Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.
The sound track of their youth by Ian Walker
It came into the charts on 13 July 1965. It stayed there for eleven weeks, and was No. 1 for two. It was their first hit and it is the first number they do tonight, “Sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey. I’ll never ever let you go.” The Searchers are top of the bill at the social club in a car plant near Southampton airport.
For the car workers and their wives the Searchers are part of the soundtrack of their youth. They sit round tables cluttered with pints and the remains of ham sandwiches and memories of Saturday nights down the palais, eyes across crowded ballrooms. For the Searchers, it is just a living.
Mike Pender, lead singer, and John McNally, lead guitar, are the two faces people recognise sitting in the TV lounge section of the bar before the gig. They are the two surviving members of the original band. They grew up on the same street, but went to different secondary moderns because Mike lived at the Bootle end of the street and John at the Kirkdale end.
They both still live in Liverpool, and drove down here this Sunday night for the start of their one-week tour of the south coast. There’s nothing much on the television; but in clubs like this, says John, “only the social secretary is allowed to switch channels.” The Searchers are not due on till around ten: after the comic, the hypnotist, the girl singer and the raffle.
“Do you still do Needles and pins?” asks a woman who wants an autograph. “Oh yeah,” smiles Mike. “They’d go mad if we didn’t do Needles,” he says when she’s gone.
There is a constant traffic of men carrying trayfuls of drink from the bar to the main hall, where about 250 couples are seated. The men are in suits and ties, the women mostly with the kind of hairdo you end up with after you’ve sat under a drier. Through the blue haze of smoke that hangs six feet above the tables, you can just about make out the comic on stage. “There’s these two punk rockers lying in bed making love,” he says. “And they’ve got the old punk rock on the stereo. ‘Is that Johnny Rotten?’ the girl says to the boy. ‘Well, it’s never let me down yet,’ he says.” It is the biggest laugh the comic gets all night.
“This is clubland,” says Frank, the Searchers’ bass guitarist, who has just driven down here from his home in London. Before the set, he must do an interview with a reporter from the local hospital radio station. Frank does the interviews, because like Mike and John say no one can understand their Scouse accent. He also does the stage chat.
After Sweets for my sweet, Frank speaks 'into the microphone, “You all happy?”
When most of the audience shout that they are, he uses the follow-up he always uses, “Oh, you been drinking as well?” He goes on to tell them that, as well as the band’s “glorious past,” they now have a “bright future,” the Searchers have recently been signed up by Sire Records, put out their first LP and single in years.
An old woman wanders round the hall collecting the empties. When she sees that our photographer is taking pictures of her, she lifts her skirt up above the knee and giggles. Frank gestures to the photographer and says, “Here mate, you missed the wedding.” This goes down well. John whispers to Frank that the photographer’s name is Homer and Frank gets another laugh out of that, before explaining that Homer and I are here for a magazine which is “a kind of intellectual Sun . . .”
The Searchers close their set with Needles and pins, but are called back for two encores: Where have all the flowers gone? and their new single, Hearts in their eyes. A man sitting at the table nearest the stage knows all the words to all the songs. He is the only male in the queue for autographs outside the dressing room, after the comic has wound up the show. “That’s all we have time for I’m afraid. Go out and buy the record and put the Searchers back where they belong, in the charts.”
A teenage girl at the head of the line for the autographs was born the year after Needles and pins came out. She came here with her mother and father.
Mike is-first out to do the signatures. One woman says to him, “Oh, Needles and pins, I used to get sent out of the kitchen to play that.” She looks like she spends a fair amount of time in the kitchen herself these days. Maybe she sends her own children out of the kitchen? In the generation was the oppressed grew up to be the oppressors of the next generation’s thing.
The woman who showed a leg for the photographer makes the band a cup of Nescafe to go with the ham sandwiches she has saved them. The Searchers sit round in a circle near the stage. All the other seats are empty. The fluorescent lights have gone on, the tables abandoned to the cleaners. Empty crisp packets and pint pots, well filled ashtrays, plates with strips of bread crusts on them.
John, lead guitar and business manager (“We couldn’t afford to pay out another 10 per cent”), tells the others the itinerary for the rest of the week: Ford open prison tomorrow, Monday, night; a social club in Godalming on Tuesday; Broadmoor (mental hospital) social club, Wednesday night; the Wellington Club, Portsmouth, Friday; a gas board social club on Saturday. On Sunday they fly to Holland for a one- nighter. Back to England for a couple of ays, then off to West Germany.
