Rock Cellar

The Zombies' Chris White on the Roll Hall of Fame, Bringing Dave Grohl to Tears and More (The Interview)

By Ken Sharp

Like their moniker, The Zombies are an unstoppable, undying musical force that refuse to go off quietly in the still of the night. Championed by the likes of Tom Petty, Paul Weller, XTC, The Bangles and countess others as a pivotal influence, The Zombies' music continues to endure and flourish drawing in new generations of fans to their spectacular and creatively inventive body of work.

Fittingly, after years of being passed over, The Zombies were finally inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. A few days after the ceremony, we sat down with Zombies bassist, vocalist and principal co-writer, Chris White, for a look back and forward at a storied 50+ year career.

Rock Cellar: The Zombies has been up for induction into a The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for many years but were passed over again and again, were you optimistic or pessimistic that the band would eventually get the nod?

Chris White: Well, in my time of life, after 54 years of us being together I thought it was an honor just to be nominated, to be quite honest. But the actual induction was magical; it was justification of the music we tried to do. Cindy DaSilva, our manager, called me and let me know we were in. I was in disbelief.

I was astounded by the fans support. Also, to find out the musicians that we respect and are in awe of quote the Zombies as being influential on them was quite a surprise to me.

Rock Cellar: Who were some of those artists who cited the Zombies as a key influence?

Chris White: Well Paul Weller for a start. When we did the first Odessey and Oracle show to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Paul came to that show. I shyly sort of went up to him and shook his hand and said, "Paul, my name's Chris White," and he grabbed me in a bear hug and he said, "You're the reason I started writing songs."

I met Jimi Hendrix years ago when I was touring with Argent in Beverly Hills at Eric Burdon's launch of his group, War. I was standing at the bar with him and and he said, "Oh yes, you did that song 'Time Of The Season'" and then he started singing it to me. Dave Grohl did one of my song, "This Will Be Our Year" for a Record Store Day release.

He came a show of ours in Atlanta in 2015 and he didn't come backstage, and we thought, "Oh, he didn't like it." Rod met up with him last year and he said, "I was too emotionally involved, I couldn't have come backstage."

His wife said he cried three times during the concert.

Elvis had records of ours on his jukebox. My wife and I are friends with Benmont Tench, Tom Petty's keyboard player. When I met Tom at a show of ours in Los Angeles, according to Ben, he was speechless because we were one of the first groups he saw live. He said Tom never comes out anymore, and how he was so surprised by that. Benmont said all he could talk about were the Zombies.

Those are the things that shock us.

Rock Cellar: Bring us through the entire Rock and Roll Hall of Fame evening. What was the biggest high for you that night?

Chris White: Susanna Hoffs' speech was wonderful. She gave a great tribute to us and that was very heartwarming and to see all the other English bands to be inducted as well. I had my three sons over and Hugh (Grundy) had his three daughters over. It was such an honor to be inducted among all the giants in rock and roll, our heroes as well.

Rock Cellar: One of the songs The Zombies performed at The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremonies was a jewel from the Odessey and Oracle album, "This Will Be Our Year," which you composed. What's the back story behind that song and why do you think it still connected so powerfully with listeners?

Chris White: It was written before we did Odessey and Oracle and it was just a song of hope, to be quite honest. I don't know where songs come from. I wrote that on keyboards. I'd always dabbled on the keyboards — I'd taken piano lessons, but it's easier to carry a bass around. The song just came out of the chord sequence. It's just a nice, positive song. Sometimes you get fed up about moaning about things. (laughs) It doesn't really apply to anything; it just came out of a fun mood. Two of my sons are putting together my back catalog of songs and demos, which has never been released.

Rock Cellar: Yes, The Chris White Experience record, right?

Chris White: Yes, that's right, it's not my idea of a title but they've researched and we've got 50 boxes of tapes and they're going through them technically. One of my sons, Matthew, is the technical one and Jamie is the one who has his own band so I've just left it to them to do it and let them choose what material is included. They're songs that I've written with people like Matthew Fisher and Tim Renwick and several other people but these have never seen the light of day. They reckon they have enough material for seven records. I can't do anything else, it's what I do, write songs. My main writing instrument is keyboards. I can't write songs on the bass. (laughs)

Rock Cellar: You played shows in America over 50 years ago, what are your most vivid memories of coming to the States for the very first time?

Chris White: There used to be a TV program over here called The Naked City, and it was a fascinating story– I thought it was so surrealistic. Then going to America was like walking into that show. There were sirens going and hearing guns. I was with Hugh and the Nashville Teens and we were in Times Square. There were these gunshots and there was somebody dead on the pavement. Of course being English and hardly ever hearing about that, the next day we looked into the papers and all it said was that eight people were killed in New York and nothing else was mentioned.

But it was magic coming to America. We were lucky that America took to our first single.

Rock Cellar: In the past 15-20 years, there's been a tremendous upturn in The Zombies' legacy and where you've viewed among your '60s contemporaries has gone up exponentially.

Chris White: That is a strange thing. The thing is, we were school kids when we started, so we grew together. Even after we stopped being together in 1967 we were still friends and still worked on different projects together. It's a rarity for a '60s band to still like each other. (laughs)

Rock Cellar: That brings up the point, unlike many of your contemporaries where egos ran rampant, The Zombies were sensible and remained down to earth in spite of the success and fame you achieved, what do you attribute that to?

Chris White: I suppose education. Just liking each other although there were differences. I think it's like having brothers. You might sometime fall out with them a little bit but they're still your brothers. I think it's that sort of feeling in The Zombies and the disbelief of the fact that we're still alive (laughs) and we've just been inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

Dave Grohl sort of said it best, you start out in a garage band and you suck when you first start out and then you grow together. I think the different talents of Rod's leadership and keyboard skills and a voice like Colin's, you can't go wrong, so you write songs to fit those credentials. Given that, it makes you write better and we didn't copy; we tried not to copy things.

Well, really, we didn't actually try to do anything, it just developed. It wasn't a conscious effort. I think the key to our whole success now is the Odessey and Oracle album, which Rod and I decided we wanted to produce. It was our first production. Just by sheer luck we got into Abbey Road and we had a publishing company that was behind what we wanted to do. So a lot of it has to do with luck.

Rock Cellar: It seemed the Zombies were a fated band, in the sense that when you first played together it felt right.

Chris White: Absolutely. I'd had little groups and worked on things before and it was so much fun. It was also so nice that they were working in harmony because Rod was very strong on harmonies. Colin had such a great voice. Rod was such a really good keyboard player. At that time he was only playing on an upright piano in those days. It just clicked and I loved it. It felt like coming home in a way.

Rock Cellar: The Zombies also had quite a unique look; everyone was well-educated and clean-cut and looked almost professorial. Did that look work for the band?

Chris White: I think basically it could have worked against us because of this unfortunate thing about GCEs — those were the equivalent of high school qualifications in England. You had to get good results to get into university. It was just a record company standard thing. There were lots of other groups around with degrees who were just as intelligent. They thought we were middle class and not from the streets. The fact is, we were all working class but we just took advantage of our educations. That was it, really.

Rod brought it up the other day, saying he sometimes gets fed up about this. All our parents were working class and it was just that we had good educations and enjoyed it. Therefore that did get in the way. A couple of people said we didn't really have to work hard and all that sort of crap.

Rock Cellar: Perhaps what separates The Zombies from your other '60s counterparts is Rod Argent's keyboard prowess.

Chris White: Rod was the leader — great musician, and he was inventive. He also always appreciated other people's input. I think the keyboard to be the forefront thing — we had problems in the early days because he didn't have a keyboard that you could amplify. We had to hang a microphone down the back of pianos when we were on stage. Most people didn't have a piano up front because there wasn't the amplification for them in those days, or at least not what we could afford.

Rock Cellar: Rod Argent told me that "Chris, in his heart, is a more romantic writer than me." You and Rod were the chief songwriters in the band, can you characterize what distinctive sensibilities you each brought to The Zombies?

Chris White: It's falling back on some of the great songwriters of the last century, people like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. So it was those elements married with rock and roll, plus having the influence of Rod Argent around was incredible. Rod had written three of the biggest hits for The Zombies so when the band finished, he and I went on to work on other things together. We produced Colin's first three solo albums and then Rod said to me, "Why don't we put our joint names on everything we write because one song will keep us going" and that was very generous of him. Then the first big hit we had after The Zombies was "Hold Your Head Up," which was my song.

Rock Cellar: "Hold Your Head Up" by Argent became a huge '70s rock anthem.

