The classic UK number one that didn’t even chart in America
The Beatles’ first American LP after signing with Capitol Records, released in January 1964, was called Meet the Beatles, and it was famously a well-received introduction, staying at the top of the US charts for 11 weeks.
Very few Americans would have realised at the time that another band from Liverpool had already released an album, five months earlier, with essentially the same title and musical vibe. Meet The Searchers, which debuted in the UK in August of 1963, didn’t get proper US distribution until the following year, after Beatlemania had already reached the States.
As such, The Searchers always remained something of a second-tier battalion in the British invasion, experiencing moments of success, including three top 20 singles (‘Needles and Pins’, ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’, and ‘Love Potion No 9’), but nothing close to the fame they enjoyed on their home turf.
This partially explains why The Searchers’ first UK number one, 1963’s ‘Sweets for My Sweet’, failed to dent the US charts at all when it was released in 1964, a somewhat surprising disappointment for a band that had followed The Beatles’ path to a T, touring the US and performing on The Ed Sullivan Show just two months after the Fab Four.
Another reason ‘Sweets for My Sweet’ might have struggled to resonate with American audiences was that the song was, perhaps, still too fresh in a lot of listeners’ minds. Just a few years earlier, the original version of the song, performed by the doo-wop group The Drifters, had been a top 20 hit in its own right.
Obviously, it wasn’t impossible for a UK rock band to reimagine a black American R&B tune and carry it back to the States. The Beatles had enthusiastically recorded covers of the Miracles and the Marvellettes, among others. In this case, though, the translation didn’t quite work, perhaps as a consequence of weaker marketing muscle from the Searchers’ US label, or maybe as a testament to the perfection of the original Drifters recording.
What made The Drifters’ version of ‘Sweets for My Sweet’ all the more impressive, in retrospect, is that the group performing it was a completely different one from the line-up that had already notched plenty of jukebox hits in the 1950s. The group’s manager, George Treadwell, was more of a businessman out for his own interests, and recognised that their name was a brand with more marketable value than any of its members; a cynical perspective that made him a bit ahead of his time.
In 1958, Treadwell tested his theory in the boldest way possible, firing the entire roster of The Drifters and hiring a completely different doo-wop group, the Five Crowns, to assume their identity. That move paid off almost immediately, as The new Drifters, led by future ‘Stand By Me’ singer Ben E King, entered their golden era, scoring hits with three all-time classics: ‘There Goes My Baby’, ‘This Magic Moment’, and ‘Save the Last Dance For Me’. The ‘Sweets for My Sweet’ single followed shortly thereafter, and featured Charlie Thomas on lead vocal, with the addition of some female backing vocalists, including a young Dionne Warwick and Cissy Houston, Whitney’s mother.
The Drifters’ single didn’t make as big an impact overseas, and so, when The Searchers released their version, it was a fresher sound to British ears, helping the track race up the charts. The Americans, by contrast, already had their sweets spoken for, and perhaps had one too many Liverpudlians to keep track of in 1964.
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