Zombie Heaven
The Zombies
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THESE WILL BE OUR YEARS:
A ZOMBIES CHRONOLOGY 1961 - 1965
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RODNEY TERENCE ARGENT
Born 14 June 1945 in St Albans
From as early as I remember I really wanted to play something and I wanted to be involved with music. My father was a piano player and had his own semi-pro dance band locally for many years, the Les Argent Trio, although he never played much at home. The thing is, I could always get a tune out of anything. I learned a cheap trick when I was very young, that if the radio was playing and I went to the top of the piano, it always sounded like I was playing in tune with the radio, because it's very hard to distinguish tones up there. So I pestered my parents for piano lessons and when I was about nine I went to a local piano teacher, but as soon as I started to learn I got bored with the whole process, and I probably played the piano less in those two years of lessons than I have ever since.
Up until the age of eleven the only music I heard was popular late 19th century classical music like Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Then I heard Elvis and 'Hound Dog', and for the next two years, I only wanted to hear the rawest rock 'n' roll I could lay my hands on. From that I then heard things like Big Mama Thornton's original version of 'Hound Dog', and I heard some of the sources of some of the things that Elvis was doing. But Elvis was such a revelation to someone of my age at that time. I'd never heard any black blues, there was nowhere to hear it and this was my way of hearing it, and it might be secondhand but some of that stuff was pretty special.
It was around that time that I then wanted to return to the piano, and from then on I just listened to loads of music. I was fifteen when I heard the track 'Milestones' from Miles Davis' Milestones album, which I just thought was brilliant, and I bought the EP which was all I could afford at the time. I can still sing you the sax and trumpet solos. In this rush of enthusiasm I thought 'I've got to hear more of this' and I went out and bought those two albums Kind Of Blue and Miles Ahead - I sold all my Elvis singles to do it; I subsequently wished I hadn't! Just before that I'd bought another EP with 'On Green Dolphin Street' on it, and when it got to the piano solo, I thought 'this is fantastic.' That was my first exposure to Bill Evans, and it made me want to get all of his albums. So I was avidly listening to all that as well. I suppose the jazz influence was unusual. But apart from that two years I never stopped listening to classical music either. I didn't see any reason not to. So all those things did get mixed up in a big melting pot, subconsciously.
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PAUL ASHLEY WARREN ATKINSON
Born 19 March 1946 in Cuffley
I was born in Cuffley, which is near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. We moved from there to St Albans when I was about nine, I had an interest in music from an early age, and my father bought me a recorder for my tenth birthday, which I loved. Then when I was twelve my mother bought me a violin and got me lessons, and I taught myself to read music. I hated the violin lessons because 1 couldn't play to save my life; it was very difficult. But St Albans School had a Tuesday night music club, and I took my violin along, and that's where I met Rod, because he was in the year above me, as was Hugh Grundy. I'd just sort of fiddle about, I couldn't really play very well, and there was a guy there with a cheap old guitar. He asked did I want to swap, so I said "sure." I brought his guitar home, and my mother was very upset, because she'd paid good money for the violin. But she bought me guitar lessons, so I went back to the music club, with a guitar this time, and started playing with Rod, and Hugh who was drumming on a table with drumsticks. I was completely hung up from the age of thirteen on Chet Atkins, I had every record I think he ever made, and I taught myself to play from them, not that I have technique like his. But I used to wear his records out. I also loved all kinds of blues and folk, like Etta James, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Alexis Korner.
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COLIN EDWARD MICHAEL BLUNSTONE
Born 24 June 1945 in Hatfield
When I was a child, before my voice broke, I had a very good singing voice. I enjoyed singing. In fact one or two people told me that before they met me, they thought I was mad, because I used to walk along the road and sing at the top of my voice. But of course they couldn't hear the singing. They thought I talked to myself. The other thing was that I was very fit, I was very much into sports and athletics. I used to run a lot and singing is a very physical thing. I suppose I had well developed lungs or something like that!
I was very interested in the beginnings of rock 'n' roll but in particular early Elvis Presley. I was aware of Bill Haley and things like that but it was Elvis really, and also Little Richard and Chuck Berry, they were the three main ones for me. I didn't particularly like any other kind of music, and I don't remember anyone in my family ever playing music at home. I tried to be interested in jazz, I really tried. It's like when you first have a drink, no one likes alcohol at first but you get the taste. I preferred pop music really.
I went to St Albans County Grammar School for boys. I was in class 1B, and Paul Arnold was sitting in the desk in front of me, and he turned around, and with this great big grin introduced himself. We were eleven years old. Quite soon we were both learning to play the guitar and I remember saying to him "wouldn't it be fun if we had a group." Everyone was in a group in those days, the Shadows sort of thing. I think I gravitated towards guitar because it was easy. I'd never had music lessons and I think everybody thought they could play a bit of guitar quite quickly.
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CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR WHITE
Born 7 March 1943 in Barnet
My dad was an inspector on the buses but he was also a bass player and worked in dance bands. He actually taught me double bass. Skiffle inspired me to pick up the guitar because it was so simple and so easy, but I learned double bass when they needed someone to play it in the school orchestra. We'd moved to the village of Markyate, which is eight miles north of St Albans, when I was five and my dad opened up a grocers shop there. We actually had quite a musical family. My uncle, Ted White, was an arranger for the Billy Ternant Orchestra and he worked in television. When I was fourteen I went along to see the Jack Good TV thing Oh Boy! broadcast, with Cliff Richard and Duffy Power. r thought that was absolutely fantastic, and astounding, because of the noise. Oh Boy! was a bloody exciting programme. I always wanted to play in bands but never thought I was going to.
I went to St Albans Grammar School, and Colin was two years below me. He remembers me because I was in the art department and we used to have music sessions there. I used to play tea-chest bass, in Chris White's Skiffle Group. Colin used to go up there when I was in the sixth form and he was in the fourth form but I didn't really know him. I played with other groups at school, and we had some good players, quite inventive. Simplicity was the key to my appreciation of bass playing, the 50s stuff, which was mostly string bass. I wasn't aspiring to jazz, it was definitely pop. I thought I was going to be an art teacher, so I attended St Albans Art School which was very small, and they were mostly into jazz. I loved Miles Davis, but I also liked traditional jazz, Ken Colyer and that sort of thing. There was a lot of that stuff going in on in St Albans at the time. I was playing electric bass by then, and though I wasn't in a band permanently, I was earning money doing dance band gigs, just sitting in.
