The Searchers: Beyond The Hits

Peter Checksfield chooses six songs from The Searchers that deserve wider attention. Peter is the author of new book The Searchers – Crazy Dreams!: Every Song from Every Session, 1963-2023, the ultimate guide to their extraordinary 60 year career.

Let’s Stomp (Demo 1963)

Just as The Cavern, a venue The Searchers appeared at only occasionally, was a major factor in The Beatles’ success, The Searchers owed much of their local popularity to the Iron Door Club in Liverpool’s nearby Temple Street. At The Searchers’ manager Les Ackerley’s suggestion, the band borrowed a tape recorder, and recorded a selection of stage favourites at an empty club. These were then pressed onto a handful of acetates, and sent to various record companies. Obviously not learning from their previous lack of judgement with The Beatles, Decca turned them down, but Pye’s young producer Tony Hatch was impressed enough to invite them to London for a recording session. For decades, it was thought that the demo was long lost, but it turned out that Tony Jackson had kept a copy. Released on CD in 2002, both the performances and the sound quality are surprisingly good, and compare favourably with The Beatles’ Decca tapes.

A December 1962 single for US rock ‘n’ roller Bobby Comstock, ‘Let’s Stomp’ was a live favourite of several Liverpool beat groups. Both Lee Curtis and The All-Stars (featuring Pete Best on drums) and Faron’s Flamingos would cover it on record during the summer of ‘63, but The Searchers’ fabulous demo with Tony Jackson’s uninhibited vocals and Chris Curtis’ wild drumming surpasses any of them.

Don’t Know Why (1965)

For what turned out to be The Searchers’ 5^th and final UK album for Pye, much of ‘Take Me For What I’m Worth’ was recorded in May and June 1965. Due to their declining popularity though, the record company was in no hurry to release it, finally doing so around the time of the single of the same name in November 1965 (there was some talk at the time of Brian Epstein taking over managing the group, but as he couldn’t prevent the commercial declines of Gerry and The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer with The Dakotas and The Fourmost, it is probable that he wouldn’t have been of much use to The Searchers either).

Although the band would never completely stop relying on outside material, Chris, Mike, John and Frank all wrote songs, which at their best were the equal of anything else they recorded. John McNally’s ‘Don’t You Know Why’ is an Everly Brothers-styled Pop-Rocker featuring superb Mike and Chris duet vocals, who sound remarkably like their idols. The song was deemed good enough for an American A-side, as well as a German B-side. The following year, Don and Phil asked The Hollies if they could contribute songs to their ‘Two Yanks In England’ album; with songs this good, maybe they asked the wrong band!

Almost There (1966) – The Tony Jackson Group

When Tony Jackson left The Searchers in the summer of ‘64, he had every reason to be confident. Always popular with fans, and now looking even better thanks to having his nose remodelled, he wasted no time in forming his own group The Vibrations, comprised entirely of London-based southerners. He also wanted to move away from his old sound, instead preferring the emerging tougher “Maximum R&B” of The Who and The Small Faces.

Major success never really came, but in the spring of 1966, the recently-renamed The Tony Jackson Group taped a 3-song session for BBC radio’s ‘Saturday Club’, and as well as raw, stripped back versions of their single A-sides ‘You’re My Number One’ and ‘Never Leave Your Baby’s Side’, they played a fabulous Kinks-influenced arrangement of The Turtles’ July 1965 B-side ‘Almost There’. Never released officially, fortunately the whole session circulates among collectors.

Crazy Dreams (1967)

When The Searchers’ charismatic drummer Chris Curtis quit the band in February 1966, it effectively took three people to replace him. Finding a new drummer was the relatively easy part, with the band quickly settling on London-based Mod and Keith Moon fanatic John Blunt. Getting someone to do the high harmony vocal parts came from, surprisingly, John McNally, who turned out to have an effective high falsetto, in addition to his usual baritone. Last but not least, they needed someone to do the on stage announcements. Mike and John both gave it a try, but weren’t comfortable in the role, so instead it fell to “new boy” Frank Allen, who turned out to be a natural raconteur, perfect for the band’s soon-to-start cabaret career (to Mike’s credit, he has since proven himself to be a confident and highly capable front man, even if he doesn’t quite have Frank’s gift of the gab).

The B-side of their final Pye single ‘Secondhand Dealer’ in November 1967, ‘Crazy Dreams’ is the kind of song that conjures up navel-showing ‘groovy’ female dancers and flashing multi-coloured lights. Featuring hard-riffing guitars, all-over-the-place drums, and lyrics like “Sitting up here in the sky, I don’t care ‘cause I’m high!”, it is far closer in sound to ‘S.F. Sorrow’-era The Pretty Things than The Searchers of old (it’s not hard to imagine The Pretties performing this in ‘What’s Good For The Goose’!). And this from the pens of Mike Pender and John McNally, a couple of down-to-earth Scousers with strict Catholic backgrounds who drank little more than Coca Cola!

Spicks and Specks (1973)

Following a commercially fruitless couple of years at Liberty, in 1971 The Searchers signed with RCA, releasing a string of fascinating singles that are well worth seeking out, and a rather less interesting album consisting of re-makes of past glories. Major success still eluded them, but for the B-side of 1973’s ‘Solitaire’, they recorded a surprise revival of The Bee Gees’ September 1966 single ‘Spicks and Specks’. In complete contrast to its smoothly-sung A-side ‘Solitaire’, Mike’s animated vocal is raw and raucous, while the backing is a combination of Rock and Classical, similar to what Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were doing with Wizzard and the Electric Light Orchestra around this time. It was a highly worthy single, but following its failure, RCA dropped the band from the label, and once again The Searchers were adrift without a contract.

No Dancing (1979)

By the late ‘70s, music inspired by The Searchers was cool again, with acts as diverse as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, The Pretenders and Rockpile all owing the band a musical debt. The problem is, it wasn’t cool to actually be The Searchers, but the 1979-1981 period at Sire records that produced the albums ‘Searchers’ (‘The Searchers’ in the USA) and ‘Play For Today’ (‘Love’s Melodies’ in the USA) was the closest they ever came to changing that, with music that somehow sounded contemporary without compromising the band’s strengths. Still in their 30s, Mike, John and Frank looked the part too, with trim builds, full heads of fashionably brushed-back hair, and an albeit temporary scrapping of the matching suits in favour of tight jeans, open-necked shirts and skinny ties.

‘No Dancing’ is the nearest The Searchers ever came to Punk Rock, with a sound somewhere between The Rolling Stones’ ‘When The Whip Comes Down’ and The Monks’ ‘Nice Legs Shame About The Face’. It’s a song that went down well whenever the band performed it in the more trendy clubs at the time, and would’ve made an adventurous debut single for the label instead of the jangly ‘Hearts In Her Eyes’ that was chosen instead.