Album Reviews

Note: The SACD review appeared here May of 2004. A new LP, mastered by Steve Hoffman has just been issued. Hoffman used the original 15ips Pye stereo master mixes played back on a vintage (1964)vacuum tubed Ampex MX-35. Enjoy!

Between 1963 and 1966 The Searchers, Liverpool’s second most popular fab four, epitomized the early Merseybeat/post skiffle sound that’s heard on early Beatles albums and elsewhere. It’s a sound dominated by ringing, tremelo-drenched guitars, a happy shuffle beat, and three part vocal harmonies. Sure the music sounds dated today, but dated like a 1963 Corvette: sleek, true and timeless.

With hits like “Needles and Pins,” (originally written by Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche for Jackie DeShannon), “Sugar and Spice,” “Don’t Throw Your Love Away,” and “When You Walk in The Room,” among them, The Searchers are surely familiar to Baby Boomers, but younger Beatles and Byrds fans may have missed them.

It didn’t take a musical genius in 1964 to hear that The Byrds had lifted the intro to “Needles and Pins” for “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” and the influence of the band on The Byrds can be heard and felt throughout the first few Byrds LPs.

Great tunes, spirited performances and as an extra bonus, spectacular sound, make this 17 track collection brilliantly mastered to DSD (and now 180g AAA vinyl!) by Steve Hoffman from the original Pye master tapes, a mighty attractive nugget. When Pye UK issued The Golden Hour of The Searchers on a single LP in the 1970’s (GH541), I bought it just to have a collection of their hits. I was amazed by how big, pure, transparent (and primitive) the sound was, even compressed down to twelve tunes per side (luckily the songs were short—many were two minutes long). Especially noteworthy are the effortless, ultra-extended highs. The purity and clarity of the cymbals are astonishing.

Todd Everett’s excellent annotation (not available on the LP edition) explains the sound: it turns out that Pye staff engineer Robert Auger was a fan and friend of Mercury’s genius engineer Bob Fine. Enough said. Hoffman used the original stereo mixes (from 3 track Ampex recordings), by Auger and Eddie Kramer (who got his start at Pye) for this hybrid SACD (and LP), running the signal through a vintage vacuum tubed Ampex MX-35 line mixer restored especially for this disc, directly to DSD. The only mystery is why the LP I mentioned lists “Ray Prickett” as the engineer.

(An email arrived 2/7/06 from Jed Kearse solves this "mystery." Kearse writes: "Regarding your review of the Searchers reissue, I can confirm that Ray Prickett was the engineer on all their sessions. Ray worked with Tony Hatch on all his productions including all of Petula Clark's hits. I worked for the late Bob Auger in the late sixties at Pye and he was a big fan of Bob Fine's. Most of the big hits from Pye were recorded by Ray. Ray had more hits in both the UK and US at one time than any other engineer. Ray is still working today, in fact we made twelve new albums last year. Having worked with Bob Auger, John Timperley, Mike Ross Trevor and many more fine engineers, I would put Ray at the top of the list, nobody has done more for recorded sound than Ray.Hope this puts the record straight, kind regards Jed Kearse, Soundline Recordings.

There’s not a throw-away song on this happy collection, and if you’re of a certain vintage, even some of the unfamiliar song titles will turn out to be old friends. Every Beatles fan—especially aficionados of the early albums—ought to pick this up. No Beatles collection can be considered complete without a Searchers compilation, and sonically, this is the best one ever—though there are a few other tracks that would have been nice to have had mastered so brilliantly.

Highly recommended and worth owning just for “Needles and Pins” and “Don’t Throw Your Love Away.”

Note: the "10" sound rating must be taken in context of the time in which this material was recorded, but in some respects it better anything done today—zero processing.