the searchers

168. ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’, by The Searchers

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The Searchers complete their hat-trick of #1s, with a very ‘Searchers’ record. Light as a feather guitar, restrained vocals, a hint of melancholy… Check, check, check.

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Don’t Throw Your Love Away, by The Searchers (their 3rd and final #1)

2 weeks, from 7th – 21st May 1964

If The Beatles were the popular kids, and Gerry & The Pacemakers the class clowns, The Searchers were the cool kids in the corner, planning out their next, more grown-up, hit record. ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ is the sort of record your gran wouldn’t have minded; but she would definitely have told you to turn off The Dave Clark Five.

It’s another Beat-pop song with a less-than-positive message. A song about a man who has been burned in the past, and who now sits at the end of the bar doling out advice to anyone who’ll listen. Lovers of today, Just throw their dreams away, And play at love… They give their love away, To anyone who’ll say, I love you… He doesn’t refer to himself specifically; but you just know he’s had his heart broken. Don’t throw your love away… he counsels… For you, Might need it, Someday…

When I first listened to this record a few days ago – a record I was aware of but had never really listened to properly – I noted that I ‘couldn’t really get into it’, that it was a little bland and uninventive. I even jotted down the phrase ‘Landfill Merseybeat’, meaning it in the same way that anyone who wasn’t The Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand or The Libertines in 2006 was ‘Landfill Indie’. But I’d like to officially change my mind, having listened to it on repeat, and admit that what I mistook for a bland number is actually a very subtle song that simply takes a while to fully reveal itself. The vocal harmonies are cute, and the guitars chime very tightly (I especially like the little ‘Arabian Nights’ fill in the bridge.)

And all credit to The Searchers, for not chasing the ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ of other Beat songs, for ploughing their own furrow and taking this forgotten little slice of sad-pop to number one. This is a very ‘Searchers’ record; and if that means it’s a little hard to get into at first, then fine. I think part of the reason I didn’t get into their first chart-topper, ‘Sweets For My Sweet’, is that that was a song that really needed an up-tempo, grinning approach, which The Searchers couldn’t provide.

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That’s not to say that they couldn’t do better than ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’. ‘Needles and Pins’ stands out clearly as the best of their three #1s, if not one of the best Merseybeat records, period. And their next single but one, the brilliant ‘When You Walk Into the Room’, would have made an even better final chart-topper for the group. It only reached number three…

I really could just cut and paste this next sentence… The Searchers (as with Gerry & The P’s, Billy J, Peter & Gordon et al) couldn’t keep the hits going much longer than this. Their final Top 20 hit came in 1965. Perhaps their biggest problem was that they didn’t write their own hits – all their #1s were covers (‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ was originally released, in the US at least, by The Orlons.) In the fifties that would have been fine, but all of a sudden, it seems, acts – especially guitar bands – needed to be writing their own stuff. They tried to move with the times, covering songs by The Stones and The Hollies, but nothing stuck. The line-up changed at an alarming rate, and they now tour as both Mike Pender’s Searchers and the ‘original’ group. But, we can remember them fondly as the band who gave us a breather, with their wistful melodies and hesitant vocals, from the relentless march of the Beat revolution.

162. ‘Needles and Pins’, by The Searchers

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The Searchers return for a second run at the top. And if their first #1 – ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ – was a cute little slice of Beat-pop; then this is next-level stuff entirely. This baby is a classic!

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Needles and Pins, by The Searchers (their 2nd of three #1s)

3 weeks, from 30th January – 20th February 1964

We start with a simple, chiming riff. In my previous post on The Searchers, I mentioned that they had a sound slightly removed from frenetic Merseybeat – a bit more sedate, a bit more melancholic – a sound that wouldn’t sound out of place on Indie records of the 1980s. Well, that sound is back here.

Lyrically, too, this is a more complex record than the likes of ‘Do You Love Me’ and other such pub-singalongs. And no, ‘Needles and Pins’ doesn’t refer to waking up with a dead arm; it’s about the feeling you get when you see a lost love. One that did you wrong. I saw her today, I saw her face, It was a face I loved, And I knew, I had to run awa-y…

It’s also a song about bruised pride… Because of all my pride, The tears I gotta hide… and a song with an air of revenge about it: Let her go ahead, And take his love instead, And one day she will see, Just how to say please, And get down on her knees, Yeah that’s how it begins, She’ll feel those needles and pins, Hurtin’, Hurtin’… This is one grown-up love song. It’s like the sophisticated older brother of discs like our last chart-topper, ‘Glad All Over’, looking down his nose at his younger siblings’ silly little songs.

