Chris Curtis was the Searchers’ drummer from 1960 to 1966 - the key years - and he was the lynch-pin of the group’s success. Very hyper, very enthusiastic, he was constantly seeking out obscure songs that, nevertheless, had “Hit” written all over them. There are different accounts as to how he came to leave the Searchers, certainly some misadventures on an Australian tour played their part, but in the end he was becoming unreliable. He made a solo record with the musicians who became Deep Purple and he produced records for other performers, notably Paul and Barry Ryan, but in the end, his music career fizzled out and he took a job in the civil service. He has retired due to ill-health (a consequence of “sick building syndrome”) and he has returned, somewhat cautiously, to the public light.

I interviewed Chris Curtis for BBC Radio Merseyside early in 1998 (subsequently in March 1998’s “Record Collector”), which, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was the first interview he had given in 30 years. John McNally said, “This interview is so distorted. Anything good that the Searchers ever did is down to him and he washes his hands of everything else.” Frank Allen, on the other hand, thought the interview was very funny and “pure Chris”. (The 1998 interview is also on this website so you can make up your own mind about it.)

Chris is still very hyper and very enthusiastic and in recent months, he has taken to performing again. Itt is sad that someone who made Number 1 records should be singing “Lean On Me” with a karaoke machine at the Old Roan pub or Cooper’s Emporium, but it happens. Someone stopped him in the supermarket and remarked on his appearance at the Old Roan without knowing his provenance.

Somewhat classier have been his appearances with live musicians for the Merseycats charity at the Marconi club in Huyton on Thursday nights, where incidentially he is taken by Mike Pender’s cousin, Michael Prendergast. He has been singing R&B oldies and “Are You Lonesome Tonight” (with awesome dynamics), but so far he hasn’t dipped into the Searchers’ songbook.

In April 2003 I asked him to come on to my show, “On The Beat”, on BBC Radio Merseyside to discuss the “new” Searchers’ albums, “The Searchers At The Iron Door”, “The Searchers At The Star-Club” and the “Swedish Radio Sessions”. He came across well but it has been a pyrrhic victory as Chris has no concept of time and has been known to ring me for a chat at two in the morning. When I told him to ring only at sensible times, he left me a present at Radio Merseyside. It was a much played copy of the Judy Collins LP, “Golden Apples Of The Sun”, which had been autographed, “To Chris, Best wishes, Judy Collins”. After “To Chris”, he had appended “and Spen”. Talk about having a collector’s item.

This is what Chris had to say in “On The Beat” on BBC Radio Merseyside on Sunday 13 April 2003. The material is not copyright - anyone who wants to write that book is welcome to use it.

SL: It’s quite astonishing, isn’t it, Chris, that, 40 years on, tracks are coming out that haven’t been heard by the public at all.

Chris Curtis: Yes, I never know about them until you tell me.

SL: You are noted for your versatility on the drums. You played tom-tom rolls, military rhythms, castanets, cowbells and bongos - you did everything on the records, didn’t you?

Chris Curtis: (Laughs) Pretty much. I was always doing a lot of things but one that springs to mind is a song I wrote called “No One Else Could Love Me”. I put down a basic track down with a standard drum-kit and then they played it back to me and I added castanets and Spanish bells.

NO ONE ELSE COULD LOVE ME - THE SEARCHERS

Chris Curtis: Tony Hatch was playing the piano on that.

SL: Tony Hatch was your producer at Pye. Was he an asset or a liability to the Searchers?

Chris Curtis: He was all right. He fibbed to me for the follow-up to “Sweets For My Sweet”. He said that he had been to a folk club in London and he had met this chap called Fred Nightingale who had written this song which would be good for us. It was “Sugar And Spice” and it was exactly the same chords as “Sweets For My Sweet”. Tony Hatch had written it himself and he tricked me into recording that rubbish.

SL: Couldn’t you have said, “Even so, I think it’s rubbish and we don’t want to do it.”

Chris Curtis: We were really desperate for a follow-up then.

SL: Do you wish you had recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” because that would have suited you perfectly?

Chris Curtis: No, it would have suited the guitar sound, but it wouldn’t have suited me.

SL: When we talked about doing this programme, you said that you would like to play some of your favourite records and the first artist is Lou Johnson.

Chris Curtis: Great bloke and a wonderful artist and this song would be just great for P.J.Proby. Especially if I sang along with him. How’s that for big time?

SL: Well, you have been performing again lately for the Merseycats?

Chris Curtis: That is run by some very nice people such as Derek Peel and I love it. Faron came and grabbed my guitar the other night and then he played it. He’s a lovely person but if he touches it again, he will never play another guitar again in his life!

PARK AVENUE - LOU JOHNSON

Chris Curtis: I love the laugh in that record. The way he goes “Ha!”.

SL: Let’s talk about “The Iron Door Sessions”. This is your audition for Pye which was recorded at the Iron Door. How important was the Iron Door to you?