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HUGH BIRCH GRUNDY
Born 6 March 1945 in Winchester
What actually got me started was, to put it bluntly, vanity. I was at school with Rod and Paul, and they had a corps, like the army cadets, which we had to do every Friday. You'd end up in the woods, playing soldiers basically, firing blanks at each other and stuff like that. I was never a sportsman at school, and didn't particularly like getting wet and dirty and horrible. If I could get out of that I would, so of course when we were up there with the guns and stuff I thought "I'm not too keen on this, how can I get out of this?" I'd noticed that the marching band, the bugles and drums, would rehearse every Friday; instead of joining in with the rest of us, they'd be down the band hut, cleaning their gear. So I joined the band and I started playing bugle. Now, the bugle was at the back of the band, so you'd find yourself marching down the street on parades, like on Armistice Day, and you'd be at the back. It became apparent to me that the people who were watching by the side of the road were watching the drummers first, because they were up the front. I thought to myself, "Forget this bugle lark, I've got to get up front and get on the drums". I applied to start on the drums, and as soon as I picked up a pair of sticks I realised I had a bit of a talent for it, so I found myself up the front, which was great.
I was listening to rock 'n' roll on the radio at home a lot; Radio Luxembourg. I started copying the drummers' movements, what I could hear, on the tables and chairs at home. I used to drive my mum mad, sitting at the table drumming away. Even once we'd started playing, we used to go down the jazz club in Hatfield and I'd listen, watching the drummer, keeping an eye. I think that was really how I learned, by watching and listening to everyone I could, soaking it all up, and adding a bit of his, and a bit of his. One of my early influences, one of the guys I really liked to see on television, was Bobby Elliott, who always looked the part when he was playing; always had a flashy move or two. And there was always a terrific drum sound on the Hollies' records.
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Zombies Beginnings
1961 – 1962
St Albans, only a forty minute drive north of London and famous as the site of the Roman town of Verulamium, has long harboured a vibrant local music scene. In the same way as Lubbock, Texas, is principally known as the hometown of Buddy Holly, so should St Albans be known as the birthplace of the Zombies.
Rod Argent: "I really wanted to be in a band when I heard my cousin, Jim Radford, in the Bluetones. I'd seen him at a local gig in 1956 when I was about eleven years old, and I had stars in my eyes. I remember thinking I wanted to be in a band, so I tried to play guitar but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I thought, I'll play piano, it doesn't matter if I just sit there all night and bash chords, that's enough. By the time I was fifteen, I could start to form that band. I had a lot of albums by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and I also loved the Motown stuff, which I guess I was introduced to by the Beatles talking about it so much when they first came out. Also, at the same time I still hadn't stopped listening to jazz and things like Stravinsky and Bartok and to me there didn't seem to be any reason why you shouldn't have all those things. I'd gone to meet a friend at school who was a year below me and there was a folk club going on in the corner of the classroom when 1 went in to say hello. Paul was playing guitar, and 1 thought he sounded good, so just on a whim I said to him "I've been thinking of getting a band together, do you want to be in it?" And he said yes. Then I just stood and watched while the army corps band practised, and picked the drummer that showed the most sense of rhythm playing a side drum, which was Hugh."
Hugh Grundy: "What happened was Rod asked if I'd like to join in after school, down in the band hut where there was a piano, sort of a music club. So I used to bring one or two of the drums from the band hut and play them along with the music they were playing. And that's where it grew from. Eventually we said, 'let's form a band here', a rock 'n' roll band, because that was what was happening at the time."
Paul Atkinson: "Rod suggested we try and put a band together. He knew a guy called Paul Arnold, who was a neighbour. He played guitar but we recruited him as a bass player. He didn't have a bass guitar so we had to make him one. He came over to my father's workshop at the house with a block of wood, and we designed and built a bass."
Rod: "Paul Arnold was my best friend at the time, who'd never played a note of anything in his life but he was building a bass. 1 said to him that night 'I've met this guy who wants to be in a band, how close is your bass to being finished?' 'Pretty soon, and I know a guy at my school who can sing a bit and play guitar', who was Colin."
Colin Blunstone: "Paul Arnold told me one of his neighbours who went to the other school in St Albans, St Albans School, was a very good keyboard player and wanted to put a band together. My initial reaction was 'Oh dear, what have I got myself into', but I had said to him it would be great to be in a group, so I went along and met this chap on Saturday morning outside a pub called the Blacksmith's Arms. I'd broken my nose playing rugby, I had two black eyes and strapping across my nose, and I like to think that they were all a little bit apprehensive about this rough bloke being in the group'"
Jim Rodford (Rod's cousin): "[My group] the Bluetones were probably the leading band in the area. Rod especially would come along and watch us, while he was still at school. Eventually Rod said he'd got some guys and asked if I would be part of the band. I told him that my band was doing really well, thanks, but that I'd help him get going. So I took Rod in my car to their very first rehearsal at our local youth club, and on the way we had to pick up one of the guys. Rod said 'I haven't met him before, but he goes to your school and his name is Blunstone'. We stopped by this pub and there was this guy standing there with a guitar in his hand and a broken nose. I wound down the window and said 'is your name Blunstone?' and he said yes. 'Well, hop in', and we drove on to the club. I set up our equipment because they had none of their own, and I gave them some pointers to start off, because they had no idea what to do. I was like the pro, the experienced guy around. Hugh Grundy only knew military style drums, so I taught him how to playa rough rock 'n' roll beat. Off they went, and they made some very desperate attempts at Ventures and Shadows hits."
Colin: "Of course I joined the band as a rhythm guitarist, and Rod was going to be the singer, but even at that first rehearsal we had a break and he went over and played 'Nut Rocker' on a terrible old broken down piano, and I must admit I thought at the time 'I don't understand why the line-up isn't including this wonderful piano playing'. I had an acoustic guitar with a pick-up called a Framus Atlantis, a lovely guitar. We practised that morning with the Bluetones' equipment and it went very, very well. The next week we just rehearsed with the little bits and bobs we had, and it was very, very disappointing! Not long after we were practising a Shadows tune called 'Wonderful Land', and I kept making mistakes, so we changed around and Rod played keyboards and I became lead singer."
Rod: "Hugh had never sat down in front of a drum kit in his life, never played a kick drum, and within an hour at that rehearsal he'd got the co-ordination together. What was extraordinary was that apart from the bass player, that was a band that went on to really gel beautifully - the chances of that happening must be a million to one."
Colin: "The first name of the band was the Mustangs and then we found there was another group called that, in fact there were a hundred groups called the Mustangs, so that got dumped, and we became the Sundowners. And then Paul Arnold came up with the idea of the Zombies. I think we all felt that no one else would possibly call themselves the Zombies."
