The Searchers to end touring after 68 years
"The Searchers are finally performing at the greatest music festival of them all.
"What a way to round off a tour and a career. I can't wait to get up on stage and give our fans one final blast."
The Searchers' hits also include Sugar And Spice, Needles And Pins and Don't Throw Your Love Away.
They have sold more than 50 million records and performed worldwide, while drawing praise from artists such as Bruce Springsteen.
The band's Final Farewell Tour runs from 14 June and will end with a performance on the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury on 27 June.
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Times
2 days ago
- Times
Sorry, Boss — I'm just not your biggest fan
Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. Which will mean more to some of you than others. It's the title of Bruce Springsteen's first album. He played his early gigs with the E Street Band about two minutes from my hotel, at a venue called the Stone Pony. Others who gigged there on the way up: Blondie, the Ramones, Elvis Costello on his first transatlantic tour. Van Morrison shot a video at the Pony because he thought it had a cool atmosphere. But it's the Boss's lingering aura that is the draw, obviously. Making me something of an imposter. This isn't a pilgrimage to the source of the river. I'm not the biggest Springsteen fan. I know I'm probably missing something. There's enough people out there willing to testify to his genius and since he's taken a stand against Donald Trump, his standing in Asbury Park is greater than ever. Supportive signs in the shop windows, defiant messages on white tees, a real hagiography. All wasted. I used to spend a lot of time at tournaments with our golf correspondent, Derek. Absolute Springsteen nut. Golf writers spend a lot of time in the US. Derek had seen his hero dozens of times. The running joke was my lack of appreciation, exaggerated to a regular assertion that Springsteen was rubbish. • This singer is Bruce Springsteen's heir — here's why Actually it was more nuanced than that. If I had just trashed Springsteen, Del could have dismissed me as an idiot. But I always qualified it by saying I liked some Springsteen. Which is true. I like it when he doesn't sound anything like how we imagine Bruce Springsteen. So, not good time rock and roll or Born in the USA. Streets of Philadelphia, I love. And his cover version of Dream Baby Dream by Suicide, New York punks with a cheap synthesizer. And that, I think, made it worse. It's like the old joke about the difference between a dummy and a dummy's dummy. The former believes everything he reads in the Sunday Sport; whereas the latter believes some of the things he reads in the Sunday Sport. By the way, blue-collar Bruce did not actually come from Asbury Park. He played here. Asbury Park is nice, rather posh. Cool, artistic community, very liberal, very gay. Lovely, picturesque, colourful wooden-boarded houses, as many pride flags as there are stars and stripes. You'd be happy to live in Asbury Park. And it's on the sea. I'm here because the tournament I'm covering ends at Meadowlands in New Jersey. The stadium is in the state, the NFL teams that call it home are the two from New York, the Giants and the Jets. Most visitors will stay in New York. But I've done that many times, for work, on holiday. So here I am on the eastern seaboard. And it's America, and quite an important part culturally, so you still get that feeling of being on a film set. You drive the New Jersey Turnpike, like Tony does in the title sequence of The Sopranos; you come off at toll booths like the one where Sonny Corleone is ambushed in The Godfather. Frank Sinatra came from New Jersey; so did rap originators the Sugarhill Gang. Then, on the Garden State Parkway the other day, there it was: the Jon Bon Jovi Service Area. How great is that? Why don't we do this, name mundane road stops after local rock stars? A Johnny Rotten Little Chef just off the North Circular. A Dave Gilmour Drive-Thru Starbucks and Shell garage at the top of the M11. You'd be proud, wouldn't you, in Jon Bon Jovi's shoes? He loves it. Called the naming — it was previously the Cheesequake Service Area — a career highlight. I think I'd turn up there one day a year if I was him, put on a uniform and get behind the counter at Auntie Anne's just to see the look on people's faces. Thinking on it, though, Cheesequake? What a name for a band that would be. Better than Bon Jovi. Although that may have been spoiled for me on discovering there was a tribute act from Yorkshire, called By Jovi. Now they should definitely have their own service station.