Chris White: Yes, it has become that and I've never regretted Rod getting half the writers share of that song because he made an offer from a position of strength. So we are very generous with each other and we're also very critical of what we do so when we had new songs we used to throw them around and work on them. As for writing "Hold Your Head Up," I was living in Spain with my first wife who was pregnant at the time. We were putting Argent together and the band was playing every night and had done some Zombies things.

Jim Rodford and Bob Henrit suddenly hit this rhythmic pattern on "Time Of The Season" and I liked it and thought it had a great feel.  So I went back and wrote the guitar riff which originally going to be the tune but I thought that was too boring and too predictable so I laid it in a cassette player and wrote the melody on top of that. That's how that was written. I like writing positive songs.

Rock Cellar: The Zombies only released two studio albums in the '60s; the jump from Begin Here to Odessey and Oracle is miraculous. Looking back, are you amazed by the band's swift progression as songwriters and record makers?

Chris White: We had a good producer in Ken Jones. He did some lovely stuff with us but we got a little bit fed up with not being able to go to the mixing sessions. As the songwriters, we got a little bit fed up with the treatments of the songs. We used to do go and do demo sessions before we did the recordings with Decca and we felt they were more like we intended. Rod and I felt like they were more edgy and Ken was trying to smooth things down a little bit and make it more palpable for what he thought we needed to sound like.

So when we came back from the Philippines, we had no manager and no record deal because Decca dropped us and hardly any money. So we said, "We want to produce our albums, we want to do our own thing." Then our publishers said, "CBS has offered you a thousand pounds and I think we can get you into Abbey Road." We were one of the first non-EMI bands to be able to record in Abbey Road. So what we did is we knew we couldn't afford more than a few sessions so Rod and I wrote songs and we put songs forward and worked on them. We rehearsed and rehearsed as if we were playing live in a hall.

So when we went into the studio we sometimes did two songs in a three-hour session and we were only on four-track. So we had Geoff Emerick as our engineer, we had Abbey Road and The Beatles had just walked out doing Sgt. Pepper. We listened to Pet Sounds, which was another one of our favorite albums; the creativity and inventiveness was inspiring and we felt, we can do that. That's how it happened. We were like kids in a candy store, to be quite honest.

Rock Cellar: Chris, you truly blossomed as a songwriter on the band's Odessey & Oracle album, can you run us through the back story behind a few songs starting with "Maybe After He's Gone," a magical song with great harmonies and an amazing melody.

Chris White: I wrote that on guitar. Colin's got such a lovely quality of his voice; it has melancholy bluesy touches to it. And it's a totally original voice, although we spent years trying to convince him that he was a singer. (laughs) It wasn't written specifically about anything — it was writing a song which would suit his voice, really.

"Beechwood Park" was written about somewhere, an image. There was a girls' school up in the village called Beechwood Park. I remember walking around there because where I lived was slightly out in the country, and just that image of country lanes with the steam rising off after the summer rain. Again, that song suited Colin's voice. He had the kind of voice you wanted to write for.

Rock Cellar: There were other great nostalgic songs that came out of the '60s written about these idealistic parks and locales — "Strawberry Fields" and "Itchycoo Park," for instance.

Chris White: Yes. I think of that era as basically — you could leave school or college and you didn't have a problem getting a job. It was after the war and the hardships and rationing and everything, so life was enjoyable. No one had that fear of not getting any work like the kids do nowadays. I mean, the kids have a lot of trouble nowadays even having some hope in life. Some of them come out of school and they've just got a line of dole ahead of them. In those days it was hopeful, and the Beatles were at the forefront of that because there was so much fun in their music.

Rock Cellar: "Changes" and Brief Candles" are both very atmospheric and unique.

Chris White: "Brief Candles" was a nice idea about three different stories. In fact, I only found this out recently, that Rod did the same thing — he often used to get titles and use that as a starting point. But Brief Candles was a book by Aldous Huxley. I always liked the title of that; it's such a nice image. It was like three stories, and Rod suggested that we each sing a verse and that just worked nicely as well.

It fitted in well the mere fact that the Mellotron was around as well, and Rod loved the sound of that. "Changes" was a great harmony idea and we wanted to use the least instrumentation as possible. I think it came out from the atmosphere at the time. It was at the tail end of flower power, which was a beautiful period and — it degenerated into all sorts of horrible things, but it was a time of hope and fun and that was the essence of it. I think I was always writing for Colin's voice in mind. Sometimes when I'd sing it to the band my voice would be straining at the top of falsetto. (laughs) It always sounded funny if I did demos, but it was always with Colin's voice in mind.

Rock Cellar: Unlike many of your '60s contemporaries, the Zombies own their catalog and exert complete control, creatively and quality-wise.

Chris White: It is total luck. We were gonna split up and we won this contest, suddenly got these offers from record labels. My uncle was an arranger with a big band. He worked for the BBC as an arranger. We went to see him and he said, "Go and see Ken Jones," who later became our first producer. And Ken looked through these contracts and he said, "That's a good clause, that's terrible. Don't do that, do this, do that." And we said, "Well, can you offer us anything?" And he said, "Well, we'll offer you all of the best of these contracts that I just told you." As a result of that, he had the company and then we had half of the publishing company. He died and his partner died. But the secretary at the company, Carole Broughton, bought it. So when everything reverted back to us from Decca and CBS, all the rights go through them. The catalog is actually owned by Marquis, but they take a very small amount to administer it.

They've done an incredible job on it. And the people who own it are the people we started with.

Rock Cellar: Are there any plans for the original lineup of The Zombies minus the late Paul Atkinson to do any future show?

Chris White: Yes, I'm hearing rumors we might be playing again and doing a tour with Brian Wilson. I can't give any more details now but I'm hearing some pretty good rumors. (laughs) I would look forward to that because anything Brian Wilson did was so inventive and Pet Sounds was one of my favorite albums.

Rock Cellar: Lastly, for you, what's the greatest joy about this continued affection and acclaim for The Zombies work?

Chris White: For me, the creativity element of it. I always like it when young people ask for advice and I say, "the most important thing is to write and don't try and copy; whatever you do, don't try and copy." I remember John Lennon saying the secret for him writing a song is you write a song and then people think you're gonna say something and then you don't do the obvious."

I think that should apply to all songs. As I said in my speech at The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, songs are the bookmarks of our life. All of us have songs which echo with us during different periods of our life.

Rod Argent - The Zombies' Co-Founder on The Beatles, Chick Corea, and His Love for the Piano

Rod Argent - The Zombies' Co-Founder on The Beatles, Chick Corea, and His Love for the Piano
Keyboard Magazine
By Kristi York Wooten

Photo by Dennis Beentjes

The Zombies are back on tour this fall, and co-founder Rod Argent is excited to be out on the road doing what he does best - reaching new audiences with mesmerizing keyboard solos on classic tracks including "Time of the Season" and "Hold Your Head Up."  Last year, the Zombies celebrated the 50th anniversary of their beloved 1967 album Odessey and Oracle with TV appearances and shows on the East Coast.  Original Zombies members Argent and lead vocalist Colin Blunstone (along with a full band) are on a run of West Coast dates beginning at the legendary Fillmore in San Francisco September 7.  Keyboard chatted with Rod Argent about his storied history as a rock composer and performer - and his love for the keys.

In the 20th century, pianos sold by the hundreds of thousands per year, but now, people can't wait to get rid of them.  There are even specific "graveyards" for the traditional wooden piano.  It's hard to believe, isn't it?

Small keyboards are portable and controllable and you never have to tune them.  So, in a way I understand why the piano is dying out.  I use keyboards on stage, but when Colin (Blunstone) and I do the occasional acoustic performance, I will always try to use an acoustic piano.  Even though you're mic-ing it up, every time you play a sequence or combination of notes and chords, the sympathetic vibrations from the other notes in the piano give a slightly different timbre to what you're playing, and that's something you cannot get out of a sample.

You're best known for organ and electronic keyboard sounds, but me tell me a little bit more about your enduring fascination with the acoustic instrument.

I do have a love of the piano as an instrument. It was a dream of mine, my whole life really, to acquire a Steinway Model D Concert Grand, particularly the German one.  I did that about nine years ago, and I play it every day.  I absolutely love it.  I'm self-taught, like lots of people, but in 1999 when I decided to walk away from production and before I got back together with Colin to play live (as The Zombies) again, a very dear friend of mine who is a classical musician suggested I do a piano album called Rod Argent, Classically Speaking.  I didn't think I could do it, but he persuaded me, and I played the music on a Steinway, a Bosendorfer, and others.  Three tracks were my own compositions but the rest included Chopin studies, Ravel, and some of my favorite pieces.  There's no way that recording could have been made on a sampled instrument.  To get the nuances and the timbre, you can't beat an acoustic piano.

