Speaking Of The Searchers:
Pass Their Music On!

The Searchers ranked second only to The Beatles in the ranks of 60's British pop. For a bunch of goody-two-shoes church goers, who to this day claim to have been the clean cut side of 60's British pop, they wore remarkably pointed winkle pickers, producing incisive pop gems the excellence of which ensured and ensures transcendence of place and time, style and genre. Brilliant pop music is timeless, it does not really date. Listen to the best Searchers records, and you'll see what I mean.

I met the band in the reception of BBC Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, England, around 1999. They were in Birmingham for a residency at Ronnie Scotts. Truth is I had blagged my way into an interview, and it was in fact my first assignment. Fancy having to interview your heroes on your first job! It was very exciting. Through the swing doors burst John McNally and Frank Allen, original Searchers and frontmen of the current non Mike Pender line up, the former being in my opinion the superior group by far.

Frank as I remember was very fashionably dressed and smelt nice...John was wearing casual sports clothes, Searchers spotters. Anyway before this gets too sad I'll continue... We talked about the fact that a serious crisis hit when Mike Pender left the group. John and Frank had an urgent meeting. He and John knew they had to get a new lead singer immediately, and they were so very fortunate to get Spencer James right away. As it turned out, they never had to resort to doing even one show after Pender left without a lead singer. It was felt that Pender had split the band for mercinary financial motives, and Frank assured me that I wouldn't hear a bad word from them about him. At which point a word so rude, so naughty and so beyond the pale ensued from John McNallys lips that frankly, I was ashamed to be British.

I have seen both Pender's and Frank and John's lineups of the group, and to me there seemed little comparison, with the latter being superior by a considerable margin. After all, as McNally pointed out, he, John McNally, started the group. Maybe his vision is still guiding his line up to this day. Of course its a shame there was a fragmentation. Musicians come and go like in the Drifters and Temptations. Who captures the Searchers' sound best? Frank and John's line up, no question. Frank and John continue to carry the flag, running with it for one of the world's great pop bands.

John advised me to hang on to my original Pye 45s of their singles, he reckons they're appreciating. I asked him what he thought of psychedelia when he first heard it. Tellingly, he said he didn't understand it. Franks first psychedelic music memory is of Syd Barretts "See Emily Play", and he recalled a recent session with producer Tony Hatch, writer of the great "Downtown", and kitsch easy listening guru, during which they tried to decipher the lyric to a Searchers song recorded around 1967. None of them could work the lyric out, but it sounded like "see my blue." Now, I'm a good Christian boy. And I wouldn't want to cast any aspertions. But it sounds to me like those good ol' boys Frank and John, and maybe Mike Pender as well, may have caught a whiff of insipid marijuana smoke, drifting in on the breeze of '67 there. Either that or they were fans of Salvador Dali, or were completely mad. Whatever, the band weren't completely untouched by the psychedelic revolution, inspite of their apparent lack of comprehension of it, and denial of ever having taken illegal drugs... Frank told me I might like a song of theirs called "Popcorn Double Feature", recorded at this time. I hadn't heard it, and only later discovered this sadly obscure piece, which reflects the changing times of mid 60's Britain in its lyric and musical content. It is one of the bands greatest recordings, and any Searchers fan should get hold of it somehow. It's a great, sad, beautiful, melancholy pop song, surely recorded around '67.

Being a rather surreal English person myself, I've just tittered at a packet of cigarettes, and now feel it is time to move on... to the Searchers' reflections on The Beatles. John McNally was particularly struck by the power of them; how a ballroom audience would surge forward toward the stage when they came on, according to McNally a very unusual response to a group of the time, who would usually have to content themselves with a few twisting daredevils daring to take to the dancefloor. A band can be loud yet weak; presumeably the Beatles were, by amplification standards of today, quiet, yet powerful. Unravel that mystery for yourself. Frank Allen wanted to know why, as an interviewer of the Searchers, I was talking about the "Fab Four". We also discussed the Searchers influence on The Byrds. McNally seemed somewhat peeved that Roger McGuinn sites the Searchers as an influence less often these days, refering more readily to George Harrison. It seems pretty obvious from this distance that the "Mr. Tambourine Man" intro was quite directly derived from "When You Walk In The Room." Also, "Room" predated The Beatles' axiomatic "Ticket To Ride" by a good 12 months. Maybe the Searchers are justifiably grieved by a lack of recognition of their direct influence.

Undeniably the greatest English pop group of the 1980's, and therefore one of the greatest pop groups ever, The Smiths, were Searchers influenced, a fact McNally, albeit vaguely, recognises. The La's, another great British guitar group, are recalled by McNally with some amusement as customers of a studio owned by a fellow Liverpudlean once in the Merseybeats (who recorded the original version of "Sorrow"- an extremely great Brit 60's pop hit). Apparently, the famously grumpy La's didn't want to tune their guitars, because it was far more 60's to be out of tune! It might be added that "There She Goes" by The La's, recently voted in Mojo magazine as one of the very greatest songs ever written, by voters such as Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson, would not exist had it not been for The Searchers' pioneering jangly riffs. It is inconceivable that REM would ever have existed, that the Byrds would have, or that George Harrison, God Rest His Soul, would have sounded anything like he did, had it not been for the Searchers.

I therefore conclude that, through hits like "Needles and Pins", and "When You Walk In The Room",The Searchers have bled their artistic genius into public consciousness, thus transforming the lives of millions of people, three minutes at a time. The band are an intrinsic part of the fabric of pop music history. Pass their music on... it deserves to last.