Rod: "We were called two or three things for a very short time, all of which were incredibly ordinary or incredibly silly, like Fred Grease and the Axles. I think in the end the reason we liked the Zombies was just that it sounded so unlike anything that people were using at that time. Actually our calling card originally said Zombies R&B. Our first gig was at Colin's school: he'd got us to play there supporting this ordinary dance band. One of the early things that we did was this Shadows tune 'Nivram', which at the time was regarded as being technically way up there, with a complicated bass solo. Paul Arnold spent hour upon hour just learning note for note, but the lights went off just as Paul was coming up to play the solo! The place was plunged into darkness but he went on and played it absolutely note perfect, but a fret higher than it should have been. We'd also decided that we had to get some showmanship for this gig together but time ran out on us. We'd managed to finish the choreography to one number, 'Shakin' All Over' I always used to move around like a muppet on stage, but the rest of the group were actually pretty static. So you had this group just standing there playing the set quite nervously, absolutely stood still. And suddenly, to the complete amazement of the audience, we started 'Shakin' All Over', and all hell broke loose. The guitars were flying round, and we'd worked out this moment where Colin ducked and the other guitars came over his head. And at the end of that, because it was the only song we'd choreographed, it was back to complete stationary playing!"
Paul: "In the very early days we would play a place called the Pioneer Club in St Albans, a youth club. It was made of these tin, corrugated iron walls and roof, and was a terribly echoey place. Bunches of people would come in and watch us, like watching rehearsals. When we caught Paul Arnold playing with his hand in his pocket Rod said 'that's it!'."
Colin: "The legendary story about Paul Arnold playing 'Peggy Sue' with one hand is true; he'd do it with anything that was in A, because he could play open strings. There wasn't a lot of central heating in this country in the early 1960s, and the places we'd play were very cold, so it seemed natural to me that if you could, you'd put your hand in your pocket. But it was partly a bit of attitude on his part. Really, Paul wanted to be a doctor, and his schoolwork was getting more and more time-consuming, so he eventually left the band, and Chris White took over."
Rod: "A strange thing was, six months before we formed, I had a call at my front door and it was Chris, wanting to know if I wanted to be in a danceband he was in. I don't know who told him I could play piano, but at the time it wasn't what I wanted to do, so 1 said no."
Chris: "I'd been playing in a small band that played Django Reinhardt sort of stuff, with this New Zealander Duffy Coke, and Michael 'Chas' Chaplin. Paul Arnold's brother Terry suggested to Rod that I joined. I loved it right from the first rehearsal. I think they'd only played two or three gigs. I joined in 1962 and they were the Zombies R&B. We rehearsed at St Etheldreda's in Hatfield. Hugh was going out with a girl round the corner, the dean's daughter, and every break he used to nip out from the hall. About the third gig I played with them, Hugh asked Paul 'What's the name of our bass player?' I hadn't spoken to him, because he was very quiet and he always used to disappear because of this girl at rehearsals, so I never got a chance to speak with him."
Hugh: "I remember the rehearsals there, it was a clubhouse in a sports field just outside of Hatfield that we used to use. I remember going there with my drums on the back of a Lambretta. My first kit consisted of a bass drum, and for some unknown reason two snare drums, and some cymbals: that's all it was! Then I moved onto another kit, might have been a Premier, that was a full kit. I had a high hat then! During the main Zombies period I just had the regular Ludwig kit, and the reason I got that was because Ringo played it, therefore I thought "that's the one I've got to have". I still have the snare drum, and I have yet to come across a snare drum that equals that original Ludwig 400."
Rod: "Right from the beginning we performed unusual things, even if they were instrumentals. I recall rehearsing the Four Preps' 'Big Man', well left field! I was always keen on the harder edged, more rock 'n' roll-y things. Right from the start we did a quite jazzy version of 'Summertime' with a long piano solo in the middle. Keyboards were not at all common. Obviously at the first gigs we did I just had an acoustic piano, and there was no sophisticated miking in those days. So consequently the only time you could hear me was when I did the Jerry Lee Lewis sweep up and down the piano. I used to do that all night long, and by the end of the evening my thumb used to be covered in blood! I loved Jerry Lee Lewis' records, but I didn't try to copy anybody's playing style. When the Beatles first came in, one of the real revelations was that they sang a lot of harmonies. But from the beginning we'd hooked up another mike at the back of the stage, and Chris and I used to sing harmonies into that. Really quite similar to what the Beatles were doing, but with no knowledge of them. We'd got it from the same place, the Shirelles and the Crystals."
Colin: "I loved the Beatles, so we played anything of theirs once they were popular. We used to open with 'Roll Over Beethoven'. Just before we went professional we did the Searchers' hit, 'Sweets For My Sweet'; I didn't really like it so Chris sang it. It used to go down a storm, and I wasn't very happy with that, though I didn't say anything at the time – I just used to go and have a little wander around while he sang it. The hot point of the show, and there was Chris singing it! A lot of the set was instrumentals, in fact much of the time it was 50 per cent instrumentals, so I could go and relax, and maybe have a dance with a beautiful girl; that's what I'd always be hoping anyway! While they had to stay up there and slog away! I remember there was a particular beautiful girl and I actually went and said to the band 'Look, playa slow one!', so I got to do a slow dance. They hated that!'
"There was a slight problem in that I had no stagecraft. How could I have had, with the route we had taken? It had just happened that I became the singer. 'Look, the guitar isn't happening, Rod's a great keyboard player, maybe you should try and sing.' I said 'OK, maybe I'll give it a little go', but I didn't demand to be the singer. Rod was very much the leader of the band, we all relied on him to a huge extent but he wasn't in the middle of the stage, so that was a slight problem. Not for him, for the band; Rod used to announce all the songs, and he used to count everything in as well, so it would be coming from the side of the stage. To some people I was the focal point, and I probably needed a bit of help in how to command a stage."
Jim Rodford: "Rod was like the unspoken leader because he had the most ability and knowledge at the time, but he was the least heard because all he was doing was banging around on these pianos in the halls. Normally they were badly out-of-tune pianos, so there was nothing of any relevance coming through. The band was getting better, they were doing slightly more important gigs and gaining experience, but they were still very amateur and with very minimal equipment. I still loaned them the Bluetones' gear. If I remember correctly they all saved from these tiny, tiny fees they were getting, to go and buy their first Vox AC- 30 amp, which was a step forward. The sound improved a bit butt they still had the guitar, the bass and the one microphone all going through the amp."