The Zombies feature piano, organ, Mellotron, harpsichord and all sorts of sounds.  How did you decide which to use?

When I first started out back then, there was nothing else available except an acoustic piano. [Although I love it], I couldn't wait to leave that scenario.  Generally, the pianos that were available for practice or in venues in the early days were a semitone down from concert pitch, which threw all sorts of curves into our performances.  Secondly, you couldn't hear me onstage unless I did a sort of Jerry Lee Lewis lift.  My vanity meant that I was doing that all night long, and the quick of my nail would be completely bleeding.  I'd put plaster on it halfway through the evening and Colin would always judge how good the gig was by the amount of blood!

Photo by Dennis Beentjes

That's what led you to electronic instruments?

That's when I discovered the Hohner Pianet (Mk 1), a fantastic instrument.  It had sticky pads that hit the tine, stuck to it, and the pressure would become too much and the tine would break away like "boooong," and that was the way the note was produced.  You could hear me onstage for the first time.  Mine [used on the Zombies' classic, "She's Not There"] was played so often it lost its stickiness action and bits of hair would get caught in there and also moisture.  I would have to take the top of the piano off and blow it dry with a hair dryer before going on stage.  That instrument was used all over the early Zombies records, it was very biting.  Manfred Mann had one, and I think even The Beatles used those instruments in the early days, too.  Even with the band Argent, I still used [the Mk1 occasionally].  I loved the sound of it, but today I can't find one that sounds the same.  I always remember in the 1970s when Argent supported Chick Corea on tour.  One night, Chick walked into the dressing room and I was in the middle of drying my keys with a hair dryer.  [Laughs] I had to talk him through what I was doing.  He was lovely about it.

What other gear did you love?

After the Pianet, I got a Vox Continental.  But by that time, I'd already heard Jimmy Smith on "Walk on the Wild Side" and was just blown away with the grit and the soul and the excitement of the Hammond B-3.  Years later, the Mellotron came about when we started recording Odessey and Oracle [at EMI Studios, now known as Abbey Road].  We walked in virtually the day after the Beatles walked out after having finished Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  We used studio 3, and we had the same engineers.  Without asking anyone, we just used the instruments which had been left lying around.  The Mellotron was there, and in my head at that moment it seemed like a cheaper alternative to a string section, which we couldn't have afforded at that point.  That instrument had its own character completely [listen to The Zombies' "Changes"].  Recording with the Mellotron at Abbey Road was a great piece of happenstance I'm still pleased about.

Photo by Dennis Beentjes

Soloing is a lost art.  Instrumental solos aren't found in the structure of most rock and pop songs today.  Did you always compose your solos ahead of time or was it more organic and improvisational?  And how does it feel to play those solos onstage in 2018?

If you play all the alternative takes of our studio recordings of [The Zombies'] "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" and [Argent's] "Hold Your Head Up," you'll hear that they are totally different.  They were all completely improvised.  It's an inevitable process.  When you play something many times, an improvisation seems to gradually coalesce into something which is not identical but has the same sort of signposts.  That used to worry me, but I read an article by one of my heroes, Bill Evans, who said exactly the same thing: a solo is improvised the first time it happens and that's the joy of it, and then it takes a shape [thereafter].  It's important that playing solos should be a natural reaction to whatever's going on around you in the moment.  This is one of the musical things that is a joy for me [on tour right now]: I get to keep things fresh.  Having done "Time of the Season" a million times, night after night, I throw something different in there to keep the other guys on their toes.  They react, and we can suddenly go somewhere else in the song.  If, in one night out of five, you're able to go to a completely different place in the moment, that feels great.

HuffPost

Interview With the Zombie - Rod Argent On Gershwin, Bill Evans, Miles Davis & The Penny Lane Piano

By Ron Galloway

The Zombies, one of the most influential bands to hit the U.S. during the British Invasion of the 1960's, made multiple appearances at this year's South By Southwest music conference, and by many accounts, stole the conference outright.

Their hit singles "She's Not There," "Tell Her No" and "Time Of The Season" and their enduring classic album "Odessey and Oracle" are pop milestones influencing everyone from Paul Weller to Billy Joel to the Foo Fighters.

I spoke this week with Rod Argent, their keyboardist, and writer of many of their hits. His Hammond B3 solo on the Argent hit "Hold Your Head Up" is cited by Rick Wakeman as the greatest organ solo ever.

Interviewer: I do a lot of public speaking. My busiest month, I was booked 14 times. It was a real physical effort. The Zombies have 22 shows in May alone! How are you doing that?

Rod: We have to travel long, long distances between each one, as well. That's the killer, really. Even when I was 18 years old I found the actual traveling part of it, getting from gig to gig, tedious and tiring. I've always, throughout my life, had a lot of trouble with jet lag, with the time changes with body clocks. As you get older, it doesn't get any easier.

Interviewer: I'm 50. I know what you mean.

Rod: That's the hardest thing for me. The actual hour and a half on stage, once you've got over the initial jet lag, which, for me, takes quite a long time...That's a real joy. It's everything that comes in between that's so difficult. [laughs]

But then, it always was. The actual being on stage is...I don't get stage fright anymore as long as I'm not outside of my idiom. As long as I'm actually within what I know and I feel that things are under control, then I don't have any stage nerves at all. That really helps. I think maybe I did earlier in my career have more.

It's just a joy to be up there playing with a great band at this stage in our career and having that bond. Having the energy come back from the audience, it's a privilege, really. It's great.

Interviewer: But it looks like the audience, it's like you all are taking the energy from the audience, which I assume makes it a bit easier.

Rod: Absolutely. The thing is, we play to such varied audiences. Sometimes we play to an older audience, which is great. Other times we play to a very young audience, which is also wonderful because you get so much young energy back from a young audience.

More often than not, there's a mix of the two. That's the most usual thing is to have all sorts of ages in the audience. Usually with quite a reasonable young component, as well, which really mixes things up and gives a lot of energy back, you do feed off that energy. It's great to get it.

Interviewer: "Care Of Cell 44" is a much loved song which you recorded at Abbey Road. Do you remember what piano you played on Cell 44? Was it the Steinway or the Challen?

Rod: I'm trying to remember. It's a very, very bright piano, isn't it, as I remember.

Interviewer: If it was the Steinway (the 1905) I believe that would be the same piano "Penny Lane" was performed on.

Rod: It very possibly was. The Beatles always recorded in Studio Two. Now, I've played the piano in Studio Two, and it is incredibly bright, actually. It's an incredibly bright piano. We did all our recording in Studio Three, and I'm pretty sure it would've been the Steinway that I played on that, actually.

Coincidentally, two years ago, I actually bought myself a Steinway Concert Grand for my house, which is my pride and joy. I just actually love it.

Interviewer: I wanted to talk to you a second about the Rodfords. Steve Rodford (the Zombies' drummer) is a monster.

Rod: He's great. He's a great drummer. Do you know it was in Nashville the following night that Alan Shacklock came along, an old friend from back home in the UK, who has produced albums for Jeff Beck, who's had Grammy nominations, Roger Daltrey. He's written number one records himself, et cetera.

It's the first time he'd seen us live in this incarnation, and he was completely knocked out with Steve. I'm glad a few people are seeing him and realizing. Steve is incredibly musical. What I love about it him is he's technically very good, but he listens. He listens to what you're playing and he responds to it and I love that.

Interviewer: If I'm right, you're on stage now with two people that you've played with for 50 years.

Rod: Absolutely, with more than two people. Jim Rodford (the bass player) is the guy, as you would have heard me say, was there right at the beginning. He's the reason I first wanted to be in a band. He was in a local, one of the first skiffle groups in the south of England way back in the '50s. I saw them when I was 11 years old, or 11 or 12 and was just knocked out, and thought I've got to be in a band one day.

I did ask Jim right at the beginning to be in the band and he did refuse. But Steve (the drummer), of course, is his son. I've known Steve since Steve was born. It was Jim that turned me on to rock and roll because I grew up just liking classical music really because there was some pretty poor pop music going on in the early '50s.

Then he played me "Hound Dog", which just blew me away. And that turned me on to rock and roll. Jim has been around.

Then, of course, Colin Blunstone (lead singer). I met Colin on our first rehearsal. That was the first time I ever met him. Jim was there on that rehearsal with The Bluetones gear, his band's gear to loan to us. I've known three people for 50 years in the band.

Interviewer: I was listening to "She's Not There" live at your show this week and realized Colin is singing in the same key as the song was recorded in 50 years ago. How in the world 50 years later does he still hit the high notes?

Rod: Because, in the late '90s, before we got together, when Colin started to do a few solo gigs, he spoke to me about being worried about the stamina of his voice. I introduced him to a vocal coach in the UK who coached the West End sort of stars. I persuaded Colin to go there.

