The Searchers: Final curtain call for When You Walk In The Room

Phil Shaw

Conflicting emotions are the essence of the song that has shone like a beacon in The Searchers’ set since 1963, Jackie DeShannon’s sublime When You Walk In The Room.

The group will surely experience confused feelings, too, when they play this year’s Glastonbury festival. Arguably the biggest gig of their extraordinary 68-year lifespan, it will also be their last.

They have retired twice and come back. However, the sole founding member John McNally turns 84 in August and ‘new boy’ Frank Allen (bass guitar for 61 years, starting with When You Walk In The Room) reaches 82 soon after.

Lucrative offers may roll in after they play the acoustic stage, but Worthy Farm at Pilton is scheduled to be the final date.

The band’s career has taken them from the dark, sweaty cellar that was The Cavern in Liverpool – the city which spawned them in the skiffle era and is still home to McNally – to the Royal Variety Performance at the Theatre Royal in London’s Drury Lane. Along the way they have averaged 200 shows a year, many in workingmen’s clubs, soup-in-a-basket nightspots and provincial theatres, as well as overseas tours.

They have plenty of hits to serve up to the Glastonbury crowd and television audience. Songs big enough to be familiar from ‘oldies radio’ to those not born when The Searchers were second only to The Beatles in the Mersey Beat pantheon (Brian Epstein lamented them as ‘the group that got away’).

Three No1s for starters: Sweets For My Sweet, Needles And Pins and Don’t Throw Your Love Away. Plus a further three that made the Top Ten: Sugar and Spice, Goodbye My Love and When You Walk In The Room, which reached No3 in 1964.

It should be a straightforward nostalgia-fest, but The Searchers’ story is littered with unexpected twists. Lead singer Tony Jackson went solo at the peak of their popularity in 1964; drummer and song-finder-in-chief Chris Curtis departed after an Australian tour two years later; and McNally’s co-founder Mike Pender split amid acrimonious legal wrangles in 1985.

There was also the strange failure of their second coming, the deal with the label that gave us Talking Heads and Ramones, Sire. Nearly two decades on from their breakthrough, when their lack of a songwriting team meant they covered songs by The Drifters, Coasters, Orlons and even the Rolling Stones and The Hollies, The Searchers still had the knack of unearthing gems and giving them their signature sound.

Hearts In Her Eyes was penned by ex-Kursaal Flyer Will Birch and John Wicks. Their band The Records had yet to record the song but gifted it to The Searchers. An insanely catchy and commercial update on their trademark chiming guitars and breezy harmonies, it should have restored them to the charts.

It didn’t, though one hopes it will make the festival setlist. When You Walk In The Room must, and it will have few rivals for the unofficial title of Best Song of the weekend (although Needles And Pins may run it close).

DeShannon’s original, released in late 1963, fused the emerging folk-rock style with production values inspired by the Phil Spector Wall of Sound. Curtis chose it for The Searchers though it was not necessarily an obvious hit, the Kentuckian’s version having peaked at 99 in the US and flopped in the UK.

In the jingle-jangle morning, The Byrds came following

Three key elements combine to make The Searchers’ rendition a timeless classic. The first is the guitar intro, which replicates the original except that Pender wanted to give it greater ‘emphasis’. He succeeded to the extent that over in the US, members of a newly formed, soon to be hugely influential five-piece would later concede that The Searchers, as much as the leaders of the British Invasion, The Beatles, were a major inspiration for their Rickenbacker-dominated sound.

In the jingle-jangle morning, The Byrds came following. It is not too great a stretch to trace a line from the opening motif of When You Walk In The Room, which is repeated throughout and closes the song, to the instantly recognisable hook that introduces Mr Tambourine Man.

Byrds bassist Chris Hillman recalled they had covered it during an early residency at Ciro’s on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, saying: ‘We borrowed a lot from The Searchers back then.’ Roger McGuinn similarly admitted the Byrds’ music was shaped by the ‘12-string sound’ (which was often overdubbed six-string guitars) McNally and Pender adopted as The Searchers evolved from the Mersey Beat era. ‘I used the pattern from Needles And Pins for (Gene Clark’s) Feel A Whole Lot Better,’ McGuinn said.

The second striking component of their treatment of When You Walk In The Room was the rich harmonies. David Crosby, who oversaw this department in the nascent Byrds before forming Crosby, Stills & Nash, acknowledged that he too was in thrall to The Searchers and the three-part vocal symmetry, initially between Jackson, Pender and Curtis.

Pender’s lead vocal was a model of phrasing. The aggressive way he sang ‘ev-eree’ rather than ‘every’ was an echo of how he pronounced the title line of the group’s previous DeShannon cover as ‘Needles And Pinza’ (I knew someone who was convinced for 20 years that it was Pincers).

Then again, on When You Walk In The Room he was blessed with the third key element, a lyric as vivid, evocative and truthful as it is concise and bleak. Anyone who has ever had an unrequited, or unspoken, passion for another person, unable to think of anything or anyone else, will recognise the scenario.

Adoration tussles with awkwardness, infatuation with tongue-tied shyness. And the thrill of seeing the object of devotion, when exquisite music fills the air and the night is suddenly illuminated by moonlight, is ruined by blushing.

I can feel a new expression on my face

I can feel a glowing sensation taking place

I see a summer’s night with a magic moon

Every time that you


Walk in the room

He cannot, dare not, reveal his yearning, instead internalising the longing and putting on a masquerade. Here, DeShannon comes up with a couplet for the ages, the French pronunciation of ‘nonchalant’ lending it added allure.

I close my eyes for a second and pretend it’s me you want

Meanwhile I try to act so nonchalant

The bridge section finds Pender – or current lead vocalist Spencer James – admitting that walking alongside his heart’s desire would be ‘a dream come true’, only to add:

Wish I could tell you how much I care

But I only have the nerve to stare

Then it’s back to the verse where the head feels like it is going to explode and there’s a final, jarring clash, of joyful music and stormy weather:

I can feel a something pounding in my brain


Just anytime that someone speaks your name


Trumpets sound and I hear thunder boom


Every time that you


Walk in the room

The title never actually appears in the lyric; it is implicit that the ‘you’ is not being addressed directly. Among those to cover the song Bruce Springsteen has played it live while Del Shannon, Agnetha from Abba, Paul Carrack and Status Quo all recorded it.

The Searchers’ version is up there with DeShannon’s. Glastonbury can expect a bittersweet treat.

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