I was an early fan of The Searchers. I
bought their chart-topper ‘Sweet For My Sweet’, on the pink Pye label, which with
only three chords was simple to play and was therefore amongst the repertoire
of my first band, The Rockin’ Pandas. The bass player in our group owned their
first album, Meet The Searchers, and from
it we learned to play ‘Love Potion Number 9’ and ‘Farmer John’, about a girl
with ‘champagne eyes’, a lyric I found captivating. The Searchers tore into it
at a terrific pace, a very tight, very exciting version of a song covered by many
others, among them much later Neil Young, who played it slower and heavier, and
contemporaneously by The Hep Stars, the Swedish group whose keyboard player was
Benny Andersson, later of Abba, whose translation – their English is slightly
wonky – mimicked The Searchers.
In
1964 came ‘Needles And Pins’, another chart-topper, which I also bought and learned
to play. As our group’s lead guitarist I loved playing that little riff on a
basic A chord by varying the notes on the second, B, string; again absurdly
simple but absurdly effective if you let the string ring cleanly. ‘Clean’ is what
we liked about The Searchers: the close-fitting, clean vocal harmonies and the clean,
ringing guitars. This is where The Byrds got their jangly sound and, later,
R.E.M. Come to think of it, The La’s lovely ‘There She Goes’ is a less than
distant cousin.
The
Searchers were rivals of The Beatles in those far-off days, and between 1963
and 1965 had half a dozen Top 10 hits, including a third number one, ‘Don’t Throw
Your Love Away’. Four albums made the Top 10 LP charts too, but personnel
changes and a disinclination to change their style as styles changed around
them kept them from progressing as others progressed. After ‘When You Walk In
The Room’, now my favourite of all the songs they recorded, and ‘Goodbye My Love’
in 1965, another fine example of their harmonic strengths, I lost touch with
them just as I lost touch with many similar groups that emerged in the wake of
JPG&R.
At
the luncheon last December for music biz veterans in Barnes that I attend twice
yearly, I skipped tables after the meal to chat again with Frank Allen, who
became The Searchers’ bass player and lead singer in 1964 on the departure of
original member Tony Jackson. Only lead guitarist John McNally is still with
the band from that era, but they’ve stayed the course over the years with a relatively
stable cast of musicians, nowadays Spencer James (with them since 1986) on
rhythm guitar and Scott Ottaway (since 2010) on drums. All four sing, thus
maintaining that unique choral tradition.
The Searchers today: Scott Ottaway, Frank Allen, John McNally & Spencer James
Frank’s
been a regular at these Barnes luncheons for longer than I have, and he told me
that after a three-month UK tour in the early 2019, at 75 he was hanging up his
bass and quitting the road, thus bringing the group’s long career to an end.
“The two hours on stage are still magic,” he told me, or words to that effect.
“It’s the other 22 when you’re touring that I can’t handle anymore, the
travelling, the hotels, the hanging around. I’ve had enough.”
In
Melbourne in 1997 I visited a gigantic casino, a temple to Mammon of cathedral-like
proportions that revolted and fascinated me in equal measure. It seemed to go
on for miles, like the size of two football pitches, dark for the most part but
with tiny coloured lights flashing everywhere, and rows of croupiers leaning
over green felt tables as far as the eye could see; cards, wheels, dice, keno,
fruit machines and, every now and then, screens where sport was being watched
by men, always men, in easy chairs, every sport imaginable, football, rugby,
cricket, tennis, golf, Ozzie rules football, athletics, horse racing, snooker, darts,
the lot, and you could bet on the outcome of the games, or even on what might
happen in the next two minutes, or five minutes, or half-hour. Such was the
variety of betting on offer that it wouldn’t have surprised me if you could
place $10 on which droplet of rain might slither down a window and reach the
bottom first.
Looking around me, I saw that most of
the customers were Chinese or at least Eurasian, and it was very noisy,
crowded, and smoky too, for this was before cigarette smoking was outlawed in
public. It seemed to me that I had been pitched into a vision of hell, an
inferno where greed is king, luck is a faithless mistress and the bookmaker
laughs all the way to the bank. As we walked past table after table, an
Australian friend told me harrowing tales of how the foolhardy who’d lost
everything and ended up in penury hurled themselves into the adjoining River Yarra from
where their bodies were dredged the following day. To prove his point he drew
my attention to those pitiful souls who lingered outside the doors on the
casino’s perimeter, rattling cans for change as they shivered in the chill of
this cold Australian August night.
It was about five years ago when I
happened to sit next to Frank at another of the Barnes lunches, and it was then
that we spoke for the first time. He told me that twice a year his group undertook
tours of Australia and New Zealand and in Melbourne play at the Crown Casino,
and when he told me this and spoke of the vastness of the Crown I put two and
two together and realised it must have been the same casino I visited in 1997 but whose name I had forgotten. We
talked about it for a while, and about how welcoming Australia was to The
Searchers and other groups of their vintage.
I
mentioned to Frank that in my opinion The Byrds and R.E.M. owed a big debt to
The Searchers, that their wonderful vocal harmonies and jangly guitars almost
certainly influenced these groups. Frank agreed, telling me he’d met both Roger
McGuinn and Michael Stipe, both of whom admitted to him that his group had been
a role model.
Frank
turned out to be an amiable chap, a muso of the old school, who looked much
younger than the 70 years he boasted then, perhaps because like another bassman, Beatle Paul, he
is slim of stature and, on this occasion, drank only mineral water, and I told him that when
they were first released I’d bought ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ and ‘Needles And
Pins’, for which he thanked me graciously, unnecessarily, and we went on to talk about ‘When You Walk In The Room’, which was written by
Jackie De Shannon. I told him this song had become a favourite of mine thanks to The Searchers but that I thought Agnetha Fältskog – another trivial
Abba connection to The Searchers – had recorded the best version,
a big Phil Spector-style production. Instead of bristling with indignation that I preferred Agnetha’s version, which if the push comes to the shove sounds very much like an Abba recording, to The Searchers, he said he reckoned Paul Carrack’s equally
grandiose version was the best, so we argued amicably about this for a while, musing on whether the song was best interpreted by a girl or a boy. Eventually we agreed to disagree – but one thing we didn’t disagree on was the
nature of the Crown Casino, the horror of it all.
Frank
told me he’d be back there the following February, playing with The Searchers
for the Casino punters in a concert room somewhere within its vast confines,
and I wished him all the luck in the world on all his antipodean tours but cautioned
him not to bet on the green baize. I don’t think he needed to be told.
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