“We’re working flat out, so we can have Christmas and New Year off,” says John, driving the car down a deserted motorway at two in the morning, towards a motel in Hayling Island. There is a copy of Lyle’s Official Antiques Review on the back seat. It gives you something to do during the day, going round the junk shops—if there’s no movies on or anything,” says Mike, who paid £3,500 for a pair of antique pistols.
I ask them why they did Where have all the flowers gone? tonight. “It was on an early LP of ours,” replies Mike. “The song was associated with us at one time.” Long time passing.
At regular intervals, Mike and John say that they will sleep tonight. And then tomorrow night they will play exactly the same set. “We know exactly what we can do,” John says. “We never thought' we were genius musicians or anything. We couldn’t go away and make brilliant solo albums. . . All we’ve got is the group. We’ve got a good name, and we can work till the cows come home. I mean, we’re earning the same money we always earned, even when we were very successful, like.” Both Mike and John are married men with kids and mortgages; they need to keep working; and John says he doesn’t know any
thing else that would give him a decent living. Both their fathers were dockers.
Over the bridge that leads to Hayling Island we finally pull up outside the marina. A note is pinned to the door of the motel, “Searchers rooms 5 and 7. Keys in room.”
The view out of the window the next morning is of cabin cruisers on mud, a grey sky, and by the carpark a line of Christmas trees bent by the wind. I can hear a typewriter clattering somewhere in the motel. Maybe someone’s laying down some epic about alienation? Strangled passion in the off-season on the south coast?
In the motel bar at noon, one couple are playing the one-armed bandit, and another are discussing arrangements for their office Christmas party with the proprietor, Pierre. He used to run a nightclub in Portsmouth called the Stage Door. The walls are covered with stars who worked there: James Stewart, Frank Ifield, the Spinners, Bert Weedon, Alvin Stardust.
“Is it Monday today?” asks a grey-haired old man who’s come down for his first drink of the day. Pierre tells him that it is.
The bar manager was born in Malta, he’s only 20 but says he has worked for Pierre for years. He takes some two-bobs out the till and feeds the jukebox, then tells me there are a lot of rich people who live on Hayling Island, “God knows why.”
Mike and John come down to the bar at two. We decide to go to Portsmouth for the rest of the day. There’s nothing to do in Hayling Island, except get drunk, and Mike and John don’t believe in that. You don’t last as long as the Searchers if you follow the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
One of the original members of the band did just that: got seduced by fame and wealth, fast cars, women who collect rock stars like cigarette cards. He invested what little he had left of his money in a Majorca disco. “We saw him about six months ago, as it happens,” says Mike. “He looked kind of old.” Mike is 38 and John 39, but they keep in shape.
In Portsmouth we go to Boots for shampoo and soap, W. H. Smith for magazines. Mike buys a copy of Guns Review and a local paper which will tell us what’s on at the local flicks. One hour later, we are in the circle at the Odeon (the stalls are closed), watching Yesterday’s Hero. And we stick it out till the Roy of the Rovers ending, when Ian McShane, yesterday’s hero, converts the penalty which wins the FA Cup for Windsor United. “They should have made it tough and gritty, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” John says as we walk to the multi-storey car park.
John supports Liverpool and Mike, Everton. A lot of their friends on Merseyside are professional footballers. One of them, Souness of Liverpool, has just bought a new white Porsche. “He’ll learn, the old gob-shite,” says John. Smokey Robinson plays on Radio One, as we drive back to Hayling Island. Mike and John know all the words. They start reminiscing.
About the early days of Merseybeat in Liverpool. They often played with the Beatles, and went to the same parties. They speak affectionately of “Eppie,” Brian Epstein, the opportunist record shop manager who saw the possibilities in the Mersey-sound and who later committed suicide. About the clubs in Hamburg they used to play. They’d do a four-hour set, the show would start at four in the afternoon, and finish at four in the morning. About the tours of America with the Zombies and the Ivy League, and once with Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers, who would book just one room in motels and sleep on the floor, taking it in turns to sleep in the bed.
Back at the motel, there’s just time to shower and shave, and eat a quick steak dinner, before getting back in the car for the drive to the open prison. “I suppose Frank will make his usual crack about liking a captive audience,” Mike smiles. “I can just see it coming.” The sign at the gates says HM Prison, Ford. A prison officer directs us to the social club for prison officers, where the comic is telling exactly the same jokes, in the same order, as last night, and where Frank and Billy, the drummer, are sitting in the snooker room.
The cabaret room is much smaller than at the car workers’ club. About 100 couples are packed into a long room, partially divided by wallpapered neo-classical arches. There are ham rolls in plastic cabinets at the bar. Like last night, it is an all-white audience, which means the comic can tell all his Paki jokes, although the prison officers and their wives are less responsive than the car workers and their wives.
