A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 113: “Needles and Pins” by The Searchers

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Higg. Episode 113. Needles and Pins by The Searchers. Last week, we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren't the only influential band on the Mersey Beat scene, and while we won't have much chance to look at Mercy Beat in general,

we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today, we're going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they're rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We're going to look at the searches, and needles and pins. The story of the early origins of the searchers is, like everything about the searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven't spoken to each other in 36 years and didn't get on for many

years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group's history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group's bass player from 1964 on, and someone who took McNally's side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a Schiffel group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined, first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer, then known as Chris Crummy, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis. According to Pender, he never liked Skiffle, never played skiffle and if McNally had a skiffle group it must have been before I met him. He is very

insistent on this point. He liked country music and later rock and roll but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn't led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson and he's very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during a period where he didn't know McNally, and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group's name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film, The Searchers, the same film which had inspired the group's hero Buddy Holly to write That'll Be the day,

but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named Big Ron, who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron's replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who, at the time he was with The Searchers, used the stage name Johnny Sanden, though he later reverted to his birth name. The group performed as Johnny Sandin and the Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo 4,

a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sanden made some records with the Remo 4 in 1963, but they went nowhere. But they'll give some idea of how Sanden sounded. The Remo 4 later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song The Beatles wrote for him. With Sanden out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman and were in trouble. They were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon's backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking

most of them. And in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group's frontman and second lead singer. Even at this point though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The searchers were the most clean living of the Liverpool bands. They were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seemed to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally. Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways.

He seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no one's ever spoken about a diagnosis. The Beatles apparently referred to him as Mad Henry. Curtis and Jackson didn't get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Penders, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions, they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band's musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much for their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music,

country and rockabilly, the Everly brothers and Buddy Holly, while Jackson, preferred, harder, stomping music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group's repertoire, and who was the group's unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists Snipe the Clovers and Richie Barrett. While many Liverpool groups played Barrett's Some Other Guy, the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, Tricky Dickie, a song written by Libra and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music,

and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Avales than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around the Rpool. other than the Beatles, the searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool

and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there and their live version of Brenda Lee's Sweet Nothins later got released as a single

after they became successful. Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles' success. The searchers were having no look getting any attention for the London music industry. In part, that was because of one bit of bad look. The day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage,

and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and sent that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the searches were no exception, and it's interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later.

The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter. EMI and Decker between them had something like 85% of the market, and basically were the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible,

chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some. some big acts, most notably Petula Clark. Indeed, the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark's records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she'd had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit, Sailor. The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark's hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits.

We've heard several songs he was involved in over the course of this series. Most recently, we heard last week how She Loves You was inspired by Forget Him, which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell. Hatch heard the group's demo and was impressed and offered to sign them. The searcher's manager at the time agreed,

on one condition, that Hatch also signed another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertaker's also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune. The biggest mark that the undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, Sour Milk See,

which George Harrison wrote for him. The searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group's first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pommis and Mort Schumann, which had been a top 20 hit in the US for the drifters a couple of years earlier. That had become a regular fixture in the searcher's live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with Twist and Shout, they'd flattened out the original record's Latin chach-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances,

as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door session. As you can hear, they'd also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of Your Tasty Kiss, Jackson sang, Your First Sweet Kiss. In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit.

That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups. Their only real competition being the Beatles and Jerry and the Pacemakers. And though nobody could have known it at the time, the pacemaker's career had already peaked at this point. Their first album, Meet the Searchers,

featured sweets for my suite, along with the selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Mersey Beat band. Money, do-do-run-ron, twist and shout, stand by me, and the Everly Brothers, since you broke my heart, with more obscure songs like,

Ain't Gonna Kiss You, by the then-un-un-Nown PJ Proby, Farmer John, by Don and Dewey, which hadn't yet become a garage rock standard, and indeed seems to have become so, largely because of the searcher's version, and a cover of Love Potion No. 9, a song that Libre and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK,

but later became their biggest hit in the US, and a quick content note for this one. The lyric contains a word for Romani people, which many of those people regard as a slur. Their second single was an attempt to repeat the sweets for my sweet formula and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn't know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time,

was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms, so the record label didn't necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case, he brought the group a song that he claimed to be written by one Fred Nightingale, and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, Sugar and Spice, was a blatant rip-off of sweets from Ice Sweet, and recorded in a near identical arrangement. The group weren't keen on the song, and got very angry later on

when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two in the charts. But it was their third single that was the group's international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers,

a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like, You Got What I Like. The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Shealy, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they'd started covering live, though, was not one that Deshannon was the credited songwriter on. Needles and Pins was credited to two other writers,

both of them associated with Phil Specter. Sonny Bono was a young song. songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cook, Larry Williams and Don and Dewey. And his most famous song up to this point was She Said Yeah, the B-side to Williams' bad boy. After working at specialty, he'd gone on to work as Phil Spector's assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector, he'd got to know Jack Nichi, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own. like the lonely surfer. Bono and Nietzsche are the credited writers on needles and pins,

but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her. Both Nietzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egotomaniacs, and it's easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, Deschannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the wrecking crew,

and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot 100, though it's actually made number one in Canada. Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song and fixed the main floor with DeShannon's original. There's really only about 90 seconds worth of actual song in needles and pins, and DeShannon's version ends with a minute or so of vamping. It sounds like it's still a written lyric, but it's really.

