Interview with the Zombies' Rod Argent

The Zombies were part of the first wave of the British invasion to hit US shores, scoring their biggest hit with She’s Not There in the summer of 1964, and like most of the bands of that wave that weren’t the Beatles, they struggled to maintain popularity when the second wave, with the Who and the Rolling Stones, hit in 1965.  If you think the Zombies are unique in this sense, recall that the Kinks, now properly lauded as one of the greats of the era, also faced a similar fate.  Do you realize that Waterloo Sunset, released in 1967 and now widely considered one of the best songs of the rock era, FAILED TO CHART IN THE U.S.?  The Zombies also had a string of great songs released between 1964 and 1967 and as far as I can tell, the crucial difference between them and the Kinks in terms of rock history is that the Kinks stuck with it while the Zombies, dispirited and facing financial pressures, packed it in right at the peak of their creativity. 

Ask anyone who knows and they’ll tell you that 1967’s Odessey and Oracle, an album that didn’t make a dent in the UK chart and was almost not even released in the US, is not just a “lost gem” or an “overlooked classic” but simply one of best records from a decade full of stiff competition.  And it’s after hearing and absorbing this bona-fide masterpiece that their story begins to take on tragic proportions.  But don’t fret, the story has a happy ending!  The band has been touring actively in recent years in its present incarnation with founding members Colin Blunstone (vocals) and Rod Argent (keyboards).  And that’s not all.  Inspired by a 3-night stand at London’s Shepherd’s Bush in 2008 where the original band reformed to play Odessey in its entirety, Argent started writing new material and the band went into the studio to record an album that picks up where they left off in 1967.  I spoke with Rod Argent about the band’s fabled history and the new record released in May (check No Ripcord for the full review to follow).

Obviously a lot of bands came out in the wake of the Beatles but you guys started a little before their success.

Yeah, we did start before their success.  In the UK, the Beatles were successful a couple years before they were successful in the States, so you have to realize that.  It was really ’62 when the Beatles started making a name with their records here, and we formed in ’61.  It was 50 years ago this Easter that we had our first rehearsal.

Right, so you were motivated by the general climate I guess.

Well, I’ll tell you what motivated me.  I had a cousin, Jim Rodford, who later played with me in Argent and was in the Kinks for 20 years on records like Come Dancing (Rodford now plays bass for the Zombies), he was four years older than me and was in one of the first electric bands in the whole of the South of England and I saw them when I was 11 years old and I was so knocked out.  I had spent the first 10 years of my life only liking classical music.  And then I heard Elvis in 1956 singing Hound Dog and was totally blown away.  So those two things were my motivation, really.

So when I’d seen Jim, I’d desperately wanted to be in a band.  When we formed, no one had met each other.  We just got a bunch of people together for the first rehearsal and it just, it was a million to one chance and it just worked.  And with only one change, we had an original bass player called Paul Arnold and he was the only guy that left.  Chris White joined about 18 months later.  And by some unbelievable chance it all gelled and it sounded really pretty good right from the beginning.

You guys are unique, there’s just nobody else like you in that period.  Was that sound there from the very beginning?

It was, yeah.  I think there were a couple of reasons for that.  When we started in that first rehearsal, I was supposed to be the lead singer.  I had never met Colin.  We had a break and I wandered over to a beaten up piano in the corner and played Nutrocker, Colin ran over to me and said “that sounds fantastic, you’ve got to play piano in the band”, and I said well, it’s a guitar band isn’t it?  So I didn’t know what to do.  Then a few minutes later Colin picked up a guitar and started singing a Ricky Nelson song and I was completely blown away and I said to him, ok, I’ll play piano, you have to be lead singer.  And it was as simple as that. 

And I had never stop listening to classical music and jazz and particularly the Miles Davis group from the later 50s, just one of the best things ever, with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley.  Indirectly they sort of came out.  Also, in the very beginning, we’d set up two mics - Colin would have a vocal mic and then behind him we’d have another mic and Chris and I would sing harmonies.  Before the Beatles came out it was very unusual for a group to sing 3 part harmony and we were doing that from the very beginning. I think those elements all conspired together to make us pretty unusual from the start.

