Review: The Searchers - Sugar & Spice (1963)
Tracks: 1) Sugar And Spice; 2) Don’t You Know; 3) Some Other Guy; 4) One Of These Days; 5) Listen To Me; 6) Unhappy Girls; 7) Ain’t That Just Like Me; 8) Oh My Lover; 9) Saints And Searchers; 10) Cherry Stones; 11) All My Sorrows; 12) Hungry For Love.
REVIEW
The story behind ‘Sugar & Spice’ (the song) is funny: apparently Tony Hatch, the band’s producer, had decided that the boys desperately needed to repeat the success of ‘Sweets For My Sweet’, so he wrote a melodically and thematically similar song himself and pitched it to the lads under the pen name of «Fred Nightingale», wary that they might reject it otherwise. Allegedly the Searchers still hated the song, but went on to record it anyway — and got a solid #2 hit right below the Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Why they hated it is a question, but probably because it was really reminiscent of the previous hit — right down to the suitably soothing alliterative title — and that was definitely not the right way to go about your career if you wanted to compete with the Beatles. Or maybe because it was far more poppy, with a sentimental guitar melody in place of the «rougher» R&B chords of the Drifters’ song. Or maybe they weren’t big fans of nursery rhymes. In any case, there is no denying either the song’s catchiness or its sappiness.
And «sappy» was something that the Searchers really did not want to associate with themselves too much, given that most of the songs on their second LP are still in the rock’n’roll vein. We got us some Buddy Holly, some Carl Perkins, a little Coasters, even a bit of Ronnie Hawkins, and, of course, ‘Some Other Guy’, a song that every British beat band was playing at the time (the Beatles included — you can see them rockin’ it at the Cavern in just about every Beatles documentary). Are the performances adequate? For the most part. Are they particularly outstanding or memorable? Not any more than the first time around. Once again, the Searchers try to prove to us that they are capable of being tough rock’n’rollers, and once again, if there is anything to laud about all these performances, it is only in the sphere of the boys’ vocal harmonies. They stay more coordinated and more in key on ‘Some Other Guy’ than the Beatles on the BBC Sessions (but only because that performance was live — I’m sure that if they did the song in the studio with Martin, the Searchers would be out of a job); they add tons of extra backing vocals to Buddy Holly’s ‘Don’t Cha Know’ (not that the song really needs them, but hey, if you got an advantage, you should use it in any context you can, right?); they throw on a rowdy Isley Brothers-style call-and-response coda to ‘Ain’t That Just Like Me’, making the Coasters’ joke song more anthemic as a result. None of that is particularly necessary, but hey, at least the boys show us that they are working.
Also, to be fair, at least the song selection, ‘Some Other Guy’ excluded, is not quite as predictable this time around. With Perkins, for instance, they try out a lesser known title (‘Unhappy Girls’) rather than ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ or ‘Honey Don’t’. Ronnie Hawkins is hardly one of the most covered American artists, either — and neither are the Chiffons (‘Oh My Lover’), at least not until George Harrison began ripping them off (heh heh). The most outstanding inclusion, for which I had even to do a bit of research, was ‘Cherrystone’, an upbeat pop-rock hit from 1959 by the Addrisi Brothers (a former acrobatic duo from Massachusets!) — but so little known even at the time, apparently, that it was confused by the record makers with the popular song ‘Cherry Stones’, by John Jerome, and included under that title and credited to that composer, so that the poor Addrisi Brothers most certainly never saw one red cent from those sales; as far as I can tell, that particular mistake has not as of yet been corrected in any discography source... because, I mean, who cares? It’s not the frickin’ Beatles or anything.
And once again, just like last time around, there is only one song on the album that properly showcases the Searchers’ main strength — beautiful folk harmonies set to pretty ringing folk guitar melodies. This is ‘All My Sorrows’, which they probably nicked from The Kingston Trio who were the ones to perform the song with this title (rather than the original ‘All My Trials’, under which it was performed by most of the Greenwich Village artists). The guitar «weave» on this song is quite exquisite, with John McNally’s clear acoustic rhythm guitar echoed by Mike Pender’s oddly distorted electric arpeggios (I’d swear he is running them through a Leslie cabinet, but apparently this is a bit too early for such trickery), and the whole thing has an ethereal-magical aura around it which, of course, you shall never find on «purist» versions. An entire album of this type of sound might have been overkill, but two or three more tunes like this certainly couldn’t have hurt — at the expense of, say, the Searchers trying to be the Coasters, an enterprise about as futile for them as trying to be the Marx Brothers, or the Dalton Gang.
Still, once again, this is a fun little record to listen to if you’ve got nothing better to do. The McNally / Pender guitar duo, in particular, keeps improving, and by the standards of late 1963 proudly holds its own to the Lennon / Harrison sound, at least when it comes to softer and folksier parts of the repertoire. In a way, they could be regarded at that precise time period as sort of a transitional ground between the Beatles and the Shadows — tighter and more attentive to professional musical discipline than the Fab Four, but looser and more rock’n’roll-like than Cliff Richard’s homies. This is not necessarily a good thing (because middle ground can be a treacherous territory), and the near-total lack of original songwriting is a serious downside, but they do have their own identity even on those early records.
Only Solitaire: The Searchers review page