Rod: "I remember doing the Girls Grammar School, and Chris suggested the old music hall song 'Mrs Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter'. This was before Herman's Hermits did it, because we wouldn't have done it then. I sang it, and I wouldn't have done it if Chris hadn't introduced me to it. That was Chris' first input, but we kept him (laughter). When we were semi-pro, if we were called out for an encore, we did a rock 'n' roll 12-bar, and Chris would freak and say 'I don't know that one" We'd say 'But Chris, it's a l2-bar blues!' He'd go 'Where am I, what chord?!' But the thing was he played great bass, so it didn't matter because he'd play them within his style, and it sounded great.
"It wasn't just a great time for British music or whatever, it was a great time for being exposed to all sorts of different music. So for the first time we were really hearing black music, hearing jazz, and when you're that age and you've got this coming in for the first time, it gives you huge enthusiasm. You just want to be part of it, or you wonder at all of these things that are being revealed to you. Nowadays everything's on tap all the time, but back then it wasn't. The first time I heard Elvis, that was my introduction to black music, by proxy. And it was only after the Beatles that a lot of the Tamla, that area, became available to people in England. And the reason we were in it, was just to expand ourselves, take in all these influences and do it because it was great."
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The band had started playing shows in 1961 but none were chronicled until the group were more or less semi-professional by late 1962. It was at this point that Paul Atkinson, as band treasurer, began to keep a tally of gigs and earnings. The following dates are all taken from his diary.
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Zombies History – 1962
15-12: St Albans - County Grammar School
22-12: Welwyn - Garden City Liberal Club
28-12: Hatfield - Hilltop
1963
18-1: St Albans - St Marys Youth Club
9-2: St Albans - Waverley Club
23-2: Welwyn Garden City - Free Church Youth Club
2-3: St Albans - Waverley Club
5-4: St Albans - St Marys Youth Club
6-4: St Albans - Mercer's
13-4: St Albans - Waverley Club
19-5: St Albans - New Greens Hall
26-5: St Albans - Cavalier Hall
27-5: St Albans - Town Hall
Rod: "This was our first real gig in a sense, the first important one on the local scene because the local promoter was corning down to see us to see if he'd like to book us at Ballito's Hosiery Mills. I worked there as a wages clerk for a year before I was supposed to be going to university. Most boring time in my life! The Cavalier Hall had been the previous night. We'd had a few drinks afterwards and we were singing for ages in the van on the way home and we blew our voices out. I was really worried about this because the falsetto range of my voice went, and one of the songs we were doing was the Beatles' 'From Me To You'. When it got to 'is there anything I can do', I just completely lost that register in my voice. So I asked Jim Rodford, 'Will you come along and just wander by the front of the stage, and when we get to that bit will you very surreptitiously just put your head by the mike and sing 'I can do'?' He said 'sure'. We set up for the gig, we were the opening act and there was nobody in the hall at all! The only people in the hall were the promoter who'd come to see us, and Jim, who wandered to the front of the stage and sang this falsetto line with nobody else in the hall at all. It was quite embarrassing, and the sound was dreadful. It was our first experience of a cavernous acoustic - we'd been used to the acoustics of very small youth clubs - which was awful for the band and which we hadn't learned to deal with at the time, so it sounded appalling to us."
Colin: "To add to our problems Paul Atkinson broke a string while the promoter was watching, and because this was the first time it had happened on stage, he had to struggle on for nearly 25 minutes."
15-6: St Albans - Co-Op Hall
5-7: Hatfield - Parish Youth Club
20-7: St Albans - Ballito's
Rod: "So this promoter obviously liked us enough to book us at Ballito's, and when we played it was our big success on the local scene. It was a combination of an in-house dance and the public being allowed. That was quite a milestone. We were supporting a band called the Laurie Jay Combo, whose guitarist was Vic Briggs (later of the Animals). He was lovely bloke, and after the gig, he came up and said 'I really like some of the things you're doing there. Have you ever thought, when you're improvising, say in C-7th, to transpose it in your mind down a 4th and imagine it's a G-minor 7th?' It was actually a way of incorporating 9ths and 13ths into my playing. Suddenly the sound was there, for all these things that 1 had heard in my mind from being influenced by jazz, but that 1 didn't know how to go about playing. I'll always remember Vic Briggs for that."
Chris: "Ballito's was when the jazzers started appreciating what we were doing. We always went down very well because we had a little more originality, and Colin had a great voice and Rod's solos were different. We did 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy' and 'What'd I Say', patterned after Jerry Lee Lewis' version as much as Ray Charles'."
Paul: "We used to get together normally at Rod's house, in the living room around his piano, for really sort of acoustic rehearsals. I would play acoustic guitar, Rod would play piano, we'd eventually bring one amp in, that Chris and I shared so we could hear ourselves play, and Hugh would just drum on a table. We would work up songs; things we liked. A lot of it came from Rod, I have to give Rod the credit, he really came up with the obscure R&B covers, many of which I'd never heard of. I don't think we ever did any Cliff Richard, though we might have done some early Shadows' stuff like 'FBI'; we copied them like everyone else. We also did 'Perfidia' by the Ventures, which I liked. But we soon dropped that stuff. I had an old Hohner acoustic guitar, which I bought for £15 in about 1963 and electrified it myself, adding two pickups to it, and that's what I recorded with on the early sessions."
Jim Rodford: "There was one moment that crystallised the whole thing for me, and I'm sure the band would all agree. They had saved and saved, and one Saturday morning they went down to the Charing Cross Road in London to buy a Hohner pianet. I remember them bringing it back and setting it up that lunchtime - I helped because they were still using bits of my gear - in the pavilion at the Ballito's Sports Ground, where they'd rehearse sometimes. They put it on a table and Rod plugged it into the AC-30, and all of a sudden the band sounded totally different. It sounded classy, in tune and really a million steps forward. For the first time you could hear everything that Rod was doing clearly, the advanced harmonic things, and the bass lines he had in his head. He was telling Chris and Paul what to play, voicing the chords, and working out the vocal harmonies, because they could finally hear what he was telling them to do with his right hand. The Zombies were suddenly a force to be reckoned with. At the moment they bought that electric piano, they went forward in leaps and bounds."