The reason I'd gone to this guy was because when I did a solo album years before, I was really pissed off with my voice. I thought it could have really been much stronger. I worked on it and I've got it really very much stronger. I persuaded Colin to go.

I said it won't change your voice. It won't change the characteristics of your voice. It will just give you the stamina and the ability to keep going. You can do many nights on the tour. Also, when you're 18 years old, you can get away with an awful lot. Quite naturally, it's like any other muscle in your body.

You can still keep that when you're older. You really can, but you have to work at it as you get older. So Colin does these exercises every day. I always do them for a couple of weeks before we start the tour. But because I'm only doing a couple of lead vocals, I, then, most of the time, don't bother when we're on tour because I haven't got the whole night to sing basically as Colin has.

I can sing higher now than I could 20 or 30 years ago. I honestly can. Colin can sing exactly what he did then. He can do what he did, but his voice has actually gained strength, too.

Interviewer: Let me ask you about the song "Summertime," which you recorded and still perform live. Clearly you love it.

Rod: I do love it.

Interviewer: What draws you to that song?

Rod: It's one of those songs that I fell in love with instantly and I must have been about eight or nine years old when I first heard it, I think.

I love Gershwin, I really do. I love Porgy and Bess. There's another song on Porgy and Bess, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," which I think is just transcendent. It's just gorgeous. But "Summertime"...I remember the story about...Now I can't remember the guy's name now but the opera singer who sang in the original production of Porgy and Bess.

When Gershwin got him over to play him, he said I've written an opera. This guy was very unsure whether he wanted to do it. The moment he heard "Summertime", he said right, OK, there's no way you're not going to get me to do this. I'm doing it, whatever it takes.

It's just one of those magical songs. It's a simple melody, but it's gorgeous and right. It's such a tragedy that Gershwin died so young actually. But glorious song. We've always done it. When we got our first recording contract by winning a competition back in the UK, we played "Summertime" on the final.

We did it for Otto Preminger when we were auditioning for the movie "Bunny Lake Is Missing." He knew Gershwin and he loved it. It's something that's always figured with us. There's a couplet in "Time of The Season," which is your dad is...No, that's Summertime.

Interviewer: "Is he rich like me?"

Rod: "What's your name?" "Who's your daddy?" Is he rich like me? That's an affectionate nod to the couplet in Summertime. Your dad is rich and your mom is good looking.

Interviewer: Gershwin thought that song was too Yiddish.

Rod: Did he really? [laughs]

Interviewer: Yeah, he was very worried.

Rod: It's so bluesy and without trying to be a parody or anything, or a pastiche. It's just naturally Gershwin, but it just naturally has the feeling of the blues in it. It's lovely.

Interviewer: Do you know who, allegedly, owned the first Hammond Model A?

Rod: Was that Gershwin?

Interviewer: Gershwin. Yeah.

Rod: Wow. Really?

Interviewer: Isn't that bizarre? Well, that's what the Hammond Company said.

Rod: Good God.

Interviewer: He did have one. It was a prototype. But he didn't have a Leslie on it. He apparently was one of the first ones that had that. I was watching you play your Hammond organ the other night, and your hands kind of looked like Jimmy Smith hands, when you watch Jimmy Smith play.

Rod: Really? Thank you.

Interviewer: Your hands are positioned different on the organ than they are on the piano. Is that a Hammond thing or because you're self taught?

Rod: No, my hands have always been totally natural. I've never ever thought about their positioning. And yet, I have to say on videos and TV, when I first saw myself play, I was really pleased with the hand position. Because I never tried to...I have a fairly high wrist when I'm playing and the hands are basically in a pretty good position.

It's just purely natural and purely what felt right to me within the process of playing. I never worked on that technique for a minute ever.

Interviewer: It's just interesting self taught musicians fall into doing the things that are correct so much of the time. But then a lot of the time, musicians do things that aren't academically correct, like the Beatles. Because they were self taught, they did chord changes that were uncommon, like having F major and B major in the same song.

Rod: Exactly. That's the real advantage. Because the thing is that when you go through, and I've got nothing against academic processes really. When I came off stage, sorry. When I came off "Live, "Work" in 1975 when Argent broke up, I really applied myself in certain areas to get my sight reading much better.

I actually bought the John Mehegan jazz book called "The Jazz Pianist" which goes through like an intuition thing about jazz harmony, et cetera. Just through my own interest really. It's just something I wanted to do.

But if you do that right from the beginning, you learn so much that's the chord sequences that have worked through the history of popular music. You absorb that so much that maybe if you're self taught and you don't have any of that at the beginning, you go off on all sorts of tangents. You rely on your ears totally and what works for you. If you've got some flair, then that can be the truest thing. You can seek...

Do you know that Bach was largely self taught? And Elgar?

Interviewer: Ah, Elgar. I've got some trivia for you. Who was the first person to ever record at Abbey Road?

Rod: That was Elgar.

Interviewer: Isn't that amazing?

Rod: That's incredible.

Interviewer: You are a huge influence on many musicians, from Paul Weller to Billy Joel. And in particular, the Wondermints.

Rod: I know that. Darian Sahanaja (leader of the Wondermints) is a very good friend. We did the "Odessey and Oracle" live show in London.

Interviewer: I saw he did the Mellotron on that.

Rod: It was so funny because he came over and we only had two production rehearsals. But I wanted, if we were going to do it, I wanted to reproduce everything note that was on our original album which is why I got Darian to do it, why we had our normal band at the moment do it, and had Chris and Hugh from the original band. We did have every note.

Darian came over and when we were in the production rehearsal, we were going through something. I gave him the harmonies and then he would stop and say, "Why are we not doing this line?" I said, "But that's not in the original." He said, "I think you'll find it is." [laughs]

Interviewer: He's got an ear.

Rod: I would go and check it out and it was. He was always right. He knew the album better than I did.

Interviewer: I want to talk about Bill Evans and the effect that he had on you.

Rod: Huge. As I said to you, I grew up the first 11 years of my life thinking I only liked classical music. I then heard Elvis and got turned onto Elvis, Little Richard. But through Elvis, I got to hear people like Big Mama Thornton, and Arthur Crudup, and then, John Lee Hooker, a lot of the blues guys, et cetera.

But at the same time, very soon after that, I discovered Miles Davis. It wasn't through "Kind of Blue." It was through an album called "Milestones." In fact, it was an EP because that's all I could afford at the time, Extended Play record.

It was the one with Milestones on it. I got completely...I still love his band from 1958, 1960 with...At the time, it was Winton Kelly on piano. But it was John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Philly Joe Jones. They left and Bill Evans took over.

Now, because I loved Milestones so much, I then went out, saved up for another EP. I bought the EP with "On Green Dolphin Street" on it. In the middle of On Green Dolphin Street is the piano solo. That blew me away. This is like a chord with piano solo. I can still remember how the whole thing goes.

That was my first introduction to Bill Evans. I was completely smitten and I bought everything that I could afford by Bill Evans at the time. There was an album called "Everybody Digs Bill Evans." There's a version called "Tenderly." This version of the song "Tenderly" on there, which I often play...I've got it on my iPad. 

I love Bill Evans playing. It's just precise, inventive, intensely musical, exciting. It's just great.

Interviewer: I never see you mention Nat Cole. Did you listen to a lot of Nat Cole? Bill Evans loved Nat Cole.

Rod: Bill Evans loved Nat Cole, and so did Oscar Peterson. Oscar Peterson based all his early style on Nat Cole. I was never completely smitten with his piano playing as much as his voice, actually, to be honest. I knew that he was the model for Oscar Peterson. I didn't realize that Bill Evans loved him so much. I think he's a wonderful musician, and I loved his singing.

Interviewer: What are you listening to now as opposed to what you listened to 20 years ago? 

Rod: I heard Kings of Leon and like them very much. I bought that album. I like some of the things The Killers have done. But I still find myself having a lot of the stuff I always used to have on there - Ray Charles, Miles Davis. I've got quite a bit of Keith Jarrett on there. I love listening to him.

I've got a lot of classical music. I've got the complete Bach Organ works on there, which was actually played by a guy called Peter Herford. I was in a brilliant choir when I was a boy, a cathedral choir. The master of the music was an organist. He was one of the top bark organists in the world, actually, he became. But he was only 26 when he got there. That was my introduction to Bach. That was another thing that turned my world around, actually, hearing Bach played wonderfully.

Interviewer: It was an interview from you that turned me onto the mono version of Goldberg.

Rod: Oh, really! Isn't it wonderful?

Interviewer: It's different. It's more energetic.

