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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Edinburgh Live
a day ago
- Edinburgh Live
Music fans pick 'greatest song ever made' and there's only one winner
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Music lovers from around the globe have united to discuss what they consider to be the greatest song of all time. With countless tracks to select from, a viral post has prompted many to regard a particular rock and roll number as the pinnacle of musical achievement. Legendary classics were cast aside in favour of one specific track that has captured people's attention. And after much deliberation, thousands of music fans declared one anthem by Bruce Springsteen as the "best song ever." The initial X post, by New York-based music writer Jules Zucker, had proposed the Scissor Sisters' 2006 hit I Don't Feel Like Dancin' – which was partly written by Sir Elton John – as the best track ever released. However, this was swiftly dismissed in favour of a track from The Boss's acclaimed album, Born To Run. While Springsteen's compilation boasts numerous masterpieces, fans believe Thunder Road stands not only as the finest from his 1975 release, but as the greatest in musical history. Jules' post said: "Enough about the worst songs ever. Let's talk about the best song ever. For instance, I Don't Feel Like Dancin' by Scissor Sisters." In response, Springsteen superfan Alexis opened the floodgates when she wrote: "Thunder Road has entered the conversation." Music lovers rushed into to deliver their assessment of the song before calling it the ultimate song of all time. One user responded: "This gives me chills because I remember the shows when he performed this and it takes me right back there. Unless you were there, it's hard to understand how good his concerts were." Another agreed, adding: "All things considered this has to be the singularly best Springsteen song but there are certainly arguments that can be made for Jungleland, Born To Run, Badlands, The River, The Promised Land or maybe even Rosalia." A third concurred, writing: "No doubt." However, not everyone was in agreement despite regarding Thunder Road as an all-time classic. One simply fumed: "Oh please..." Meanwhile, another joked: "Not even the best Bruce song with 'Thunder' in the name." A third added: "It's up there, but for me there's better in his catalogue." (Image: Kevin Mazur/WireImage via Getty Images) Some were even proposing alternative tracks, with one citing Bob Dylan's Tangled Up In Blue as the greatest song ever made. Another user asked: "What do you know about The Weight by [Canadian rockers] The Band?" A further suggestion for the greatest song ever made was Fleetwood Mac's The Chain. The song will resonate particularly with motor racing fans of a certain age as its distinctive riff was used as the BBC's theme tune for its Formula 1 coverage between 1978 and 1996, and again between 2009 and 2015. They wrote: "The thing about listening to music is you keep thinking 'maybe one day I'll find a song better than The Chain' but you never find any songs better than The Chain." There was a broad range of other artists put forward by the public, including Lou Reed, The Beatles and Black Country, New Road. Meanwhile, another viral tweet put forward The Beach Boys' God Only Knows as the greatest song of all time – two months after their founding member Brian Wilson died, aged 82. What do you consider to be the greatest song ever made? Let us know in the comments below.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Telegraph
Forget Bob Dylan, this folk hero is the true voice of America
'Look out you fascists, here I come,' sings the twangy, nasal voice, to a simple acoustic strum. Even on a home-recording, it's unmistakable. This is the voice of Woody Guthrie, the folk singer who influenced the greats, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. It's from I'm a Child Ta Fight, the second single to be released from the upcoming album Woody at Home, Vol. 1 and 2, a painstakingly restored collection of songs recorded by Guthrie at home with his children in Brooklyn in the early 1950s. They were taped at a time when the singer's health was declining, shortly before he was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea, the inherited neurodegenerative disease that had led to the death of his mother in 1930 in the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. Guthrie would himself soon be admitted to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where he was a patient from 1956-61. It was there that he was visited by a young Bob Dylan, an event memorialised not only in the song that Dylan wrote for his hero – Song to Woody – but in the 2024 Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. The Oscar-nominated film starred Scoot McNairy as Guthrie and Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, and reawakened interest in the music of both men among a much younger audience. Guthrie's publisher had gifted him a lo-fi mono recorder to get some songs down on tape. Brought back to life, it's a treasure trove: 22 previously unreleased recordings, including 13 never-before-heard Guthrie songs and three spoken-word tracks. There is a version of his alternative American national anthem This Land Is Your Land, with new verses, and a recording of his classic evocation of the Dust Bowl era, Pastures of Plenty. Plus the only version recorded by Guthrie of Deportee, from a poem that he'd written in 1948 after a plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California, which killed 28 migrant workers being deported to Mexico: 'Who are these dear friends who are falling like dry leaves?' it reads; 'Radio said, 'They are just deportees'.' The song has taken on new resonance in Trump's America, where officials are rounding up migrant farmworkers and returning them to their countries of origin. Since the late 1950s, Deportee has been a folk standard, covered (with a different arrangement to Guthrie's) by Springsteen and Dolly Parton, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, The Byrds, Joan Baez, The Dubliners and Deacon Blue, as well as by country supergroup The Highwaymen (consisting of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings). It speaks to how deeply Guthrie's words touch the heart; to how he captured the plight of the downtrodden down the decades. And it explains why Guthrie continues to capture the imagination almost 60 years after his death in New York City in 1967. He's a romantic figure, for sure, and one whose life was altered by tragedy, including the death of two loved ones (his four-year-old daughter, Cathy, and his elder sister Clara) in separate fire-related incidents. The image of him emblazoning his guitar with the legend 'This Machine Kills Fascists' has become part of rock folklore; many musicians have paid homage to it, from Steve Earle's direct tribute to Joe Strummer and his 'Ignore Alien Orders' guitar (Strummer once styled himself Woody, before he became famous with The Clash). Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello had a custom-built axe with 'Arm the Homeless' scrawled on it; peace-loving Pete Seeger had a banjo with 'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender' printed around the rim. Guthrie's own story began in Oklahoma in 1912, where he was born the middle of five children to middle-class parents. His father Charley dabbled in real estate and politics; his son remembered him as a hard, fist-fighting type and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who was reportedly involved in the lynching of an African-American mother and son before Guthrie was born. After his music-loving mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital with Huntington's, the young Guthrie followed his father to an oil town on the Texas Panhandle, where it jutted into Oklahoma. It was a boom time but lean years would follow, as over-farming turned the rich southern plains into the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In the Great Dust Storm, Guthrie sang of the morning after the 'Black Sunday' dust storm of 1935: 'We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown / Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.' The 'we' referred to Guthrie and his first wife. At 21, he had married 16-year-old Mary Jennings and started a family; soon, he was joining the swelling wave of Texans and 'Okies' travelling to California searching for work. It is this time of great hardship, which John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath, that Guthrie captures in Pastures of Plenty – told from the perspective of a worker moving from place to place. It's an entire social history in six verses, shot through with an intense political consciousness: 'California, Arizona, I make all your crops / Then it's north up to Oregon to gather your hops / Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine / To set on your table your light sparkling wine'. No wonder Dylan was blown away by the one who came before him. On stage at New York Town Hall in 1963, as Guthrie lay dying, the younger man recited his poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie: 'You'll find God in the church of your choice / You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.' Guthrie's music, Bruce Springsteen said many years later, was the first in which he 'found a reflection of America that I believed to be true, where I believed that the veils had been pulled off'. It inspired one of the Boss's greatest works, the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town – right down to the title's echo of the famous line in Pastures of Plenty: 'On the edge of your city you'll see us and then / We come with the dust and we go with the wind.' Back then, Guthrie had hitchhiked and hopped trains, sign-painting and singing on street corners – until he had to trade his guitar for food – but then he hooked up with a cousin to form a musical double act and pitched up in Los Angeles. They were good enough to get an unpaid radio slot, which blossomed into a contract after Guthrie began singing with Maxine 'Lefty Lou' Crissman. Within a year, he was able to send the money to bring his wife and children to LA. Guthrie branched out into writing and was sent to report on the poverty that so many faced at the time. It changed him. He met Steinbeck and travelled with the author through California, performing in migrant camps. He moved to New York after his radio show was cancelled, leaving behind his old life, including his first wife and children (two of whom would later die of Huntington's), and almost froze as he hitchhiked in the snow. There in a hotel room, in 1940, sick of hearing Irving Berlin's patriotic God Bless America on the radio, he wrote This Land Is Your Land. To Guthrie, the former didn't speak to the struggle of working-class Americans who had lived through the Great Depression; his song did. The version on Woody at Home is perhaps even more poetic than the original: 'I'm a-chasing my shadow / All across this road map / To my wheat field waving / To my cornfield dancing / As I keep walking, this wind keeps talking / This land was made for you and me'. Springsteen would later call it 'one of the most beautiful songs ever written'. He also wrote Hard Travelin', reflecting on his years as a hobo living among the working poor. He detailed those experiences further in the semi-fictionalised 1943 memoir Bound for Glory, which received a rave review in The New Yorker: the magazine described his songs as deserving the status of 'a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite'. Guthrie had arrived. Newly divorced, he married Marjorie Greenblatt, a dancer, with whom he had four children, including the singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie (he would later marry again, and have another child). A tiny proportion of the songs that Guthrie wrote in his lifetime – estimated at around 3,000 – were ever recorded. They include handwritten lyrics from 1954 for a song about the housing policies of the man who owned the apartment complex where he lived in Brooklyn – the father of the 47th US President. 'I suppose that / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts / When he drawed / That color line / Here at his Beach Haven family project'. By then the American folk revival was already well under way and Seeger, its guiding light, was just a year away from being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Guthrie was lionised by the folk movement, which recognised him as a passionate and authentic chronicler of hard times, with a political will born of experience. Though his fame would soon be eclipsed by Dylan's, the two will be forever linked. It is Guthrie whose works seem rooted in something immovable and permanent, like the granite cliffs of Yosemite; they will be with us for a long, long time.