I wish I had the musical vocabulary to describe the chord structures and the key and whatever it is that gives this record its ‘mood’. Whatever it is that makes this song so good. But then again, if I could dissect it and pinpoint it’s genius maybe it would lose some of its magic. It’s a sad-sounding song about a sad-sounding break-up; and it’s superb. By the final verse, it’s reached a bit of a crescendo. Two voices – the lead singer (Mike Pender) and a high-pitched back-up which just adds to the emotion. Oh, needles and pins… And those drum-fills. Oh those drum-fills.

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I’ve been kind of surprised, listening to them all in a row, how cheesy (for want of a better word) these early Beat #1s have been. Musically they’ve been a huge step forward but, in lyrical terms, records like ‘From Me to You’, ‘Bad to Me’, and ‘I Like It’ haven’t moved on much from the 1950s.

‘Needles and Pins’ is different. Though I was shocked to find out that it is actually a cover. It’s a song I’ve loved for a long time and have assumed for years was a Searcher’s original. But no. It’s a Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono song, originally recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1963. I feel betrayed… I really do. This – and I realise that this is a bold statement to make – is the first pop song I ever loved. I must have been maybe seven, and it was on a sixties mix-tape (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before) in our family car. It would be playing on a Sunday evening as we drove home from dinners at my grandparents, along dark roads under orange streetlights. A melancholy scene for a melancholy song.

Actually, that’s another thing that has surprised me – just how many of these early Beat chart-toppers were covers. Since Gerry & The Pacemakers kicked the movement off in April ’63, I make this six covers out of eleven (I’m counting ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in this, though it isn’t your average Beat-pop number). I just assumed these boys with guitars were all writing their own songs. How wrong I was!

Anyway, the ‘Needles and Pins’ story doesn’t end with The Searchers. It’s classic status is confirmed by the fact it’s been covered by The Ramones and Tom Petty. It’s a song so good that it might just give you needles and pins! (Though I’ve always said ‘pins and needles’ – I guess that didn’t scan quite as well…)

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155. ‘Sweets For My Sweet’, by The Searchers

/ UK #1s blog / 5 Comments

Everybody back aboard the Merseybeat bus, for a trip that’s going to take us well into 1964. The initial beat-bands to top the charts – Gerry & The Pacemakers and The Beatles – are now joined by another bunch of Liverpudlians.

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Sweets For My Sweet, by The Searchers (their 1st of three #1s)

2 weeks, from 8th – 22nd August 1963

I can’t imagine another time when one sound monopolised the top of the charts in such a fashion. From now – early August 1963 – to the middle of February 1964, every UK #1 will have a Merseybeat flavour to it. And we kick off with this one, and a chorus that most will know…

Sweets for my sweet, Sugar for my honey, Your first sweet kiss, Thrills me so… It’s a step back from the frenetic tempo of ‘From Me to You’ and ‘How Do You Do It?’, the guitars here chime rather than rattle; the drums roll rather than thump. There’s a hint of a chugging little riff buried in there too. In fact, I’d say that musically this is a step ahead of the earlier beat chart-toppers. I’m getting hints of The Byrds in the guitars and The Beach Boys in the ‘oooh-eeeh-oooh’ backing vocals. In fact, I can hear the foundations of ‘80s indie in that chiming solo that follows the choruses. You tell me that that doesn’t sound like something the Stone Roses might have come out with.

On the flip side… there’s always a flip side… the lyrics here are a step back from the cheeky charms of John Lennon and Gerry Marsden. They were giving us little vignettes about running fingers through hair, and kisses that would keep you satisfied… relatable stuff. The Searchers still sing in scouse accents but are giving us: If you wanted that star that shines so brightly, To match the stardust in your eyes, Darling I would chase that bright star nightly, And try to steal it from the sky… And then there’s some nonsense about the Sandman, like it was still 1954 or something.

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There’s a good reason for this. I said that the chorus should be familiar to all, but to American readers it might be more famous in the form of The Drifters 1961 original. (Yes, I too was slightly surprised to find out that it was a cover, and that in fact all The Searchers’ chart-toppers would be covers.) These lyrics work well in the hands of The Drifters. But 1963 is a long way, musically, from ’61. Times have changed, and if you came out with these lyrics in a playground in Liverpool you’d probably get beaten up.

The Searchers were, like the bands that went immediately before them in establishing this new sound at the top of the charts, a four-piece, young (early twenties) and, of course, from the north-west of England. They will hit the top spot twice more in very short order, and next time it will be with a much better song…!

That’s not to be too harsh on ‘Sweets For My Sweet’, it’s a perfectly good pop song. It’s just a bit… Cheesy? Simplistic? Trite? Maybe it’s a victim of time. If The Drifters had taken it to #1 two years earlier I might have loved it. One thing’s for sure, though, when that perfect little drum roll at the end, which is so mid-sixties, pops up you are just about ready to forgive all the sins that went before.

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