Rod: It's more energized. It's more focused. There's a wonderful story about him. As a Canadian he was sent out on a cultural exchange. He was sort of an up and coming player. But the authorities in Canada didn't think that much of him. They sent him over to the Moscow Conservatoire. He went and played there as part of this exchange program.

He played in the first half of the concert and the place was just dotted with people. There were not many people there. To his amazement, in the second half he came out and the whole place was packed because in the interval, the word had got around him to some famous Russian pianists. They were just completely blown away by him.

It was at that period that he did the mono version of the Goldberg variations, which I think is much more focused, with the exception of the very slow variation on there, which I don't like on that, I have to say. It's too slow, I think, and, actually, the only one that doesn't work for me. But most of it is just sublime. I just love it.

That would be definitely one of my desert island albums.

Interviewer: I suspect Bach is your number one musician.

Rod: Classically, yeah. But then I also love a lot of the early 20th century composers like Stravinsky and Ravel. I love that, too.

Interviewer: Last question is, what are you reading?

Rod: When I'm on the road, I have to read things which I can read while there are distractions going on. On this trip, already, I've read a couple of Lee Charles novels, which is Jack Reacher. But I'm actually reading at the moment a book which is absolutely fascinating me. It's called "Red Joan" by Jennie Rooney.

It’s really good. It was set in 1937 at the time when a lot of idealistic people were turning to communism in '37. Obviously, something has happened to make the authorities question her as an old lady. Anyway, it's beautifully written. I really like that.

One of my favorite ever books, actually, is written by an Englishman called Laurie Lee. He's very famous in England. His most famous book was called "Sided with Rosie." But he wrote a trilogy of books, and the first one was called "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning." It's just a beautiful, beautiful book.

Basically, it was when he was in his teens he had a violin. He left home and he just walked. He got himself to Spain and walked across Spain, basically, with his violin. Spain was a pretty medieval country in those days. It's so different than how it is now.

I reread it while we were touring Spain a couple of years ago because we were playing a lot of the places where he was. They were tiny little, almost medieval, villages when he was there. Now they're bustling towns, et cetera. All very built up areas, and very, very different to how life was then. But it's a wonderful book.

---&---

Just a note that the article has Peter Hurford's name misspelt.

SXSW Interview: The Zombies

[According to the SXSW website, this interview took place on 15 March 2013.  SXSW uploaded a video of parts of it, and NPR posted a transcription, preceded by a brief introduction, which I've pasted below.]

It's remarkable to still have The Zombies with us. And rather unimaginable, really. They first broke up in 1968, just before their seminal second album, Odessey and Oracle, was released. They never really sold any records in back home in England, but in 1964 and '65, they had two hits in the U.S. with "She's Not There" and "Tell Her No." A third hit, "Time of the Season," made it to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969, well after the band was broke and disbanded.

More than 30 years later, two of the band's founding members began a tentative reunion. Rod Argent, whom you'll see most often behind a keyboard, and singer Colin Blunstone have rekindled The Zombies from time to time since then, but this isn't a nostalgia trip. They're really good, and the new music they make, including their 2011 release Breathe Out, Breathe In, is more than respectable. It's a joy to hear.

At the South by Southwest music festival this year I was given the opportunity to talk with Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone. We talked about their early days of touring — playing six or eight shows a day, along with 15 other groups. We talked about the making of their most revered work, Odessey and Oracle, which was originally released 45 years ago this week, about breaking up before the album was released and about making music all these years later.

---&---

Bob Boilen: I want to go back to really early, to about 1964 when you came to the States. And I want you to think about this place, South by Southwest, where there are about, you know, let's say 2,000 bands playing nice chunky sets, 30 or 40 minutes. And regular sets are an hour or more. I want you to take me to — and all these people — to 1964 and coming to America. And let's say going to the Fox Theater with Murray the K. And what was that like? Describe that to people, because it's such a whole different ballgame, right?

Rod Argent: It was extraordinary. I mean we — I've just written a song actually Colin hasn't even heard yet. Which talks about, "We walked into the Brooklyn Fox at snowy Christmas Day and Patti and her Bluebelles, blew us all away." I'm just trying to remember the words. "She took us to Aretha Franklin, showed me so much soul. And helped us join the party with our English rock 'n' roll." And that was, that's pretty much it. But we went on stage. And we were part of how many acts, Colin?

Colin Blunstone: There were 15 or 16 acts.

Boilen: They were revues is what they called them, right?

Blunstone: I guess they were. And we had to follow Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, who were sensational. And we were only 18 and 19 years old.

Argent: We were little white kids, weren't we?

Blunstone: Yeah, this is our first time in America. And we had to follow this sensational act. So it was a little challenging. But, I mean, we were very lucky because we had the national No. 1 record at the time. So it did help, I've got to be honest with you.

Argent: But we played two songs. And then all the acts had to do this. We were on with Ben E. King.

Blunstone: Yep. The Shirelles, Shangri-Las.

Argent: Nashville Teens.

Blunstone: Yeah, Dionne Warwick.

Argent: And Chuck Jackson. Chuck Jackson had a big hit in New York at the time. And he was...

Boilen: Do you know when that was?

Argent: Well, I mean, what was...

Blunstone: "Since I Don't Have You?"

Argent: "Since I Don't Have You," even though that was originally The Skyliners. He had a version that was [a hit] in New York. A great singer. And we were pretty much in awe, because all our heroes were black, really, at the time. Apart from Elvis and some, you know, some of the early rock 'n' rollers.

Boilen: Yeah.

Argent: Who were the first people to dip into black music, really. And by proxy that's how we discovered it. And we were pretty much in awe. But they took us to their hearts, they really did. I mean, those words about Patti were really right. She said, "Oh man, there are a couple of people you've got to hear." She said, "You've got to check out Aretha Franklin, and you got to check out Nina Simone." And all that was magical, you know, that was magical input for us. And so I have to say, without wanting to be big-headed about it, a couple of the other white acts on the band, they didn't really talk to them very much, did they? But they sort of, they took us into their confidence, we thought.

Blunstone: They seemed to, yeah.

Boilen: Those were different times and in some ways, very segregated times. Music was one of the places where it would often come together.

Blunstone: Absolutely.

Boilen: Music often pushed the boundaries of race.

Argent: Completely. Even going back to Benny Goodman, when he started using black people in his band for the first time.

Boilen: And you were about to describe the fact that you said it, you said you played two songs. And that's — that really is the huge difference is that this was more like putting on a radio show for people. This is how, 'cause Murray the K was the DJ in New York when I grew up, [on] WMCA. And he, they would put on, you'd come out, do two songs. Did you use your own band or did you ...

Argent: Oh yes, yes.

Blunstone: Yes.

Boilen: But some of these revues you didn't. You had backing bands.

Argent: Yeah, yeah.

Boilen: Maybe by in the '50s, maybe in the '60s it was different. But it was two songs, you're off, two songs from another band. No?

Argent: No, no. We weren't off. We would — every band in, every act in the set had to do this. The biggest and the smallest, you did your two songs, then you had to stay on stage at the back and kick your legs up and down and dance on the stage. And everyone had to do it. And it was absolutely crazy. And I always remember that a couple of us were co-opted by Murray the K into doing something on the show [with] The Shangri-Las. One of their big hits was "Give Him A Great Big Kiss" and I was co-opted to walk up to the front of the stage and plant the smacker on Mary. So — and the other thing was Hugh, wasn't it? Tell him about Hugh.

Blunstone: Hugh Grundy had to drive a motorcycle on ...

Argent: "Leader of the Pack."

Blunstone: Yeah, Hugh Grundy was our drummer and he had to drive a big motorcycle onstage for "Leader of the Pack." And I think he really enjoyed that. But I think you enjoyed the kiss as well, didn't you?

Argent: I enjoyed it very much. That was my favorite part of the show. And there were six shows a day. It was it six or eight, Colin?

Blunstone: Six ... something like that. And the thing is we had to stay in the theater, because there were thousands of people at the back of the theater. And one of the guys, Paul Atkinson, our guitarist, went out of the back of the theater once. He was just pushed up against a plate glass window just by the crowd, and the police came in and they got him. His shirt was ripped off him. And the police got him out and they said, okay, we do that once. We're not doing it again, so we just had to stay in the building for all day.

Boilen: Stay in the building just one more minute. I want to describe the sound that came from, not just from you, which I want to talk about too, but what came from the crowd.

Argent: It's crazy, isn't it?

Blunstone: Wow. Yeah, it was, I mean it was wonderful.

Argent: Screaming and...

Blunstone: It was a lot of screaming, I remember. I think for the first two or three years we were together, I needn't have sung at all, because no one heard anything. And of course, they had very small PA's in those days. Really, I wish I'd have known that at the time, it would have saved me an awful lot of trouble.

