Tony Jackson, who died on Monday aged 63, was lead vocalist and bass guitarist with the Searchers, one of the successful groups to emerge from Liverpool in the city's musical heyday of the 1960s.
The group was best known for their hits Sweets For My Sweet (a cover of the song by the Drifters) and Needles and Pins, one of the most catchy melodies of the era. The Searchers' carefully arranged harmonies and 12-string guitar sound was to have considerable influence later in the decade, particularly on The Byrds.
Anthony Paul Jackson was born in Liverpool on July 16 1940. After leaving school he went to Walton Technical College with a view to becoming an electrician. But his first love had always been music, and in 1959 - when he was performing as lead vocalist and guitarist with a skiffle group called the Martinis - he met Mike Pender and John McNally, who invited him to join the band they were forming. This was the Searchers, named after the 1956 film starring John Wayne.
Jackson accepted and immediately set about building, and learning to play, a bass guitar. This meant that he could not also concentrate on singing, so the band hired a fifth member, Johnny Sandon, to fulfil this role.
Initially the group was decked out in a uniform of red shirts, black trousers and white shoes, before changing into polo-neck sweaters and suede waistcoats from C & A. Johnny Sandon and the Searchers lasted from 1960 until February 1962, becoming one of the most popular groups performing in the clubs and dance halls around Liverpool.
When Sandon left in 1962, Jackson was ready to resume as lead vocalist and the Searchers continued as a quartet, following the Beatles' example of performing in Hamburg before appearing regularly at Liverpool's Iron Door club. Before long, Brian Epstein was taking an interest in their act; but, when he watched them at the Cavern Club, the venue made famous by the Beatles, Jackson - who had been enjoying himself in the pub - fell off the stage, to Epstein's evident disenchantment. However, the Searchers soon came to the attention of Tony Hatch.
By now they were playing American R & B, country, rock'n'roll, rockabilly and soul. In 1963 they were signed by Pye Records, and their first single, Sweets For My Sweet, reached No 1 in August. Two of their next three singles - Needles and Pins and Don't Throw Your Love Away - also reached the top spot, while Sugar and Spice (written by Hatch) was No 2.
The Searchers also covered American R & B songs such as Love Potion No 9 and Be My Baby. In 1964 they ventured into folk-rock with a version of Malvina Reynolds's What Have They Done to the Rain?.
By July of that year the band had released three albums in the previous nine months, but Jackson - who had become known as "Black Jake" - felt it was time to move on; the album It's the Searchers (1964) contained only one song in which he was the lead vocalist, and he left the band to form his own group, the Vibrations.
In an interview shortly after he split with the Searchers, Jackson revealed that he had just spent £200 having his nose remoulded: "I've had a lifelong complex about my nose. I couldn't mix socially. In fact, I was under psychiatric treatment for it. Now I feel a lot better."
The Vibrations released Bye Bye Baby, but it reached only No 38 in the charts. Their recording contract with Pye ended in 1965, and another with CBS also fizzled out. The band was reduced to touring southern Europe.
Later Jackson ran a night club in Spain and managed a golf club at Kidderminster. In 1991 he attempted a comeback by re-forming the Vibrations, but without success, and appeared on stage in a guest role with Mike Pender's Searchers on four occasions between 1992 and 1995.
In 1996 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison after threatening a woman with an air pistol. Meanwhile, Jackson's hands became so badly crippled with arthritis that in the last years of his life he could no longer play the guitar.
He married, in 1960, Margaret Parry. In 1964, however, Jackson remarked: "We have seen each other only about twice in the past two years."
At a Searchers' Convention held at Nuneaton in October last year, Jackson was invited to join his former colleagues on stage in a rendition of Sugar and Spice. Jackson declined, explaining: "The spirit's willing, but the body's knackered."