merseybeat fell from favour circa 1965 (when, sadly, The Searchers’ contract
was running out). Alas, my answer got deleted before anyone else had a chance
to read it (my answer was long – of course it was! – a deletion that seems to
be typical of both my luck and theirs). However, those of us who have a fond
regard for Merseybeat and can see past the ‘holes’ and ‘whatmighthavebeens’
will know how great The Searchers could have been and still can be, if only we
can get their records accepted by a wider audience. My answer to critics who
see The Searchers as a poor second to The Beatles is to play them ‘He’s Got No
Love’, a single from 1965 and dabbling with psychedelia a full two years before
the summer of love and way ahead of the pack. Failing that (it is a hard record
to find, after all), heck any of their records will do because they all have
their moments when The Searchers sound like the best little band in the world
(although sadly they all have their misfires too). Meet The Searchers? They’re
not quite here yet but blimey are they worth meeting when they can be
themselves and don’t have the need to keep pretending. There’s still way too
many even serious collectors of 1960s music who pass this band by even now and
oh so few times they really got the chance to shine that only the few fans like
us really know who The Searchers were. Change that now – put that singles
compilation and go buy a Searchers album right now!

A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF SEARCHERS AND RELATED ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:

'Meet The Searchers' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-133.html

'Sugar and Spice' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/news-views-and-music-issue-57-searchers.html

'It's The Searchers' (1964) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/its-searchers-1964.html

‘Sounds Like Searchers’ (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-searchers-sounds-like-searchers-1965.html

'Take Me For What I'm Worth' (1965)  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-5-searchers-take-me-for-what-im.html

'The Searchers' (1979/1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-searchers-19791980.html

'Play For Today' aka 'Love's Melodies' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-searchers-play-for-today-aka-loves.html

'Play The System' (B sides and rarities) (1988) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-89-searchers-play-system-1988.html

‘Hungry Hearts’ (1988) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-searchers-hungry-hearts-1989.html

Surviving TV Clips  and The Best Unreleased Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-surviving-tv-clips-1963.html

Solo Recordings 1964-1967 and 1984 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-solo-recordings-1964-1967.html

Non-Album Recordings Part One 1963-1967  http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-non-album-recordings-part.html  

Non-Album Recordings Part Two  1968-2012 

http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-searchers-non-album-recordings-part_20.html

Live/Solo/Compilation/US LPs/'Re-Recordings In Stereo’ Part One: 1964-1987 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-searchers-livesolocompilationus.html

Live/Solo/Compilation/Rarities Albums Part Two:  1990-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-beach-boys-15-big-ones-1976.html

Searchers Essay: It’s All Been A Dream http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-searchers-essay-its-all-been-dream.html

Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-searchers-five-landmark-concerts.html