full of placeholders where entire lines are whoa-wo-wo. The kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but they didn't really work for her record. The searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics. Instead of the middle eight leading to a long free-form section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus in the new key of C-sharp,

with Curtis harmonising this time. The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon's version. While repeating the original verse after the key change and adding in Curtis's high harmony gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiraling. He keeps thinking the same things over and over at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It's a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. incidentally, one thing I should note here, because it's not something I normally do, in these excerpts of the searcher's version of needles and pins, I'm actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what

I'm excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis's drum kit, which isn't particularly audible if you're listening to it on early 60s equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which are modern digital copies of the tree. track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here's a couple of seconds of the unmodified track so you can see what I mean. Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQed it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn't noticeable. But I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I've compromised

and used the monomix, but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I'm talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half-minute pop song.

But the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music. The riff in DeShannon's version is there, but it's just one element, an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It's a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff. You basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff, and it's the backbone of the song. But there's also a piano and horns and the blossoms singing. But what the searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb.

They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C, which the Shannon's version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric 12-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using 12-string wickenbackers to get the same sound. That record is the root of jangle pop and folk rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy,

Trebly Guitars and Devilly Brothers-inspired harmonies, is one that leads directly to the birds, love, Big Star, Tom Petty, Riem, the Smiths and the Bengals, among many others. While the Beatles were, overall, obviously, the more influential group by a long way, needles and pins, has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Mersey Beat era.

It went to number one in the UK and became the group's breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number 16. The follow-up, Don't Throw Your Love Away, a cover of a B-side by the Orlon's, again featuring Penderon lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies,

also made number one in the UK and the US top 20, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, Someday We're Gonna Love Again, a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number 11

and caused journalists to worry if the searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group's members was going to leave, but it wasn't Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group's lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, it's The Searchers, which included needles and pins.

Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal. Even John McNally got one, while Jackson's only lead was an Everly's style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members. At one point, it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fist fight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group's move towards more melodic material. It's important to remember that the searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage.

Listen, for example, to their performance of What Did I Say at the NME Poll Winners Party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals, clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity. Good to me. She lives here in Wembley, right in the middle of the ice pool. She's good to me and she knows what to do. Having a good time now there, John, you're trying email. The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group.

Whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read. and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers. Jackson didn't take this replacement well, and publicly went around telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendos to this effect in Mike Pender's autobiography, although Alan denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship and says that he doesn't actually know what Curtis's sexuality was,

because they never discussed that kind of thing. And presumably Alan would know better than anyone else, whether he was in a relationship with Curtis. Curtis is widely described as having been gay or by by his contemporaries. But if he was, he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There's some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band

was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn't get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, Bye Bye Baby, made number 38 on the charts. However, his later singles had no success. He was soon re-recording Love Potion No. 9,

in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US. Meanwhile, Alan was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group's run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new line-up, when you walk in the room, was a cover of another Jackie de Shannon song,

This time written by DeShannon on her own and originally released as a B-side. The searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon's original, and by this time playing it on real 12 strings and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Alan. Do you think the birds might have heard that? That went to number three on the chart. The next single was less successful. only making number thirteen but was interesting in other ways from the start as well as their r m b covers curtis had been adding folk songs to the group's repertoire and there had been one or two covers of songs like where have all the flowers gone on their albums but what have they done to the rain was the first one to become a single

it was written by malvina reynolds who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties and who also wrote morning town ride and little boxes what have the What Have They Done to the Rain was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn't as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top 20 at all seems quite an achievement. Their next single, Goodbye My Love, was their last top 10 hit,

and the next few singles only made the top 40, even when the Rolling Stones gave them take it or leave it. The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicators for enjoyment,

as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis's date, departure, Have You Ever Loved Somebody, was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as a Neverly Brothers album track. Unfortunately for The Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it. Neither single made the top 40, and the searchers

would never have a hit single again, nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, aggravation, a cover of a Joe South song. The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Joe Maretti, but it didn't chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis, John Maud and Ritchie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple.

The Searchers didn't put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of re-recordings of their old hits in 1972. But then in 1979, Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads and The Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering needles and pins to sign the searches to a two-album deal,

which produced records that fit perfectly into the late 70s New Wave pop landscape while still sounding like the searches. Apparently, during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn't involved. Unfortunately, while over the first,

albums had some critical success they did nothing commercially and sire dropped them by 1985 the searchers were at breaking point they hadn't recorded any new material in several years and Mike Pender and John McNally weren't getting on at all which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members the group was so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the the two of them. One would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool, and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No one except them

knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren't amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways. The drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group. Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own, but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as Mike Pender's searches, so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as the Searchers with a new singer.

A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Alan are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved. There were now two groups with near identical names playing the same set in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other,

to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Pender still tours, or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year, and McNally and Alan's band continued playing regularly until 2019

and only stopped performing because of McNally's increasing ill health. Having seen both, Penders was the better show. McNally and Alan's line-up of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesizer for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar-based drums sound, but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020 as a reward for his services to the music industry.

Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Hall. and now in well-deserved retirement. While Alan and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmate's funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn't even say hello to each other. And even though McNally and Alan's band has retired, there's still a prominent notice on their website

that they own the name of the searchers and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly 12-string electric guitar, you're hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison. a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

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