Chris Curtis: It was owned by Les Ackerley who became our manager and was a good chap, very nice person, but he lost out when we went to London. It was great to play the Iron Door. We used to do doubles at the Orrell Park Ballroom and the Iron Door. It was difficult to get down the stairs with my drums at the OPB and then down another flight to the Iron Door. The stage was only a foot high, and it was a strange place. The room had a divider in it and Roger McGough used to stand between the doors.

SL: Did you do lunchtime sessions there?

Chris Curtis: No.

SL: What about at the Cavern?

Chris Curtis: Ray McFall, the owner of the Cavern, took a dislike to me because I said it was a dreadful place. It was stinky and sweaty. I used to play in corduroy trousers and a leather jacket and had a hair a foot long, so it wouldn’t be conducive to a nice, pleasant lunchtime.

SL: Well, wearing a leather jacket on stage is a pretty daft thing to do.

Chris Curtis: That’s me. I used to come home and my mum would say, “Take those clothes off, you stink”, and I would be sopping wet.

SL: Well, the song you have picked from “The Iron Door Sessions” is “Rosalie”.

Chris Curtis: That’s John McNally singing and I thought he did a really good job on that. He swings on rhythm guitar too, he plays the best rhythm guitar in the world.

SL: So you all took lead vocals?

Chris Curtis: Yes, that was one of the advantages of going to Germany. Manfred Weissleder and Horst Fascher realised we could play for a long time. I would sing “What’d I Say” and the audience would go absolutely nuts.

SL: Whereas Gerry Marsden in Gerry and the Pacemakers was their only vocalist and he was ruining his voice.

Chris Curtis: Yes, but he was doing an impression of Tony Sheridan. No one gives that man enough credit. He was great. He was the man who instigated “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (sings). Gerry must have heard him sing it. If you impersonate someone singing, it is never the same as your own throat doing the job.

ROSALIE - THE SEARCHERS

SL: You said you were at the Star-Club. St. Pauli was very seedy but people have told me that you went to this church that was in the midst of the strip clubs. Is that true?

Chris Curtis: Of course. We finished at five or six o’clock on Sunday morning and it was a good way of winding down. It was a convent church and there were a lot of nuns there. It was great.

SL: And what did you think of the area itself?

Chris Curtis: You said the word ‘seedy’. It was awful. There were transvestites standing in the doorway of the seedy clubs, and because I had very long hair, a lot of people thought I was a tranny, and I wasn’t.

SL: Very few people had long hair then.

Chris Curtis: Manfred Weissleder, who was a great bloke, and Horst Fascher, who did the announcing, would ask me why I had my hair like that, and I said, “Because I use it in the act.”

SL: But when you started having hit records, presumably somebody told you to have it cut.

Chris Curtis: No, I told myself. (Laughs) I thought, If you want to be as successful as Cliff, it will have to go.

SL: You only heard this Star-Club album the other day.

Chris Curtis: Through your good aegis. I was surprised by its quality. We had been back in England and we had got well known here, and we had a contract to go back. We were told that we didn’t have to do it, we could be bought out of it, but we said, “They paid money to see us before we were well-known, so we will return the favour.” They really appreciated it. Look at the crowd on the front of that album. They went absolutely nuts for us.

SL: Everybody did “What’d I Say”.

Chris Curtis: Yes, but nobody did it like me. Johnny Hutch of the Big Three did it first on Merseyside and he could drum better than anyone.

SL: You mentioned going to church at the Star-Club and this leads us onto another of your favourite artists, Big Maybelle.

Chris Curtis: Oh, I love her, she’s brilliant. Nobody knows about her in England, and she did covers of the Beatles’s songs. (Sings “Eleanor Rigby” like Big Maybelle.) I thought it wasn’t a woman at first, but it was Big Maybelle and she sings brilliantly.

NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I’VE SEEN - BIG MAYBELLE

WHAT’D I SAY - THE SEARCHERS

SL: And there’s some German in there.

Chris Curtis: Yes, that was to get them to join in.

SL: Not many people were singing lead vocals and playing drums until Levon Helm in the late 60s.

Chris Curtis: Oh, wasn’t he brilliant? That’s what I tried to do with the Searchlights, as I call them.

SL: Tell us a bit about your repertoire at the Star-Club.

Chris Curtis: Well, we would start with a speedy number to get them up dancing. That way the club would sell more beer. They called it “mach schau”. We would race around and I would shake my head and they really liked that. For some unknown reasons, the Germans liked me better with short hair and I thought it would be the other way round. I looked like an ordinary English chap when I had my hair cut.

SL: And Astrid Kirchherr took your pictures.

Chris Curtis: No, she didn’t. That was another AK, my girlfriend, Annette Kuntze,she came over to London to live with me in Knightsbridge. She took wonderful snaps and she did some of the Pye covers. She would tell us to stand still and not smile, and we would be all sullen.

SL: What about the songs on here - “I Can Tell”, “Sick And Tired”, “Mashed Potato”.