Boilen: If the — and I was going to say — from your perspective, could you even hear yourselves?

Blunstone: Not very well, not really.

Argent: There was no foldback; it was almost non-existent in those days.

Boilen: Foldback is the monitoring system [so the band] could really hear themselves. It's the British term ...

Argent: So when the audience hears a band now, you know, obviously they hear in the best possible way. When we're behind those mics and those speakers and unless we have good foldback, it's very hard to pitch. You can't focus on your voice. You know, it has to be pretty good for you to give a good performance and we didn't use to get it in those days.

Boilen: And did you travel from city to city and do similar revues or...

Blunstone: Well, not on that first tour we didn't.

Argent: In '65 we did that.

Blunstone: Yes, and that first tour we just did Murray the K. And then we did the very first show of Hullaballoo. Jack Jones introduced us and I think we just sang "She's Not There." And they tried to get us dancing again, but to start with it was quite big dance piece. And then as they saw us shape up, it got smaller and smaller.

Boilen: But did you — which of the TV shows did you sing — actually sing on any? Or was it a lip sync?

Blunstone: No, it was all lip synching in those day.

Argent: But that was a joy for us because the actual sound mix on television in those days was terrible. And if you did live things, you know, the people — usually engineers from a previous generation who had no understanding of rock 'n' roll and didn't understand the sound mix and balance. So we were very pleased in those early days to, you know, just lip sync.

Blunstone: What was that live TV we did? I forgotten what it's called. With the — they had dancing girls and elephants. And it was like a circus.

Argent: Oh! That was...

Boilen: Let's bring that back. [laugh] You're going to give me an idea.

Blunstone: I can't remember. But what I do remember is Rod and I had to sing a very close harmony song, but Rod was over [at] the end of this room. And we were trying to sing a harmony ...

Argent: How can you do it?

Blunstone: ... with dancing girls. And they had these feather boas, and they kept flicking them round my face. And I'm — and these dancing elephants and things. I can't remember what the show was called.

Argent: And they keep flicking their trunks all over.

Blunstone: I know. I just couldn't tell you; it was terrible. Absolutely terrible. And when it was shown in England — luckily in America our section was blocked out because the President made a speech to the nation right on our section — and we were so pleased.

Argent: We were.

Blunstone: But back in England — they showed it in England. Rod and I were just both desperate, mortified. And we both met up in this — without knowing; we didn't call one another — we went to the same pub to get drunk. And we just ... this is the end. That was just terrible. But anyway, we survived.

Boilen: When we think about 1962 at a point where you're what? 17, 16, 17, 18 something like that.

Argent: It was '61 when we formed.

Boilen: '61 when you formed. There wasn't a wave of bands; we take that for granted now. I want to just talk about the idea of what America defines as the British Invasion that was a few years later. That invasion probably involved 13 groups, right? Compared to the 2,000 you might come and see here. But I just want to talk about the idea of being a teenager and being inspired to form a band as a teenager. Of course, it was not a given as it is now.

Argent: Well, it was for me. Because I grew up the first 11 years of life, only liking classical music. 'Cause the popular music of the early '50s was pretty bad actually. And then my cousin who plays bass with us now, and for 20 years was a bass player with The Kinks ...

Boilen: His name?

Argent: Jim Rodford, I'm sorry. And he was in Argent as well — a founding member with me of Argent. He's a few years older than me, and he had one of the first electric bands in the whole of the South of England. I saw him play — well, two things. He played me Elvis singing "Hound Dog," which completely made me fall in love with rock 'n' roll. And the second thing was he was in this group. I went out to see them. I thought, I just have to be in the band one day. I really have to be in the band. And I was thinking about that constantly until I was about 15. When I met a guitarist at my school, he said he'd be in the band. I went to a guy, a good friend of mine who was playing — who was building a bass. Never played a note in his life, but was building a bass. And I said, is it nearly finished? And he said, yes, it's nearly finished. I said, would you want to be in a band? He said, yeah. He said, I've got a mate who plays guitar and sings a bit. And he said ...

Blunstone: That was me.

Argent: That was Colin. So, and anyway we all met up for the first time. Jim Rodford — the aforementioned Jim Rodford — he took us with all his band's gear. He loaned us all the band's gear for the first rehearsal. Showed Hugh, the drummer, who I saw playing in the Army Cadet Core Band. I thought he had the best sense of rhythm of all the people that I'd seen there. Showed him that his first pattern on the drums, and we had our first rehearsal. And on the first rehearsal I was going to be the lead singer, Colin was the guitarist. And that was it. After about half an-hour, we had a break and I wandered over to a beaten up old piano, and I starting playing "Nut Rocker" by B. Bumble & The Stingers. Colin raced over to me and said, "You have to play piano in the band." I said, that it was a guitar band. Bands are guitar bands, aren't they? You know, we were looking at The Shadows and some of the instrumental bands that were around at the time, and then after about 20 minutes, Colin started strumming the guitar and singing a Ricky Nelson song. I can never remember what that song was.

Blunstone: Well, I think it might have been "Poor Little Fool."

Argent: Or "Hello Mary Lou."

Blunstone: I think "Poor Little Fool."

Argent: And I thought, "This guy sounds great." And I said, "Well, I tell you what, okay, I'll play piano, but you've got to be the lead singer." And that was it. That was the band.

Boilen: Wow.

Argent: With one change where the bass player became a doctor in Canada. He emigrated to Canada. Chris White joined, and that was the band. So many bands started like that, and you can go back to earlier periods of music as well. I know that Duke Ellington's early band which became seminal to so many jazz musicians, was formed by a group of friends in Washington. They were called The Washingtonians, and that's how they started. So many bands start like that. I was reading an article by Dave Grohl the other day where he said, just get into a garage and suck. He said, just play and learn how to interact with other musicians, and just play for the joy of it. And that's what we were doing. That's still what people should be doing today. Not closeting themselves, you know, with, in their bedrooms with a few drum loops and things. Just make your mistakes and learn the joy of playing with other people. That's what we did.

Boilen: And getting out in front of people. Do you remember the first time you took that ...

Blunstone: The big step.

Boilen: I don't know ... were you in a basement doing this? You described ...

Blunstone: Well, we were still at school. We all went to school in one city called St. Albans. Although it's a city, it's not that big. That was the connection but we didn't live that close to one another so we would just rehearse at the weekends.

Argent: We'd take our stuff on the bus.

Blunstone: Yeah, we would the stuff on the bus. And one time I went with the drummer on a little scooter, a Lambretta scooter with his drum kit and my guitar. So we just got there any way we could.

Boilen: Where's the Instagram?

Blunstone: And — but I remember our very, very first ... our very first gig. It was in a little village called Lemsford. It's probably only 150 people live there. They had a youth club and we played there. And ...

Boilen: Isn't that where you met Janie Jones?

Blunstone: Shhh. I was absolutely thrilled. There were probably 30 or 40 people there. It wasn't an audience; it was a dance. At the end they always used to like to lower the lights for a slow dance, so everyone could have a smooch. So we played The Shadows song ...

Argent: "Nivram."

Blunstone: "Nivram."

Argent: It was cutting edge at the time. And it's a bass solo.

Blunstone: There's a bass solo in the middle. And the guy who built the bass, I mean he was okay. But he wasn't great, and as the lights got lower, he lost the fretting on the bass.

Boilen: He didn't see it?

Blunstone: He was playing a semi-tone difference to the rest of the band.

Argent: He played it perfectly but with semi-tone and out of tune.

Blunstone: And just let me say that — I thought it sounded really modern. Really cutting edge. It sounded great. But he was actually playing a semi-tone flat for the whole thing. But that was our first gig, and we weren't gonna let a little thing like that put us off, you know. It was great fun.

Boilen: Let's talk about the first time you walked into a studio. How long did that take?

Blunstone: Oh, everything was in an evening. We did everything in an evening.

Argent: That's right. Four tracks and mixed and everything in an evening, yeah.

Blunstone: But the first session we walked into was in West Hampstead Decca Studios where all the Decca acts recorded. Tom Jones, Lulu, Moody Blues all recorded there. It was an evening session and when we walked in the engineer had been at a wedding all day. He was blind drunk, absolutely blind drunk. Which is okay, I don't mind someone being blind drunk. But as time passed he became more and more aggressive. And so, sort of 45 minutes into a 50 -ear career, I thought, "This music business is not for me. I don't like this, this really is very difficult." Then we had a bit of luck. He collapsed. He was absolutely out cold. And we — he had a Zombie on each leg and a Zombie on each arm — we carried him up three flights of stairs. We took him into a black London taxi, put him on the backseat. I never saw him again. And his assistant took over, who was Gus Dudgeon.