22-7: Welwyn Garden City - High School
18-9: Hatfield - Memorial Hall
20-9: Kings Langley - Ovaltine Talent Contest
21-9: Park Street - Village Hall
24-9: Luton - St Andrews Youth Club
1-10: St Albans - New Greens Hall
5-10: Hatfield - St Michaels Youth Club
12-10: St Albans - Mercers
20-10: St Albans - Cavalier Hall
27-10: London - Colney Willows
2-11: St Albans - College Of Further Education
3-11: Hitchin - New Hermitage Ballroom
7-11: St Albans – Co-Op Hall
9-11: Ware - Drill Hall
16-11: St Albans - Marconi's
20-11: Luton - St Lukes Youth Club
23-11: St Albans - Ballito's
7-12: St Albans - County Grammar School
8-12: London - Colney Willows
14-12: Watford - Southwest Herts College Of Further Education
16-12: St Albans - Girls Grammar School
19-12: St Albans - Art School
20-12: St Albans - College Of Further Education
23-12: St Albans - Market Hall
31-12: Flamstead - C.O social
At the end of 1963, according to Paul's book-keeping, the Zombies had earned a grand total of £324 6s Od, beginning with an average fee of £6, though by the end of the year they had doubled that.
Colin: "As I remember it was £6, with five quid to go in the kitty for gear and £1 for bus fares and petrol. That's why we put down £6, which was a strange figure."
An amazing and incredible year for the Zombies, starting off with semi-pro gigs at their usual haunts in St Albans, and topped off with a number one record in America and shows in New York.
3-1: St Albans - Faulkner Hall
10-1: Hemel Hempstead - St Johns Hall
17-1: Luton - Halfway Youth Club
18-1: St Albans - Old Verulamians
Chris: "Our big thing became the Old Verulamians' rugby club. [Although this may not be reflected by Paul's diary dates] We'd played down there initially as a fill-in band or something, but it was so successful that they then started putting a marquee on the back, because they had too many people come down. It used to be quite astounding, the reaction. The worst thing was the electric generators and our equipment started going softer and going out of tune. People used to regularly lose their voices singing there because you couldn't hear anything, as the generators were varying so much. That was when we started getting this incredible reputation".
24-1: St Albans - Market Hall
Paul: "At the Market Hall off St Peter's Street, where they had Friday night dances, most of the bands were not local. They were pro bands from Sheffield, Manchester or London that were touring. There might be a pretty bad local band opening for them, that'd be booed off the stage before the real band would come along. So the fact that we actually headlined in our own town was unusual. We got feedback that we were good. We started playing these gigs around St Albans and Hatfield and gradually further afield, and we got a great response – of course a lot of people there were our friends, and we were very popular for a Friday or Saturday night in and around St Albans."
25-1: St Albans - Ballito's
1-2: St Albans - Ballito's
14-2: Welwyn Garden City - College Of Further Education
15-2: St Albans - Sphere Works
21-2: St Albans - Faulkner Hall
22-2: St Albans - Old Verulamians
Hugh: "It was heady days at Old Verulamians. We used to play there so much until they got so full that you couldn't get another person in there, and the walls would be awash with condensation, and the floor awash with beer. St Albans was a small town, but a friendly place, a good town. The same crowd used to follow us around, they just became massive fans. We were doing a hell of a lot of gigs in the immediate area. It was a great time."
Andy Nye (Chris White's nephew): "Being born in 1959, I was only aged 6-9 years whilst the Zombies were 'around', but the memories I have are very vivid, coming from a small village where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. My grandfather [Chris' father] let them rehearse in the bedroom above their shop at 68 High Street in Markyate. I would sit in on rehearsals with my brothers and watch in awe. We had to be very quiet, for fear of being chucked out! But we didn't want to miss a thing. The room only measured about thirteen feet by thirteen feet, though the bands equipment in those days was pretty simple. And as fans would gather outside whenever the band rehearsed, one time they set up their equipment on the Oat tin roof above the shop's brick storeroom, which housed washing powder and dog food, and gave an impromptu concert to the fans watching from the blocked street. This was long before the Beatles' rooftop concert and caused quite a stir. The village only had the one policeman, PC Gale, and I don't think he dared to intervene!"
28-2: Kings Langley - Ovaltine Factory
29-2: Kingston upon Thames - Coronation Hall
Rod recalls that this was the first gig the Zombies played outside their local area and they shared the bill with the Cheynes, whose principal members were Mick Fleetwood and Pete Bardens.
7-3: Flamstead - Village Hall (Chris White's 21st birthday)
8-3: St Albans - Francis Bacon School, Alma Road
14-3: St Albans - College Of Further Education
15-3: Dunstable - California Ballroom (audition)
Terry Quirk (friend): 'I’d been in the year above Chris at the grammar school, and when we were at St Albans Art School together we became very good mates. He and I used to organise gigs at the art school, and Donovan, who lived nearby in Hatfield, was notorious for sneaking in without paying. I can remember Chris playing a variety of sounds on the guitar, but I wouldn't say they were exactly musical. We used to go to the Jazz Club at St Albans, which was a trad jazz club but it was just around the time of R&B, so it became an R&B club, allied to the Stones etc. The other place to go was Dunstable, to the California Ballroom, where we'd all hang out during the mod era. Everyone was very cool in Italian suits and it was the place to go and meet the girls. You had a very large hall with a band at either end, the support and the main attraction playing continuous music. The Zombies went from being that support band to headlining. A lot of the original gigs were word of mouth arrangements like the Old Verulamians. They were always wild, lots of young people enjoying themselves. You know what rugby clubs are like, a lot of loaning around to say the least!"
20-3: St Albans - Girls Grammar School
26-3: St Albans - Market Hall
4-4: St Albans - Old Verulamians
5-4: Watford - Town Hall (Herts Beat Contest heat)
The Herts Beat competition had been organised by the London Evening News in order to find "the top beat group in the county". The first prize was £250 and "possible" interest from booking agents and record labels.
Paul: "Somebody said there was competition going on, and they thought we should go in for it, I think it was Chris. By this time we'd got into the habit of rehearsing in a room above Chris' dad's shop in Markyate. Usually on Sunday afternoons. So what the hell, we went in for it."
11-4: Redbourn - Village Hall
17-4: St Albans - Faulkner Hall
18-4: Luton - St Lukes Youth Club
21-4: St Albans - New Greens Hall
15-4: Hatfield - College Of Technology
19-4: Jackson's Studio, Rickmansworth - recording demos of 'Summertime', 'It's Alright With Me'
2-5: St Albans - Old Albanians
9-5: St Albans - Co-Op Hall
10-5: Watford - Town Hall (Herts Beat Contest Final)
The triumph of this evening was the turning point that the rest of the Zombies' career hinged upon. The set list on this momentous night was 'I'm Going Home', 'Summertime', 'I Got My Mojo Working' and the band's first original 'It's Alright With Me'.
