The Searchers: Another Night: The Sire Recordings

Imagine the plight of the Searchers in 1979. You’ve been diligently plugging away at the night-club circuit since the hits dried up in the late ’60s, and you’ve just made a great, pop-rock record. Critics love it, but radio won’t play it as they’re too busy scrambling around to find bands that look like the Pretenders, the Boomtown Rats and Elvis Costello, but who sound like… well, the Searchers.

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It was as if the band had patiently waited for their brand of ultra-melodic, smart pop-rock to come back into fashion, but when it did, no amount of leather jackets and upturned collars could disguise the fact that they would be forever nailed to 1964 and in 1979, it was OK to sound like the Searchers, but very uncool to actually be the Searchers. This beautifully curated Omnivore compilation of the two albums they made for the so-hip-it-hurts Sire Records, is an attempt to get the band some belated kudos.

In 1979 in the UK, it was now acceptable to slip a bit of melody back into your songs. Punk rock had cleared away a lot of the deadwood, before inevitably collapsing in on itself like a dying star and bands like the Records, Rockpile and most of the Stiff Records roster could now walk the streets of London without fear of being spat on. It became a boom time for high energy, well-written guitar pop – exactly the kind of stuff that the Searchers had been doing since the early ’60s.

The Searchers (which forms disc one of this two-disc set – the second being 1981’s Love’s Melodies) collates some strong original material with some well-chosen covers (including Dylan’s “Coming from the Heart” and Tom Petty’s “Lost in Your Eyes”) and some specially written material – “Hearts in Her Eyes” by Will Birch and John Wicks of the Records is a real highlight here. The trademark jangle is toned down a little in favor of a more strident and direct approach, in fact, some of these songs sound like the Knack, but with less contentious lyrics. There are some nods to the band’s Merseybeat heritage – “Love’s Melody” could have slotted in nicely between “Sugar and Spice” and “Needles and Pins” in their run of ’60s hits, but The Searchers didn’t even graze the charts on its initial release.

Bloodied, but unbowed, they tried again, and in 1981 they released their second and last Sire album. In spite of the quality of the material, including a way-ahead-of-the-curve cover of “September Gurls”, it suffered the same bargain bin bound trajectory of its predecessor, and it was back to the cabaret circuit for the band. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but listening to this in 2017, where power-pop is thriving and surviving, it’s hard to see why this era of the band’s career yielded so little success.

The fault lies in the public’s perception of them. Today, we’re pretty accustomed to artists making a comeback after years in the wilderness – Johnny Cash, for example, but following the upheaval of punk, a ’60s band like the Searchers would always be last year’s thing, no matter how credible their current product was. And this product was very credible. All it needed was an angle – a Tom Petty collaboration. A tour with Blondie. A name-drop from Springsteen. But as a wise man once said, “If grandma had wheels…” And so on.

You may snigger behind your copy of NME, but the Searchers have made one of the best pop-rock albums of 2017, only they made it 38 years ago. If you’ve got a skinny tie and a pair of Chuck Taylors in the wardrobe somewhere, you need this record.