Argent: He went on forever as a session engineer.

Blunstone: He went on to produce all of Elton's stuff, Kiki Dee, David Bowie. But he was only the assistant engineer on this first session.

Boilen: What a stroke of luck.

Blunstone: His first session ...

Argent: ... became a number one around the world

Blunstone: ... was our first session, and on that session we recorded "She's Not There" and I think three other tunes. Everything: backing vocals, mixed and in the car and on our way home by 11:00.

Boilen: And the [new] record, Breathe Out, Breathe In. How would you have done — how did you do that record?

Argent: The thing is, that over the years I've done a lot of record production and I've had thankfully a lot of success with it. There was a European artist called Tanita Tikaram in the '90s that [was] a record that I produced. It sold $4 1/2 million, et cetera. So I've done lots of production and gone through all the techniques, but on this particular album, Breathe Out, Breathe In, we decided not to try and be incredibly retro and go back, you know? Because you can't go back. But to try and embrace some of the things which worked so well in the old days. So we decided first of all to almost have no overdubs. We had almost no overdubs on the album, which means that we can do everything live, which is great. Secondly, we decided, from my point of view, that the keyboards should be as organic as possible, so I basically just played piano or organ or electric piano on the record. Thirdly, we decided that, as much as possible, the rhythm track will be played with everybody together so that we got some real interplay and the feeling of freshness about what we were doing. So typically, even though it took longer than it did in the first place, typically this is how each track would happen: I would go to the drummer's place, prepare him by playing in the track. We would typically play as much, do the rhythm track in three hours, so it wasn't a long day session. [Recording] the rhythm track would be three hours. And then we would leave it. Then we'd have a separate day where I'd work with Colin on the lead vocal and we'd give that a lot of attention, a lot of time, 'cause we wanted to make that as good as possible, so that would take a day. But not long days — we're talking about very civilized hours. You know, like 10:00 'til 6:00 or something like that and we'd have lunch and everything. But you know, it was very fresh and easy. On the third day, we would explore harmonies and we would put all the harmonies down because we wanted to explore harmonies in the way we always used to in the old days. So we'd try to get that parameter in. And then we would, the engineer and myself would, then mix it on another day. And I mean that's four days, but they're not four long days. And in the way that stuff is done nowadays with millions of tracks, we just didn't do it like that. And so we tried to make it very much about capturing performances, just as in the old days. So we, in many ways, tried to go back to what it felt like the best of the old thing.

Boilen: You said something that interested me which is that idea, that the idea of exploring harmony. And I think one of those things that connects people to a record like Odessey and Oracle for example is just that. There's such pure voice on that record. And so beautifully arranged. I was thinking of "Rose For Emily." I want to know what you came into the room with, and what you discovered in the room. In other words, how much of it was, you worked your butts off in trying to figure out the arrangement beforehand? Or how much was inspired? Talk about the sessions for Odessey and Oracle.

Argent: Well, we had to prepare things very well because we didn't have a large budget for the album, so we typically used to rehearse in my front room actually, around the piano. If it was one of my songs I would usually write many of the parts as integral to the song. Like, for instance, on "Care of Cell 44," the bass line was written by me because that was part of the song. So a lot of it wasn't just experimental on the day of recording. Same as "She's Not There," and many of those things. We'd work out the harmonies around my piano and we'd prepare absolutely as much as possible. But because on Odessey and Oracle we had eight tracks or at least seven because it was two four-tracks working together, for the first time we had all this preparation because each of the sessions was only three hours long or something like that. At the same time we had these extra tracks which meant we could overdub whatever spontaneously occurred to us.

Boilen: But did you think that through ahead of time? Or when you walked in there you realized, oh, now we can play more?

Argent: Everything we prepared we would put down. And then, for instance, on "Changes" I suddenly heard, [singing] "dah-dah-dah-dah-dee" on the top and we just whipped in and did it. That sort of spontaneity was part of the record too.

Blunstone: We always were a harmony band right from 1961, and there weren't a lot of harmony bands around. And we're lucky to have Rod, who's a very fine keyboard player. He understands harmony. He was in the Cathedral Choir, so he again understood harmony from that. But this led to a very interesting way that we did harmonies. Sometimes musicians would say to me, "Well, how did you get that harmony on that particular track?" 'Cause normally most people will, someone will sing the top harmony, and someone will sing the bottom harmony and someone sings the melody. But we didn't do things like that because I was a very, very inexperienced singer. And so sometimes I would — and I've got quite a high voice — so I would naturally drift to the top harmony. We would try and establish what I thought was the melody, and that could be quite different to what the melody was. But we had to fix that. And then Rod would try and set a very easy harmony for Chris, because he had to play bass at the same time, so he would be playing a different note to the note he's singing. I don't know how bass players do this, so Chris' harmony very often would be just a straight line. [Sings a single note] "Ummmmm," like that. And then Rod would have to fill in all the holes. So his harmony would be [sings notes at seemingly random intervals] "la-la-la-la-la-la," like that.

Argent: Sometimes.

Blunstone: And when you hear them all together it works. And so our harmonies were quite unique. People find it very difficult to copy because of that.

Boilen: As a fan of the band in those days, the singles in America did really well. Did they do well at home?

Argent: Do you know that was a major source of disappointment to us? And one of the things these days it's so hard for people that are young now to understand, you know, because the media is so instantly communicated now, you could have a hit in Australia and know it within a few hours. In those days it wasn't like that. We only judged things by the way things were in the U.K. We found out much later that we had hits all over the world apart from the U.K.

Boilen: And you didn't know then.

Argent: We didn't know it, no.

Boilen: Isn't that amazing?

Argent: What it led to was a situation where basically our income was for the majority of the band was mostly defined by our U.K. gigs. And because we only ever had one hit record in the U.K., and that wasn't a huge hit, "She's Not There." And then the income for most of the band wasn't that great. But because Chris and I had written the material, and because it had been successful all over the world, this sort of terrific stream of income was coming through for us. So we had no financial problems. But the other guys had to, you know ... were pretty much by the end living hand to mouth, and they had to make decisions. That's one of the reasons we broke up. Our guitarist got married to a girl who was the choreographer on the original Murray the K show over here. So he met an American and he said, "Look, I'm going to marry her. I've got no money. I'm going to have change my career." And then Colin followed and so did Hugh, and that's one of the main reasons why we split up.

Boilen: But to paint that picture when you're going into the studio which is, do you remember months and years is what when you walked into to record Odessey and Oracle?

Blunstone: It was in, it was '67 and it was spring to summer. You know, it was nice weather. I couldn't tell you exactly.

Argent: It was virtually as The Beatles had walked out.

Blunstone: We were the next band in.

Argent: Abbey Road.

Boilen: Literally.

Argent: After they were doing Sgt. Pepper.

Blunstone: And one of the reasons why there's such a lot of mellotron on Odessey and Oracle is because they left the mellotron behind. We didn't have a mellotron. It was just there. And some of the percussion instruments were lying around on the floor. So we thought, "Yeah, okay."

Argent: Some of the engineers were lying around on the floor as well. We used them.

Blunstone: Yeah, we used the same engineers. Geoff Emerick and Peter Vince were, you know, amongst the best engineers in the world, and we were so fortunate to use these same engineers that had just finished Sgt. Pepper.

Boilen: And you think about those times ... Your record, think about even The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request. You think about Pet Sounds and people now would think, what smash success records those were. Monetarily those were all flop records.

Argent: Yeah, even Pet Sounds. Which is extraordinary.

Boilen: Nobody bought Pet Sounds back when Pet Sounds came out. Nobody. I mean, a few.

Argent: Even though Sgt. Pepper really came out as a result, almost, of Pet Sounds.

Boilen: That's right. And Odessey and Oracle was not a big-selling record.

Blunstone: It wasn't, no.

Boilen: And there was a, well, a lot of records in that period that fit that mold of Sgt. Pepper. None of them did well.

Argent: I always say on stage that Odessey and Oracle sells more year in, year out now than it did when it first came out. With the No. 1 hit record. It's crazy.

Boilen: And the attitude of the band. You're hand to mouth, you go into a session to record this record. The record comes out — did you break up before the record comes out? Let's talk about that chronology.

Argent: We broke up before the album came out. I mean, we put the first single out and I think the guys in the band said, well, yeah, especially the ones that weren't writers said, "Well, let's give this thing a chance." And if the single doesn't happen in the U.K. We're only talking about the U.K.

Boilen: The single?