Chris: "The final was the most exciting and memorable occasion, because everything seemed to fall into place. We drew lots out of a hat as to who would go last. In the heats we got last drawn out of a hat and in the final we got last. At the Watford Town Hall there was a big stage and we set up where the orchestras were, right by the judges. Everything just went perfectly. We had coaches of fans come along from St Albans with banners and everything, so we had a great deal of support. And we won!"
Terry Quirk: "In the St Albans area there were three or four bands that each had a following, like the Bluetones and the Trespassers, but what really made the Zombies stand out, apart from their natural talent and having a good frontman in Colin, was cracking that Herts Beat thing. That was a focus, and all of a sudden there was attention. All my family went along to the final, and there were a whole bunch of supporters, friends and relatives. One thing about the boys is that all the families were close and got to know each other through supporting the band."
Paul: "It was a big deal; even my mum and dad came, and to get them to come out to a show was notable. Shane Fenton was one of the judges. It was really a watershed, and even my father afterwards said: [deep voice] 'That was very good'."
Chris: "Rod had taken a year off before university, Colin went into insurance, Hugh was in a bank, and Paul had applied to go to university starting September 1964. His parents definitely didn't want him to be in a beat group. I'd just applied to do my final year's training in Bournemouth, but I cancelled it. So we won the Herts Beat final, which was a final fling, and then we got all these offers, so we thought 'why don't we try it for a year'."
Jim Rodford: "The Bluetones had entered the Herts Beat competition as well, and we got to the semi-final but the Zombies beat us. When they won that, that was what allowed Paul to stay in the band, because his parents probably said 'See how this goes' Because there had been talk at one point of me joining. They were all ready to go to university and they'd all got passes, most of them, but Paul's parents were really against him staying in the band and not going to college. So there was a period of about a month when Rod said 'We all want to take a year out and give the band a go, but I think Paul's not going to be able to come. Would you consider playing guitar?' I said I didn't think I was good enough on guitar. I had an ear and I could probably pick it up, but it was just talk."
During the next couple of weeks, the group were approached by several companies and individuals offering contracts. According to press reports of the final, the Zombies were actually approached before being declared the winners.
Paul: "It was the quintessential A&R story. The band wins the competition, and we’re sitting backstage glowing over the cheque for 250 pounds – a lot of money for those days – thinking about how we’re going to spend it on going to spend it on guitars and amplifiers. This chap walks in, wearing a suit and tie, and says 'Hi, I'm Dick Rowe from Decca Records'. He actually pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, saying 'I'd like to sign you to Decca. This is a Contract, and I know you guys are underage, so show this to your mums and dads, and give me a call.' He walked out, and I think we only ever saw him once again. '
Colin: "The first manager we saw was George cooper [a major booking agent in the UK at the time]. He had a big American-style bungalow out towards Ilford, which very impressive. We sat down a little apprehensively he said 'Drinks, boys?' and we all went 'oooh no!' We didn't know whether we were going to be drugged or what. Then the second manager we went to see was this guy who lived in a mansion block of flats in Maida Vale. He was an older guy, who I think managed a band called the Countrymen, who were like the Bachelors. He answered the door in a long dressing gown and we swanned into his apartment. It obviously wasn't going to happen. When he went to show us out he came back to the door and he locked himself out of his apartment and he only had a dressing gown on. So he desperately didn't want us to go; he needed help to get back in! We went around to the back of these flats, and there was a contraption that you could put your dustbin in, like an open wooden box outside the building. He crouched inside this thing, and we had to get him up on pulleys, up the outside of the building."
Chris: "The guy had something to do with Philips but he didn't seem to know what he was on about. An old Tin Pan Alley type. We had to wing him up on the dustbin lift at the back, which was embarrassing, because he had nothing on underneath his dressing gown! We thought, 'No, we don't want to sign with him!' My dad suggested we see Uncle Ted, but Ted said he didn't know anything about pop music, and that we should see Ken Jones of Marquis Enterprises, who lived in the same sort of area. Lots of these different offers had come in, and Ken sat down and went through all the contracts with us, as a friend, saying 'that’s a good clause, but don’t sign that bit', etc. So I said 'What about you? Can you offer us anything? ' We knew he’d produced this hit by an American guy in England [possibly Marvin Rainwater’s ‘Dig You Baby’]. Ken said Marquis would offer us all the best things he’d just pointed out in the other contracts; more or less ‘we’ll give you the best of this’. We were very, very lucky with Marquis.”
Marquis Enterprises was a partnership between Ken Jones and Joe Roncoroni, the latter an old-school publisher and ‘song man’ who was very well respected within the music industry. Jones was a musician and arranger, with many credits to his name, such as the advertising jingles for Murray Mints and the Tetley Tea Men.
Paul: "I was still at school, and of course all our parents were very dubious about this, so we met with Ken and Joe, who we all liked very much, they were like uncles. Marquis were producing records and doing lease-tape deals with various labels, so they decided to do that with us and Decca, because of Dick Rowe's interest. We were lucky to have come across them. They were totally honest, while everyone else was getting ripped off left, right and centre, and fortunately our parents got a lot of reassurance from Ken and Joe, because they could have said 'no' right then. You had to be 21 to sign a contract. Chris was the eldest, he might have been 20 going on 21, I was 18, Rod, Hugh and Colin were 19. After meeting Ken and Joe our parents were satisfied, so we did the deal with them. There was a publishing agreement for Rod and Chris, and it was a very fair deal. Basically it was that if one of the songs became a big success, say over 100,000 in sales, they'd set them up with their own publishing company. So if you look at the credits, 'She's Not There' was published by Marquis, and then subsequent songs were Verulam Music, which they administered for Rod and Chris.
16-5: St. Albans - Old Verulamians
17-5: London Colney - Willows
22-5: Hatfield - Breaks Youth Club
23-5: Hatfield - College Of Technology
24-5: Watford - Town Hall (Billy J Kramer show)
29-5: St. Albans - Market Hall
30-5: St. Albans - Ballito's
Chris: "We were playing at when Colin chipped his front tooth. He had a bottle in his mouth and he was walking past the gents toilet when the door slammed in his face."
Colin: "That's why in all the early photos I have such a weird smile - I was trying to hide my tooth!"