Chris Curtis: They were fillers. Lots of bands over there used to go, “We will do that one, and we can do it again later and then again later on”, but we never did that. We did different songs all night.

SL: What about “Sho Know A Lot About Love”?

Chris Curtis: Oh, that’s great. I loved obscure B-sides and loved finding really wonky songs. I used to go to a place in Rotunda where the chap knew me and would say, “Go upstairs where the boxes are and go through them for as long as you like.” I worked in Swift’s at the time, selling prams, but don’t ask me about that!

SL: So you never got any of your records from the Cunard Yanks?

Chris Curtis: No, you will find that all of the tracks recorded by the Searchers were available in NEMS or in the Rotunda shop. I found “Love Potion Number 9” in a back-street, second-hand shop in Hamburg. I saw this 45 with a triangle in the middle and I thought, “I’ve got to have it, it’s such a weird looking record.” I took my little portable electric record-player to Germany and I played “Love Potion Number 9” and I thought, “This is excellent.” For some unknown reason, I reckoned it would be a good single for the States as they like dopey stuff like that. We did it on “Shindig”. Brian Epstein used to introduce “Shindig”, dressed very British but just right for what he was doing - he was a Keith Fordyce for America.

SL: When you found these songs, did you have any difficulty in persuading the other Searchers to do them?

Chris Curtis: No, they knew I had picked the hits so I must know something. They went along with it.

SHO KNOW A LOT ABOUT LOVE - THE SEARCHERS

SL: Let’s move onto Dusty Springfield, whom you knew very well indeed.

Chris Curtis: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. She lived in Liverpool for a time and one night she drove me home to the Old Roan, to my mum’s old house. She had a huge silver-grey American car.

SL: I get the impression from Vicki Wickham’s book that she didn’t appreciate how good her voice was.

Chris Curtis: She never did. She was a very strange star. One night we were on the charbanc coming back from a one night stand and I could see that she was crying. I said, “What’s the matter, Mary?” She said, “We have just passed a primary school and a cemetary.” It made her aware of the transition of life. This song is pertinent to everything I thought about her, “Ne Me Quitte Pas”, “If You Go Away”. She was just wonderful.

IF YOU GO AWAY - DUSTY SPRINGFIELD

Chris Curtis: Genius. The French is spot-on.

SL: I saw Marty Wilde last night at Pontin’s and you could tell he absolutely loved performing. He couldn’t wait to get out there, but I presume Dusty Springfield was never like that.

Chris Curtis: Oh, she was, and she loved to do up tempo things. Vicki Wickham asked me to produce the sound for a “Ready, Steady, Go!”. Dusty and Otis Redding were on. She was doing a Northern Soul track called “Bring Him Back”. She was working with the Otis Redding band and I thought it wasn’t going to work because they didn’t seem loud enough. I don’t know what they did in the afternoon but when they did the show, it was Bam! Bam! Bam! and I thought, “This’ll do for me.” “”Bring Him Back” was excellent, she did a real good job on it.

SL: Did you like performing live yourself?

Chris Curtis: Well, I hated miming. I always lost track. I could do it, but it was only all right.

SL: Let’s move over to your Swedish sessions. Why did you do all these sessions for Swedish radio?

Chris Curtis: My best friend was in charge of the radio station. When I left the Searchers, I rang him and he told me to come over to Sweden to get myself straight. He sent his wife back to France, to her family, and he was a decent bloke.

SL: And he produced these sessions?

Chris Curtis: Well, it was whoever was there, but Klaus did quite well. “See See Rider” is Mike Pender’s forte. It was a good upbeat track that I nicked from Joey Dee and the Starliters. It really swings along.

SEE SEE RIDER - THE SEARCHERS

BRING HIM BACK - DUSTY SPRINGFIELD

SL: I was hoping to lead you into one of the famous incidents when I asked you about Dusty where she threw plates around. Did that happen?

Chris Curtis: Oh yes. She did that at the Liverpool Empire. She had a “Dusty mood”, as I call them, and she sent out to George Henry Lee’s for a box of plain white crockery. The dressing-rooms were in a corridor and she got the whole box and sent them crashing down there. It’s like a child, I suppose, but we all get our little tantrums.

Chris Curtis: George was one of the nicest, quietest people I have ever known. Both the Beatles and the Searchers, in that order, were playing the Litherland Town Hall. I didn’t go round with the other three Searchers that much, so I got the 28 bus from Stanley Road along to the Richmond sausage works and then I walked up the back-streets to the Town Hall. I had my long hair and I was ready to play in my leather jacket and corduroy trousers, I looked like something from “Bad Day At Black Rock”. I saw the Beatles, and I heard George say to the others, “It’s Mad Henry coming this way. What shall we do?” And John said, “It’s okay, he’s just mad.”

SL: Chris Curtis, thank you very much.

Chris Curtis: A pleasure to be here.

NEVER WITHOUT YOU - RINGO STARR