Argent: The single was "Care of Cell 44." It came out, it got great reviews, but it just didn't do anything. So we then split up, and we did an interview with a very iconic radio DJ at the time, Kenny Everett. He was an iconic DJ in England. And he said, "I love you guys." He said, "Well, wouldn't it be wise to wait until the album comes out before you split up?" But we didn't, you know, we've gone. And in fact, it was 18 months later before, because one DJ in the States loved it; loved the single, "Time Of The Season."

Boilen: Who was that?

Argent: It was a guy in Boise, Idaho. I can't remember the guy, but he played it and played it in a way that can't happen now with records because everything's so instant. But in those days it was possible for a huge fan — that playlist didn't govern everything, you know, so he played what he loved.

Boilen: What they would call "break" a record.

Argent: And he broke it. And it took him months.

Blunstone: But even before then, the album wasn't going to be released in America. But Al Kooper from Blood, Sweat & Tears had just become a producer, an A&R man at CBS, and he went to Clive Davis and he said, we have to get this. He bought it in London.

Argent: He said, "Whatever it costs you."

Blunstone: Yeah, "You've got to get this album."

Boilen: Isn't that amazing? Otherwise we may not know who they were.

Blunstone: And Clive Davis said, "We already have this album and we passed. We're not going to release it." So, it's because of Al Kooper that the record was even released in the first place. CBS were not going to release it.

Argent: On such things actually does this business rest ...

Boilen: The other part of painting this picture is, and especially for younger people who don't know the era well, is that it was only the age of singles. Even though we think of these classic records in 1966 and '67. Really...

Argent: Albums were just becoming important.

Boilen: Right. In '66 even a group like The Beatles could release a record and it would be different in the States than it would be in England. It was not this cohesive thing that we think of now. There was no FM radio, so all the radio, like in '66 and previous in America were all 45 driven songs. You'd have you guys playing. You'd have the, you know, the Singing Nuns, you know, have Tony Bennett. You know, you'd have this one radio station that everybody listened to, is this weird variety of stuff. But the idea of doing something completely ... I mean like The Doors or maybe Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" were some of the very first things that were like, this is really different stuff. And then when FM radio came to be in '67 and people started owning those FM radios in '68, '69, that's when you started to hear what I'd say was the more interesting, more artistic, more creative, more challenging music. And I think had the technology been a little different a little earlier that would have changed a lot of people's lives, including the money that wound up coming to you all. And ...

Argent: Absolutely.

Blunstone: Possibly it would have, yeah.

Argent: And I remember I was touring in the very late '60s, early '70s when the explosion in FM radio started and was really happening. And do you know at that time it was basically driven by the enthusiasm of the DJ's?

Boilen: That's right. They carried the records into the studio with them.

Argent: Yeah. They would play again, you know, no huge playlist. They would play what really turned them on. I remember the first time I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash album. This guy played it and said, "I love that. I'm going to play it again." And he'd play the whole album again. And you know, that could not happen now.

Boilen: That's right.

Argent: But it happened then. And did the audience go down because of that? No, it did not. The audience was enormous because people respond to the honesty, the enthusiasm of people that are really into the music. And what, and that's what they love. Nowadays I think it's a self-defeating circle, a vicious circle.

Boilen: Well, and the fortunate part of nowadays which, I think having lived through a bunch of these times, in some ways is the most exciting time. You know, as much as FM radio was such a remarkable thing. You'd turn on the radio and you'd hear The Velvet Underground, you know. Now I can turn on and go anywhere and hear some amazing bands from Mali. Just like you can do at this festival. Or hear somebody who did something in their bedroom in Seattle. And the gatekeepers aren't as important anymore. The gatekeepers then really did keep you from hearing things, like not putting out Odessey and Oracle if it wasn't for somebody. But now anyone who has a good strong voice can tell people about music. Your friends can tell you about music. You can go get it, you can listen to it without having to buy it. There's so many access points. And I think also the technology having changed it allows people to try and make music. That idea that you said, just get out, like Dave Grohl said, just do it. Just make whatever, what was the phrase he used? Or he used...

Argent: He said, "go into a garage and suck."

Boilen: You could, and in this case mostly bedrooms. And I think that's fabulous. And I think some of the music coming out these days is some of the most exciting. Which if it's okay it leads me to something else. This is a group called Foxygen [plays "San Francisco" by Foxygen], maybe any of you know it? Can you hear the direct line to the creativity and things that you were...

Argent: It sounds very late '60s.

Boilen: Yes. And I want to try to think about having gone into that studio in '67 in spring, summer. We're sitting here in 2013 and there's a band from the West Coast of the United States making music inspired by the music you made then ... Can you even begin to imagine any of that?

Blunstone: No, absolutely not.

Argent: This took us by surprise, didn't it? It was Chris White, the original bass player, who first called me up many years ago and said, you know, a lot of people [are] playing Odessey and Oracle. I thought he was just making it up. And I didn't listen to it, you know, I don't know if Colin did, but I didn't listen to it for about 20 years. And I couldn't even remember, you know, I mean I have my memories of it. Eventually when people started talking about it, Paul Weller from The Jam started talking about it. A lot of people then, young bands, and right up until the present day. The Vaccines last year, a very hot indie band in the U.K. made a video on the net saying it was their favorite album. You know, all that's gone on. And when that started to happen I went back and listened to it. And it was better than I remembered it. It's good, to be honest.

Boilen: It was pretty good, right? [applause]

Blunstone: You know, to commemorate the 40th year that the record came out, we got the surviving members of the band together and we played a concert, along with our present band, of the whole album. And you know, as Rod said, we don't listen to it very often, so we couldn't really remember it very well. And we were a little bit worried about the two other guys. Chris White and Hugh Grundy hadn't played since 1967. So we were going to do a concert in a big hall in 2011. And we thought, we should all get together and just go through these songs.

Argent: We were being very smart, weren't we?

Blunstone: We were being very smart. We've been playing regularly. We're the pros. And we'll just see how Hugh and Chris play, they might not be able to play anymore. Anyway, to cut to the chase: They'd really, really rehearsed. They knew all these songs backwards.

Argent: They were note perfect.

Blunstone: Note perfect.

Argent: We were all over the place. [laugh]

Blunstone: Rod and I had had to listen to it. And they were absolutely on the money, weren't they? And I just thought it was so funny. We were terrible when we played.

Argent: But when we did it, we only had two production rehearsals but we decided that if we were going to do it at all, and it was Chris' idea to do it. He said, "You know, we should really do it." We never played this live. We decided we wanted to replicate every single note on the original record, otherwise there was no point in doing it. And because there was a bit of overdubbing on there, we got Darian Sahanaja from the Brian Wilson band to come in.

Boilen: He's brilliant.

Argent: He's lovely. On the two production rehearsals he came in, and I was trying to teach him. He would say to me, "Why aren't we doing that little bit with harmony in it?" And I said, "Well, it's not on the original." He said, "I think you'll find it is." And you know, and we did. He was actually great. But we got the band we tour with now to do part of it. And Chris and Hugh obviously played, you know, the main parts of it. And we did, we reproduced every single note that was on the original album.

Boilen: Wow. [To audience] And if you haven't seen them live, it is an astonishingly wonderful show.

Argent: Oh, thank you very much. But on that first night when we, we booked one night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in the U.K. And it sold out, so then it became two nights. And then that sold out and so it became three nights. And just before we went on stage we suddenly thought, "Oh my God, if this doesn't work ... ." Because people kept saying, "Do you know who's standing in line?" Paul Weller has got tickets for all three nights. Robert Plant is here. Who else was there? Snow Patrol and God knows who else. And I suddenly thought, "Oh my God, if this is a disaster ... " You know, after the first two songs, we've got to be in front of these people, we're going to have a whole night to play. But in fact, within I would say a minute we knew it was going to be really great fun.

Boilen: Playing that Foxygen song, hearing your music back in the day. Can you think of what the nugget is that makes what you do so universal?

Argent: You know, we've often thought about this and I think one of the reasons is, the fact that what Colin often says gave us difficulty in the early days. And that is, when we wrote and recorded music, we never tried to play what was the current fashion in the day. We never thought, "Wow, we've got to make sure we get to the hook in 30 seconds otherwise radio won't play it." We just took a musical idea and tried to make it work for us. And if we could get excited about a result, we thought you'd stand some chance of that reaching out over the radio waves and actually touching somebody else enough to go out with their hard-earned money, 'cause you were talking about kids only in those days, who had to make a decision if they were going to buy a record or not, you know. And that's how we always worked. And that's how we still try and work today. And I think in the short term it meant that maybe we missed out commercially, instantly on the instant radio side of things. But in the long term I think it's meant that some of the stuff we did then hasn't dated — it sounds of its period — but it hasn't dated as much as maybe some of the other things from that period did, and it can still speak to people today.