5-6: London Colney - Willows
6-6: Rickmansworth - Fete (am),
6-6: St. Albans - Old Verulamians (pm)
12-6: Decca - West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'It's Alright With Me', 'She's Not There', 'You Make Me Feel Good', 'Summertime'
Gus Dudgeon (engineer): "They came in to cut 'She's Not There', having won the Herts Beat contest, but I recall the band were actually pretty relaxed. This other engineer Terry Johnson started the session. He was my boss, and I was just the tape operator, the tape jockey. But Terry had a bit of a problem with booze and at lunch he'd got paralytically drunk. He came back and he was so drunk that they threw him in a taxi and sent him home, and Ken Jones looked at me and said 'well I guess it's down to you'. So I moved to the engineer's chair for the first time, and had a ball doing it. The first thing I actually engineered top to bottom was 'You Make Me Feel Good'. I just loved what the band did and they were a really nice bunch of guys. I used to look forward to their sessions more than anyone else I worked with."
Rod: "I think it was expected we would record at Decca. The studio in West Hampstead was fairly anonymous. You went downstairs to record, and we always recorded in the same studio (No 2). It was very much the day of the three-hour session. I'd regard recording four songs as a four week job now! But that first session was great, and we were on cloud nine, we thought it was brilliant. It was really a toss-up as to which was the A-side, and Ken couldn't decide. We went round to Paul Arnold's house, and the mums and dads were there too, and we tried to decide which one."
Colin: "'She's Not There' really stuck out. I thought very early on that that stood a chance of being a hit, in fact I thought all three of those tracks, 'She's Not There', 'You Make Me Feel Good' and 'Summertime', were really good, and there was a time when all three of them were being talked about as an A-side. I liked them all. 'She's Not There' has got an edge. Moody, maybe a bit sinister. I think that was something we could have built on, but people didn't really worry so much about image and mood in those days. You just did the best songs that were available, to the best of your ability. I think we could have capitalised on that a bit more. Looking back I realise Rod and Chris were thinking in a different way to me, from that time they were thinking of a possible career in the music business. I thought of it as a very pleasant and worthwhile interlude in my life before I established a career in something totally different."
Paul: "The first I heard of it after the session was when I got a test pressing and played it at home on my father's stereogram, and thought 'Wow, this sounds pretty good', but I didn't know it was going to be 'She's Not There' until the record arrived."
13-6: St. Albans - College Of Further Education
20-6: St. Albans - Old Albanians
26-6: St. Albans - Market Hall
27-6: St. Albans - Old Verulamians
18-6: St. Albans - Old Albanians (end of school)
24-7: 'She's Not There' released and reviewed on BBC-TV's "Juke Box Jury"
Paul: "George Harrison was a guest on Juke Box Jury when 'She's Not There' came out, and of course we were glued to our sets, 'Oh, a Beatle's going to judge our song!' And I remember he said, (scouse accent) 'Well it's really very good, very well done Zombies, thumbs up'."
Jim Rodford: "When I first heard 'She's Not There', it was a stand-out moment. I went round and Rod stuck it on in his mum's front room. I can still see it going round on the turntable, the label and everything, and I thought 'This is so different, it's incredible.' It was radically different, a real step forward, and it completely knocked me out."
25-7: St. Albans - New Greens
At this point the Zombies turned professional and signed a management agreement with the Tito Burns Organisation, a powerful force in the business back then, but ultimately not one to the group's advantage.
Rod: "That's the one time we took all the advice in the world. We thought 'We've got to get a good manager', so we consulted with lawyers and solicitors, and we ended up with someone with a very dubious way of looking at things. The very first tour we did, Tito said 'Now boys, you've got a hit coming up the charts, what do you want to do'? I can book you out for the next three months' - it really was three months, I think there virtually was not a day off. 'I can either get you guarantees, you'll be guaranteed a sum each night, or you can take a percentage, which would be riskier'. So completely naive, we said 'Well, what do you recommend?' And he said 'I recommend you take the guarantees'. We later found out that he'd sold us to an agency that was run by his wife, because it was strictly illegal for the manager to be the agent [too], so his wife was. And of course she was putting us out for £250 a night and we were getting £100. In 1964 that was quite a lot of money."
Colin: "I remember this conversation with a promoter, probably something along the lines of 'I'd like to have you back, it's been great, but I can't afford it'. And we'd say, 'It was packed out, and you're only giving us £100" And he replied, 'No, I'm paying £250" We knew that quite early on, so what I don't understand is, if we knew that, why did we go on? I guess we felt Burns was a powerful manager, and he could get us airplay and TV When we walked into his office Tito would always say (hands outstretched) 'my boys'!"
Paul: "He was our agent and our manager: a total conflict of interest, but that was the norm in those days. The scene in that Dylan movie Don 't Look Back was pure Tito."
Chris: "After the high of winning the contest, turning pro was quite anti-climactic, especially with the way Tito Burns reamed us. I worked with David Apps, an assistant of his, later and I asked him 'Why did you rip us off!' and he said 'Well, if we hadn't done it someone else would'. Paul Arnold's brother Terry was our original manager. He was originally looking after and doing the bookings, and when we went pro we kept him on at 10% as road manager, which was a big bone of contention with Colin. The two of them didn't like each other, they grated against each other, and there were often nearly fights. Colin would say 'Why am I paying 10% to this fellow to insult me all the time?'''
31-7: London - Kingsway ATV House "Ready Steady Go"
1-8: St. Albans - Old Verulamians
2-8: London Colney - Willows
3-8: Hayes - Botwell Youth Club
5-8: BBC-TV Studios - Dickenson Road, Manchester "Top Of The Pops"
9-8: Nottingham - Ice Rink BBC-TV "The Cool Spot"
11-8: "The Cool Spot" transmitted
12-8: Southampton - Southern TV "3-Go-Round"
13-8: Ryemuse Studios - South Molton Street, London recording: 'Sometimes', 'Woman', 'Kind Of Girl', 'Leave Me Be' (demo)
21-8: Morecambe - Harbour Arena
22-8: Rawtenstall - Astoria
23-8: Scarborough - Futurist
24-8: London - Ad-Lib Club (photos for Queen)
26-8: BBC-TV Studios - Dickenson Road, Manchester "Top Of The Pops" (transmitted live)
28-8: Preston - Top Rank
29-8: Boston - Pavilion Gardens
30-8: Scarborough - Futurist
31-8: Decca - West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'Leave Me Be', 'Kind Of Girl', 'Sometimes', 'Woman' (backing tracks)
1-9: Forest Gate - Lotus Ballroom
9-2: Hitchin - Hermitage Ballroom "Top Of The Pops" transmitted
3-9: Reading - Olympia
4-9: Hereford
5-9: Decca - West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'Leave Me Be', 'Kind Of Girl', 'Sometimes', 'Woman' (vocal tracks) plus (evening) East Grinstead - Whitehall and Tottenham - Club Noreik
Paul: "We started doing doubles: East Grinstead and Noreik in Tottenham - that was a nightmare - trying to do two gigs in one night. By the time of 'Leave Me Be' I'd also acquired a Gretsch, which I eventually sold, as I didn't really like it. I switched it for a Rickenbacker, which I then played all the way through on stage, but I still used my electrified acoustic on sessions because it sounded great, chunkier and tougher on record, and frequently better than the Rick. All played through AC-30s of course. Rod got a Vox Continental organ, and he put the pianet on top, like Manfred Mann used to do, so he could play them in unison.”
