Linda Wertheimer: Here at NPR, there's a small space up on the fifth floor between a desk and shelves crammed with CDs and books about music. It's basically a stage for musicians who come to perform what we call Tiny Desk Concerts. This week, a legendary 1960s rock band visited our tiny stage.
Voice over PA system: Our Tiny Desk Concert with the Zombies is about to begin, so please head on over to the skinny end of the fifth floor. Thank you.
Rod (in audio from the Tiny Desk Concert): Well, we're gonna, uh, we've got a new album out, actually, and we're gonna do, um, a song from the album called 'Any Other Way.'
[Clip of performance of 'Any Other Way' from the Tiny Desk Concert]
Linda: The Zombies Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone came together in 1961 to form the Zombies and may be best known for hits like "Time of the Season," or maybe it would be this one, "She's Not There."
[Clip of performance of 'She's Not There' from the Tiny Desk Concert]
Linda: Their 1968 album Odessey and Oracle was very well reviewed, and now - more than forty years later - they have a new album titled Breathe Out, Breathe In. They join us in the studio now. Colin, Rod, welcome.
[Both speaking at once]
Colin: Thank you, thank you very much.
Rod: Thank you very much, great to be here.
Linda: Now, Rod, uh, you're looking out at the audience in this, the Tiny Desk Concert
Rod: Yeah.
Linda: and, uh, you know, I am way the oldest person there, no kidding. Uh, I mean, you're looking at a whole new generation.
Rod: D'you know, you are, and, and the great thing is- Odessey and Oracle came out and wasn't really a hit, and then about twelve years later, the guy from the Jam
Colin: Paul Weller.
Rod: Paul Weller started to talk about the album, and, and said it was his favorite album of all time, and he said that again this year, and the record sells more every year now than it did when it first came out. We almost have- always have young bands come to see us. You know, it's such a privilege to be at our stage in our careers and to be able to get that, that energy back.
Linda: Now, all of these years since those hits in the sixties, what has kept the two of you coming back to each other to make music? There've been little intermissions in there, but you've come back. Is there
Colin: Sure.
Linda: Is there something that the two of you do together that is just not as good as what you do apart, do you think?
Colin: I'm not really sure. I mean, if we were to go right back to the Zombies, um, from 1961, we were all quite modest musicians individually, but when we played together, something happened.
[Clip of 'Time of the Season']
Rod: And I think it is something to do with the fact that, that the earliest music in rock and roll that we made was together, and you grow up learning your trade at that very important time, you know, when you're fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and you're learning so quickly then and, and fashioning things around each other. I, I think it's something to do with that.
Linda: But you s- you sing as if you were brothers. You know, your voices are similar. You sing very close.
Rod: Well, they do match, don't they?
Linda: Yes, they do. I, I think that's-
Colin: Yeah.
Rod: I don't think they are terribly similar, actually, if you get them apart, are they?
Colin: No, they just seem to work together when we sing together.
Rod (overlapping with Colin's comment): But, but when we, when we sing together...
Linda: Mmhm.
Colin: Yeah. And, you know, and Rod always says that when he's writing, he - subconsciously -
Rod: Yeah.
Colin: he's got
Linda: He hears it.
Colin: my voice
Rod: Yeah.
Linda: Yeah.
Rod: Totally.
Colin: in, in his head when he's writing.
[Further clip of 'Time of the Season']
Linda: Well, the other thing that, that you brought to this, Rod, obviously, it, I mean, your keyboard playing, is that you, you bring, uh, a sort of a jazz sensibility to it. You play a sort of honky-tonk-ish piano if you want to. I mean, there's a lot of different strands that go into this music. I must say I like that part, the sort of layering.
Rod: Well, I think the thing is that, um, we never thought we were doing anything- I mean, when I was writing 'She's Not There,' I just thought I, I was writing a song by the Beatles, if you like.
[Clip of 'She's Not There']
Rod: In retrospect, when I listen to our, our stuff, it, it actually doesn't sound like anybody else; it sounds very distinctive, even though we thought, very much like when Jo- John Lennon wrote, um, I think it was 'I'm a Loser,' he thought he was being Bob Dylan.* It was nothing like Bob Dylan, but, you know, it, your own influences come through, or your own personality comes through and changes what you're imagining into something of your own.
Linda: Your album Odessey and Oracle, uh, Rolling Stone magazine put that at number eighty on their list of five hundred greatest albums.
Rod: I know! As I said, that's the, that's the extraordinary thing: it took a long time to start
Linda: And to build.
Rod: generating and buil- and building.
Linda: But one of the things that's interesting about that was that right after it came out, you decided to stop playing together.
Colin: Well, strangely enough, we actually decided to stop playing before it came out, which I always thought is not the shrewdest
Rod: Questionable decision, yeah.
Colin: Yes, not the shrewdest of business decisions. We deserted this poor album, Odessey and Oracle. I th- I remember us all leaving one room after a conversation where we said the band has to end, and I had a very lonely drive home to- well, I lived with my parents- and I thought, 'I'm what? I'm twenty-two? Have I retired? Is this it? Is it-? Am I now gonna be a gentleman of leisure?' I had no plans whatsoever. Eventually, I did get back into the recording industry, but it took-
Rod: Pretty soon, actually.
Colin: Yeah, within a, a year or so.
Linda: Mmhm. Mmhm.
Colin: It's quite difficult explaining it to- when we do interviews in the States that in my solo career, I've had many, many hit songs, but unfortunately, they were never hits in America, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Rod (in audio from the Tiny Desk Concert): OK, well, we, we will try one last one, which is, um, a big solo hit that Colin had, actually, uh, in Europe, and it's called 'I Don't Believe in Miracles.' That's what we're gonna do. [Begins playing the introduction]
Linda: The Zombies, Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone, joined us after they played a Tiny Desk Concert, which you can see at nprmusic.org.
[Clip of performance of 'I Don't Believe in Miracles' from the Tiny Desk Concert]
Linda: This is Weekend Edition from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.
---
*I don't know if this is specifically what Rod was referring to, but in The Beatles Anthology book (p. 160), Lennon comments, "'I'm A Loser' is me in my Dylan period, because the word 'clown' is in it. I objected to the word 'clown', because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right, and it rhymed with whatever I was doing."