The Herald Scotland
05-07-2025
- The Herald Scotland
Classic Scottish 1984 album is still, decades later, young at heart
A week ago, they played Glastonbury for the very first time, playing the Acoustic Stage in a bill that also featured Nick Lowe and the Hothouse Flowers. Their much-lauded debut album, Sisters, released in 1984, has now been accorded the expanded box-set treatment. In February this year they entertained fans old and new at the Barrowland. And two years ago they released The Bluebells in the 21st Century, their first studio album since the debut. 'The Bluebells are on a really great trajectory at the moment', Hodgens – Bobby Bluebell, as was – told Ellen and Hepworth. 'We've just finished our [next] album. We've had a real kind of Indian Summer, renaissance, in the last few years. I don't know why, to be honest. But all of a sudden, people like Stephen Pastel and [critic] Pete Paphides are all beginning to reassess us'. He brought up Young at Heart, perhaps the Bluebells' best-known song, which hit number one in the UK charts in 1993, seven years after the band's demise, thanks to its exposure in a TV car advertisement. 'When you have a hit like [that], you kind of get put in that Marmalade category" he said, referring to the Scots pop band whose hits included Reflections Of My Life and Radancer. "And now you begin to realise that Marmalade were a fantastic band, with really fantastic songs and great singers, and I think we're getting a little bit of that again now'. To revisit Sisters, that splendid album they released back in 1984 – the year, lest we forget, of such colossal albums as Springsteen's Born in the USA, Prince's Purple Rain soundtrack, and Madonna's Like a Virgin – is to recall just how good a band the Bluebells were. The hits are all there – Cath, Young at Heart, I'm Falling – but there are also some sharply political songs, a reflection of those turbulent times: the Falklands war, the early 1980s recession, the miners' strike, and widespread revulsion at the policies of Margaret Thatcher. The album is now part of a three-CD, one DVD boxset, The Bluebells: Sisters, which blends the original record with bonus tracks, B-sides, single mixes, BBC sessions, live versions, promo videos and footage of the band appearing on Top of the Pops and the Old Grey Whistle Test. (As the band posted on Facebook recently, they played Young at Heart on ToTP on no fewer than seven occasions between 1984 and 1993 - a record beaten only by their fellow Scots, Wet Wet Wet, who performed their single 'Love Is All Around' eight times). In his introductory liner notes to the boxset, the music journalist Will Hodgkinson has this to say: 'Rooted in classic song craft, exuding cheerfulness even when dealing with loneliness, heartbreak and other lachrymose staples, the Bluebells were the very essence of indie — they helped define its jangling, guitar-led sound — while maintaining an accessibility that went to the heart of their working-class roots. 'It was all captured in Sisters, a classic album of upbeat pop that in 1984 delivered the band something contemporaries like Orange Juice and Aztec Camera only ever managed intermittently: actual massive hits. They rang out from the speakers of fairground dodgems, youth club discos and concert halls across the land for one glorious summer of 1984'. He surely speaks for many people who were into the Bluebells at the time when he ventures: 'Returning not just to the album but a wealth of radio sessions, singles versions and live recordings all these years later, what amazed me is how contemporary and relevant they sound. The essence of youth, it seems, changes less than we might imagine'. Read more: The band revolved around Hodgens, a Govan shipyard worker's son in thrall to classic Sixties songwriting, and the McCluskey brothers, Ken and Dave, who had been in a schoolboy punk band, Raw Deal. Hodgens, who had founded a music fanzine, Ten Commandments, in 1980, initially played his own songs in a band called The Oxfam Warriors, who undertook a handful of shows supporting Altered Images. At the last one, at Glasgow School of Art, Alan Horne, of Postcard Records, Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins and a friend named Robert Sharp held up Juke Box Jury-type 'hit' and 'miss' cards. Horne told Hodgens that songs were good, unlike the band, and that if a new group could be put together he would try to put them on Postcard. The Bluebells came together when Hodgens ran into the McCluskey brothers - Ken on vocals, David on drums - and they were joined by Lawrence Donegan, on bass, and Russell Irvine, on guitar. Glasgow had a small and very close-knit music scene then, and the Bluebells received a lot of encouragement, while Collins himself 'was something of a mentor' for Hodgens at the outset. The new band made rapid progress. 'We played with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera', Hodgens told Scots music historian Brian Hogg in 1993, 'and because of this Postcard connection we were in Sounds [magazine] straightaway. There was even a picture of us in New Musical Express after our second concert. Nick Heyward saw it and because he liked my guitar he phoned up and gave us a support slot with Haircut 100'. In 1981 Radio One presenter Kid Jensen invited the band to record the first of a number of sessions for his show, which gave them invaluable exposure. In July 1982 Smash Hits said of the Bluebells that they were 'vendors of sturdy guitar-driven pop music with a distinctive ringing tone which, once heard, isn't easily forgotten'. Melody Maker went even further: 'Bobby Bluebell doesn't look like a pop star. He's tall, gangling, wears glasses and should be advertising Charles Atlas bodybuilding courses – as the seven-stone weakling. By the end of this year, Bobby Bluebell will probably be a pop star and the heart-throb of millions. That's where the smart money is'. It was all happening for the Bluebells. They graced the cover of Melody Maker, and shortly afterwards came a live appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test in October 1982, when they were as yet unsigned. The gig brought them to the attention of a wide audience. Elvis Costello had already reached out to them, and offered to produce some of their material. Their Costello-produced debut single, Everybody's Somebody's Fool, which had been tentatively been lined up by Postcard, came out, instead, on London Records, the band's eventual home. Two singles, Cath and Sugar Bridge, had made it to the lower reaches of the Top 100 in 1983. The following year, I'm Falling reached number 11; then Young at Heart peaked at number eight. The cheerful promo video (included in the box set) featured Stratford Johns, the actor best-known for his tough-cop roles in Z-Cars and Softly, Softly, as the owner of a greasy-spoon cafe, as well as Molly Kelly and Clare Grogan. The album, Sisters, had numerous highlights, aside from the hit singles: the poignant, string-laden Will She Always Be Waiting, on which they had originally worked with Costello; Aim in Life, written by Ken McCluskey at the age of 15 and 'about a lonely reclusive lady that I delivered newspapers to'; and a moving love song, H.O.L.L.A.N.D., There was a cover of Dominic Behan's most famous song, The Patriot Game. Behan was a friend of the McCluskey brothers' parents, and the brothers knew him well. 