Is that where you got Summertime from?  From Miles?

It wasn’t from Miles though I was well aware of that version he did with Gil Evans on the Porgy and Bess album,  No I knew the song and loved the song and I had a flatmate who played a version of Summertime with different chords, and I basically nicked that version.

The chord progression you use sounds like a song right off Kind of Blue (All Blues), with that up and down thing on the keyboard.

Yeah, I think naturally I used to introduce modal stuff into my playing without realizing it.  I remember really well the time I met Pat Metheny.  He told me, to my amazement, that “She’s Not There was the record that made me believe I had a way ahead with what I wanted to do”, he said “all that modal stuff”.  And I thought, there’s no modal stuff on She’s Not There, but then when I went back and started playing it I realized that when I was making the transition from A minor 7th to D, I had actually put a modal motif to join those chords together.  It had never crossed my mind.

One thing that surprised me, looking back at your history was that you had more success in the US than in the UK.

We had more success almost everywhere in the world than we did in the UK (laughs).  At the time, we knew about America but we don’t about anyplace else.  You could have a hit in Australia and find out by accident that a year and a half ago you had a hit. 

It seems like you’re image was played up as kind of highbrow…?

It was absolutely criminal the way we were handled from an image point of view.  Well we weren’t handled.  You look at the way other bands were handled, you had Andrew Loog Oldham with the Stones and Brian Epstein with the Beatles, you had the Who, fantastic image management. 

We had just come right out of school and the PR guy asked us what we’d been doing and obviously we hadn’t been doing anything!  So he asked us what exams we had taken, what a line really, and he counted up all the exam results we’d got and put them down as qualifications.  It was quite unbelievable.  And there was a set of photographs taken that were just appalling and the papers would pull these out whenever they wrote about us.  So in the UK, our image was forever that very unhip, schoolboy with glasses image.

When you talk about Odessey and Oracle you hear a lot about great lost albums and they’re usually pretty good, but this is one where there’s not a bad moment on it, and you can’t say that about a lot of records, even from the 60’s which had a lot of peaks – this has to be one of them.

Well, it was in our heads that we may break up, mainly for financial reasons since only the writers had a steady income.  We desperately wanted to get our own ideas out before we broke up.  The other thing is we always had the philosophy where we never set out to make commercial records, we have to get to the hook in 30 seconds or we have to follow this trend.  We always stayed true to what excited us.  That sometimes meant that these weren’t immediate hits, but in the long term, because we weren’t slavishly following trends, the songs have lasted and have retained their quality. 

I haven’t heard the whole new album yet, but from what I’ve heard it sounds like you’re picking up where you left off and doing what you guys do well.

I think that’s true.  One reason for that is that this band has been together in its present form for around a decade now, so we’ve gotten really tight.  It’s very much a group album.  There were several criteria I wanted to follow recording this album.  One thing is that the songs should be concise.  Also, we’ve always enjoyed exploring harmony and we do that throughout this album. 

I wanted to imagine myself in my normal position on the stage, hearing Steve drum the way he does, and have an enhanced view.  I wanted it to be natural and organic in that way. 

There were other things as well.  We had recently performed Odessey and Oracle, we realized we had never played it all the way through because we broke up. And there was something about the way those songs were constructed that made us smile.  I think it had an indirect bearing on what we did.  It sounds like it was recorded this year obviously but for me it has huge resonances with what we did then. 

I’m just praying for a bit of radio play because I really believe there’s the potential for a really honest and strong reaction from people.

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The Zombies' new album Breathe Out, Breathe In is out May 9th on Red House Records. For more info visit www.thezombies.net

You can hear the audio of the interview on the High and Low Podcast on iTunes or at http://www.highandlowpodcast.blogspot.com