In the snooker room, Billy is telling everyone about the blow-out he had last night on the way back to Luton. There is a drape over the table which, being full length, occupies almost all of the room. Just space enough for a line of chairs on which we sit. A man comes round with a tray of hot pies. Billy and Frank take one, then they all go backstage to change.
But Mike returns to the snooker room complaining, ‘‘You’ve got a guitar neck up your arse trying to get changed. John’s trying to tune up. Everyone’s in there getting changed, including the comic, it’s diabolical.” Mike is taking off his brown cord trousers, folding them neatly before putting on the black cord ones. “I can’t even be bothered to shave tonight,” he says.
He decided to wear the khaki shirt, not the 'blue one. “When it comes to these kind of places there’s crap and really crap. This is really crap . . . Most of them would’ve come here tonight, whoever was on. It’s their local club. Maybe we put a few on the gate.” He shrugs. “I’m not motivated now. I’ll go on that stage, and go through the motions. Well, I’ll be into the songs from the album, but the rest of it . . .” He shrugs again. There’s peals of laughter coming from the cabaret room. Perhaps that was the Johnny Rotten joke.
A man calls out the winning raffle numbers and then the Searchers come on stage, which is in darkness. “There’s two settings for the lights here: on and off,” says the roadie, sitting at his control panel behind the wallpapered arches, which makes it hard for him to get the sound right. The lights go on, and the band grind into Sweets for my sweet. Mike is smiling. He said he would go through the motions. They do the same songs in the same order as last night and a hundred nights before that.
Frank’s chat, too, is the same. “This was a hit in 1965. I won’t even tell you the title. I’ll see if you can remember it.” The Searchers play the opening chords of What have they done to the rain? and get applause from those who recognise it.
But the set goes down well, as it should. They are good and get called back for two encores. On the second, Frank asks if there are any requests. “Silence is golden,” an old lady pipes up. “I’m sure it is, dear, but that was by the Tremeloes.” The old lady collapses in giggles,
“Johnny B. Goode ” someone else shouts.
“As it happens, we know that,” shouts Frank above the squeal of John’s Yamaha guitar, which is already winding into the rock ’n’ roll classic.
Billy beats the drum for the final time tonight. The rest of the band unplug their guitars and walk off. Another night’s wages earned.
I talk to two couples at the back of the hall. “We’ve had them all here, you know,” says one of the men. “Billy J. Kramer the other week. Searchers tonight. All we need now are the Beatles.” I ask if he enjoyed the show? “Yeah, great. Takes you back to when you were courting like.”
The other man at this table has decided that the way I am standing, one arm akimbo, is too camp for his tastes and he makes sub-Larry Grayson duckie lips at me, while I’m talking to his friend. His wife keeps nudging him, tries to engage him in conversation; but none of this works, he continues with the pouting. He has had too much to drink, but he is still a jerk. Homosexuals under his charge must get a hard ride. His wife comes with me to get Mike’s autograph in the snooker room.
Last in the queue for an autograph is a woman who thanks him and says, “I love that Needles and pins. It’s really great.” Mike flashes despairing eyes, signs her book, and when she has gone, explodes. “I told you didn’t I? That’s all they want to hear. They piss me off. It’s the same old question, the same old answers. It gets to you sometimes.” It has got to him tonight.
I get a lift back to London with Billy, who comes from the Gorbals, and has played the drums for his living since he left school at 15. “When I was younger, I grew up with ballrooms all round me, and I thought I could work as a musician forever. But disco has killed live music and, to be honest, the working men’s clubs have killed cabaret as well. People won’t pay two or three quid when they can get into a working men’s club for a quid. That’s why the cabarets are closing.”
He talks about the break-up of the Gorbals, how the whole slum has been shifted out to huge housing projects on the edge of town, where his mother now lives. “These people were used to a pub on every corner, shops and everything. But they just built these giant blocks of flats, and nothing else. No wonder they go round destroying it all.”
Billy has been in jazz bands, soul bands, and with the Searchers for six years. He says he has often thought of trying to do something else, but what else can he do? “I haven’t any qualifications or anything. I think Frank’s the only one in the band who’s got O-levels or something.”
He is going back to Luton, at two in the morning. In rock ’n’ roll romance, the road is freedom and escape. In the rock ’n’ roll life, it’s the way you get there and get back. “It’s the work, the work, just the working life,” sings Bruce Springsteen, star of the 1970s, of the production line.
Billy drops me off at King’s Cross. There are some dossers trying to keep warm in cardboard. Thirty miles to Luton.
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