The Guardian
05-08-2025
- The Guardian
‘My daughter didn't get emotional like I did': the families who go gigging together
While some teenagers still wouldn't be caught dead with their parents at a gig, there's been a marked number of multigenerational gatherings of parents, kids, uncles and aunts at recent tours such as Pulp, Bruce Springsteen and the Oasis reunion. We spoke to four families about why they enjoy watching bands together. Mark Taubert, his seven-year-old son and his 12-year-old daughter were one of many families in attendance at Stevie Wonder's Cardiff concert in Blackweir Fields, Cardiff, in July. 'He came on to the stage and lit the place up with his charisma and magnetism. I was surprised to see quite a few different age groups in the crowd. Then Stevie Wonder brought two of his own children on stage, and it felt even more like a multigenerational event,' he says. 'My son Idris even had a brief restorative snooze during Living for the City, but then woke up for Sir Duke – one of his favourites.' Even if Idris didn't fully appreciate the whole show, Mark hopes his son will in future. 'In 80 years' time, Stevie Wonder will just be this sort of legendary figure of the past, and my son will be able to say that he saw him.' It was quite the contrast to the gigs of his youth, Mark says. 'My worst was Guns N' Roses in Mannheim when I was 16. There was a riot at that show. It wasn't necessarily something I'd take my kids to.' Before the Oasis reunion tour commenced in July, The Jesus and Mary Chain played Tramshed in Cardiff in June. The gig was a bonding experience for James Cooper and his daughter Astrid. 'As a fan of the Jesus and Mary Chain since I was 15, I was delighted that my daughter Astrid declared that they were her favourite band too,' he says. 'I recalled to Astrid that JAMC were the precursors to Oasis – being warring brothers on the same label and paving the way for Oasis in many ways – but loads better! We are both skateboarders, so we combined the day with a trip to the skatepark. I considered ourselves very lucky that we got to see the far superior band in a small venue. 'My daughter loved the day and the experience. She didn't get emotional like I did, though. It was maybe more significant for me, as she is almost same age as I was when I first saw them at 15. These experiences with one's daughter don't happen very often.' Alice Witter and her 18-year-old son travelled 200 miles to see Billie Eilish play Co-Op Live in Manchester last month. 'We both like her albums equally. I told him there's not one song we won't be able to sing along to,' she says. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion 'The crowd was amazing. It was all mixed generations, but mostly my son's age or a bit older, and everybody was dancing and singing. My son took some videos, so we came home with a whole visual record of what we saw, and played it through the car stereo on the way home down the motorway, on high volume. It's the best concert I had seen since Sting in 1990s.' 'You definitely notice more and more families at concerts nowadays,' says Jo Ortlieb, 58, an English teacher who lives near Lille in France. 'Our parents didn't go to concerts, whereas we did, so I guess it's the age we live in. It's really nice to see.' Her family's first gig was Dizzee Rascal at Sziget festival in Budapest in 2013, when her sons were 11 and 13. 'It was such a great feeling to be dancing and singing along to all our favourite songs, although there was a lot of swearing. A young Hungarian couple even came up to me at the end to say they thought I was cool.' More recently, Jo, her sons, now 23 and 25, and her husband have seen Nick Cave at the O2 in London and Asian Dub Foundation in Lille. 'My husband and I are big fans of Nick Cave, so the kids grew up listening to him at home. I get quite emotional when they play songs that we all used to sing together in the car or in the kitchen. We like to think we've given them an eclectic taste in music. We never did that sort of thing with our parents, so it's really nice to be able to do it now.'
