Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono wrote this song, which finds the singer so bewitched by a girl, he gets that needles and pins feeling when he sees her. Nitzsche was a producer who worked on a lot of movies. Bono married Cher, but before he was known as her husband, he was a record producer who made a name for himself working with Larry Williams on songs like "Bony Maronie" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzie."
Jackie DeShannon recorded the original in 1963 on Liberty Records, but her version stalled at #84 on the Hot 100. In a Songfacts interview with DeShannon, she explained why her recording didn't hit. "There were a lot of issues with the record company, a lot of marketing things I wasn't happy with," she said. "For instance, 'Needles And Pins' was Top 5 in Detroit, Top 5 in Chicago, and Top 5 in every city it was played in. However, unless you're coordinated across the country and the song hits the charts at the same time, you can't get the big leaps. My record didn't have that, because it would be going down in Chicago while it was going up in some other city. So that was a problem."
The Searchers heard British performer Cliff Bennett sing this at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (where The Beatles played for a while), and wanted it to be their next single.
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