'When we started performing as The Bluebells we asked Dominic to update some of the verses so that it could become more of a universal message for young folk and the futility of war', Ken told the Record Store Day UK website recently. The brothers also worked with Behan on South Atlantic Way, a clear-eyed look at the Falklands War. It begins: 'I was a raw recruit fresh out of school/and we set sail South Atlantic Way', it begins. Later: 'Well, I've got shrapnel running through my mind/I've glory in my head/Love of country has made me blind/to the living and the dead…' Among those who reviewed Sisters favourably was Sounds magazine, which said that it contained 'more beauty and fear than most albums you'll hear this year'. Read more On the Record: "We were in a really fantastic location called Highland Studios up near Culloden in the north of Scotland", Hodgens recalled last month when asked by Classic Pop magazine about the making of Sisters. "It was a kind of residential studio and we just had the best time doing the album. "I'd say there's no greater experience being in a band than recording your first album in a residential analogue studio playing live together, concentrating, the whole buzz. The whole tingle down your spine thing when you hear it all back through the mixing desk on those giant speakers for the first time. It's something that we're trying to recreate with our new album, which we're currently recording in a very similar way up in here Scotland at the moment". Asked about the political content on some of the songs, he said: "I think in The Bluebells, without sounding too clichéd, most of our parents had been brought up really influenced by their working-class roots. My father worked in a shipyard. Ken and David's father was very affiliated with Dominic Behan and people like that. "So we were very up in our politics, and very aware of what was going on. I'd just moved down to London and there was a bombing campaign going on there, so it was quite a tense situation. The Falklands War came, and obviously we weren't afraid to bring it up. We would write about anything in the songs, but we didn't really ever do it deliberately, or as a policy. It just came out in a lot of the songs". Four decades after its release, Sisters fully deserves its remastered and expanded second life. It remains a compelling listen, and one that has no dated in the slightest. * The Bluebells: Sisters boxset is released by London Records.
Telegraph
04-07-2025
- Telegraph
Stevie Wonder: The superstar's charisma remains undimmed
Stevie Wonder did not go as far as Bruce Springsteen did six weeks ago when he proclaimed onstage that America had fallen into the hands of 'a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration'. But there was anger in the way Wonder talked of being 'very disappointed with the leaders we have – all of them' at the start of his set at the Lytham Festival in Lancashire, reminding them that they're supposed to make the world a better place. The 75-year-old set about doing just that with a joyful set that included lots of teasing interaction with the sell-out crowd of 20,000, plus a closing tribute to the recently departed Sly Stone as he rolled Superstition into Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) in one epic funk workout. It certainly wasn't hotter than July at the breezy venue on the west coast below Blackpool but Wonder had warmth to spare, opening with Love's in Need of Love Today, from his 1976 double album Songs in the Key of Life, with its message of love over hate, then getting the party started with As If You Read My Mind and Master Blaster (Jammin') from 1980. The latter matched the dazzle of Wonder's bright red suit, with its sequinned portraits of Bob Marley and Malcolm X. The size and stage presence of Wonder's band, two guitarists, two percussionists and a drummer, two keyboard players (plus himself), bass, multiple horns and backing singers made for a big, funky sound, perfect for a rare UK tour that will take in Manchester's Co-Op Live and BST Hyde Park. Dance tracks like Sir Duke sounded magnificent. Wonder's voice still has its rich timbre, and all its shades of expression – it growls, yelps and roars – only rarely showing its age in a few places such as the repeated, rising vocal runs on Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing. There's just the hint of increasing physical frailty, too, but Wonder's charisma is absolutely undimmed. Over a career that extends over more than six decades (he scored his first US number one in 1963 at the age of 13), the singer and multi-instrumentalist has created such a range of enduring works that it's easy to forget what a huge, playful presence he is on stage. He's almost unique in his ability to roll out great songs of such astonishing variety, from pure 1960s pop like Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours to radical soul like Living in the City to heartfelt love songs like If You Really Love Me. Wonder has deep soul, but he also just loves to muck about; he's a disruptor, exuberant, naughty – there's something uncontainable about him. Here, he had the band set up a slow reggae version of The Beatles' Love Me Do as he played harmonica on it; and he wanted the crowd to sing along with him so much, he sometimes gave them almost the whole song, as on his classic pop-cheese ballad, I Just Called to Say I Love You, 'It's just gonna be me playing piano, and y'all sing, you good with that?' We were good with that. Then he made the crowd choose between Do I Do and Superstition as the closer. That was no contest.
