Performance: The Searchers

Bruce Mason Centre

Reviewer: Graham Reid


By the time the Searchers had their audience dancing in the aisles at the end of a two-hour-plus show on Thursday the only question was: why would they not have?

For a period in the mid 60s the four-piece enjoyed a series of hits, most of which are considered classics today.

A list still makes impressive reading: Sweets For My Sweet, Sugar and Spice, Needles and Pins, Don't Throw Your Love Away, When You Walk in the Room and many many more - all of which were given terrific, faithful airings before a mostly "mature," enthusiastic audience.

By the late 60s, however, the world had gone paisley and their radio pop was marginalised, so they headed off for a career in UK clubs.

However, John McNally's 12-string Rickenbacker sound influenced the Byrds, Tom Petty and REM, and - probably unbeknown to their local audience this week - the band enjoyed a brief revival in 1980.

Then, at the insistence of the Ramones, who covered Needles and Pins, the Searchers were signed to Sire Records, making the Ramones and Talking Heads their label mates. Their album of power pop was one song away from brilliant.

But, despite bass player, frontman and amusing standup Frank Allen (who clearly honed his quick stage humour in the wilderness years of workingmen's clubs) saying they would cover all periods of their career, the music stayed firmly in the 60s, they joked about their age, and seemed to genuinely appreciate the response they received. They even obligingly posed for snapshots.

The Searchers - powerfully-voiced Spencer James on rhythm guitar, a new boy of only 15 years' standing in a band now in its 39th year - played themselves as a self-deprecating nostalgia act by choice. Only one song, the huge MOR ballad Somebody Told Me You Were Crying from '89, fell outside their hit period.

To that extent the show was slightly disappointing.

But any band that opens with three consecutive classics, tosses in others along the way, and closes with still-convincing treatments of signature songs such as Needles and Pins, When You Walk in the Room and a wall-shaking Rockin' All Over the World wasn't going to leave its nostalgic audience dissatisfied. And the Searchers certainly didn't.