Colin: “We carried our own PA; it was two T60 bass cabinets with speakers, with an AC-100 Vox PA amp. Certainly, it gave us an edge in the early days because it meant we had a very good vocal sound. Our road manager hurt his back, he couldn’t life anything, so often at gigs we had to lift all the gear out. And early on, girls would be trying to cut our hair. I’d see these scissors going past my eyes while I’ve got an amp in my arms, and I’d thing 'Oh dear, someone’s going to get maimed here! '”
Rod: 'Around 1964 in England when Beatlemania was at its height, it rubbed off on everybody else. It was dangerous to go out walking in the town you were playing beforehand, because you would attract a crowd and get these people coming at you with scissors trying to cut bits of your hair off. I remember once a girl getting involved with a crowd like that, and I was wearing a scarf, and this girl cut the scarf in half and ran off with it. She later came into this pub where we having a meal before the show with half a scarf, saying 'I've brought your scarf back, and you can have it if you sign an autograph'!"
7-9: Woking - Atlanta
9-9: Farnborough - Town Hall
10-9: Swindon - McIlroys
11-9: London - Kingsway ATV House - "Ready Steady Go" and Birmingham - Erdington (missed)
Paul: "We did Ready Steady Go in London and had to get to Birmingham, and in fact we missed the gig. We encountered a very rowdy crowd who threw bottles at us because we showed up late. But this was all pretty exciting stuff."
12-9: Bury - Tyldesley Palace
13-9: Southall - Community Centre
14-9: Liverpool - Silver Blades
15-9: Montrose - Lacarno
16-9: Dunfermline - Kinema
17-9: Glasgow - Scottish TV "Dig This"
18-9: Kirkaldy - Praith
19-9: Haddington - Corn Exchange
20-9: Blackpool (day off?)
21-9: Tamworth
22-9: Nuneaton
23-9: Liverpool - Rialto
24-9: Southport
25-9: Oldhill Birmingham
26-9: Atherstone
27-9: Manchester - Twisted Wheel
28-9: Altrincham & Warrington
29-9: London - BBC Playhouse Theatre, "Saturday Club" and Wallington - Public Hall
30-9: Stourbridge - Corn Exchange
1-10: Kidderminster - Corn Exchange
2-10: Wembley - Associated-Rediffusion TV Studios, "Five O'Clock Club" and Dunstable - California Club
3-10: Norfolk - Heacham Public Hall / "Saturday Club" broadcast
Colin: "We travelled in a very cramped Ford Transit, and we used to zip into these sleeping bags because it was freezing cold; it wasn't very grand at all. And the van could only go 50mph. We used to get in the bus first thing in the morning and we would drive all day, unload the gear and play the gig, and that was the whole day gone."
Chris: "It was our first van, a red and white Commer with a sliding door and a lock, onto which you put the burglar alarm. We were playing up near Colchester, and we couldn't gel the van started and I had to call the AA out and find a garage. We'd try to jump-start it, and it was about three hours and the fellow suddenly said '(ahem) you haven't turned the disabler from the alarm off'. We sat in the back of the van freezing cold after that gig and I hadn't turned the key - it was switched on but the alarm wasn't sounding."
Hugh: "The draught was horrendous in that van. We always had sleeping bags. and I remember Chris in a balaclava. Later we had a blue Ford Transit, and we were in Wales somewhere. I remember it was freezing cold, and we were going slower and slower and we actually stopped because it felt so slippery. We got out and we fell over standing on the road, because it was like a sheet of ice. The van just slid into the side of the road, unbelievable!"
4-10: Hampstead - Country Club
5-10: Bath Pavilion
6-10: High Wycombe
7-10: Bristol - Corn Exchange
8-10: Erdington Birmingham
9-10: Ellesmere Port
10-10: Gainsborough
16-10: London - Regent Sound, Denmark Street, (demo session - tracks unknown) - 'Leave Me Be' released
17-10: Sheffield (start of Searchers/Dionne Warwick/Isley Brothers tour)
Colin: "The Isleys were great. I remember Rod and I talking to Ronnie Isley, and he would say 'look out for managers, look out for the crooks', And we said 'don't worry, we've got it all sorted, we've got a great manager, everything's fine' [laughter]. Obviously on the road we were young guys and all that side of it, but we were quite quiet as a band compared to other people. It was all innocent stuff. At that age you accept whatever happens as being natural, so it seemed a very natural thing for us to have a hit record and be mobbed. There seemed to be a degree of inevitability about it."
Chris: "You'd talk to the Isleys about who you liked, like Miles Davis, and they'd say 'Man, that's starvation music'."
18-10: Liverpool
19-10: Huddersfield
21-10: Colchester
22-10: Luton
23-10: Slough
24-10: Stoke
25-10: Aston - Alpha TV Studios, "Thank Your Lucky Stars"
26-10: Taunton
27-10: Exeter
28-10: Gloucester
29-10: Worcester
30-10: Maidstone
31-10: Bournemouth - "Thank Your Lucky Stars" broadcast
1-11: Portsmouth
3-11: Cambridge
4-11: Leeds
5-11: Kingston
6-11: Chester
7-11: Doncaster - Gaumont
8-11: Stockton - Odeon
9-11: Glasgow - Odeon
10-11: Chesterfield - ABC
11-11: Cleethorpes - ABC
12-11: Birmingham - Odeon
13-11: East Ham - Granada
14-11: Norwich - Theatre Royal
15-11: Coventry - Theatre
16-11: Nottingham - Odeon
17-11: Bristol - Colston Hall
18-11: Croydon - ABC
19-11: Tunbridge Wells - Essoldo
20-11: Cannock - Essoldo
21-11: Newcastle - City Hall
23-11: Manchester - Odeon (end of tour)
24-11: Decca, West Hampstead No. 2 recording “I’m Going Home”, “Road Runner”, “Sticks And Stones” plus “Red Skelton Show” (Filming)
25-11: Decca, West Hampstead No. 2 recording “Tell Her No”, “What More Can I Do”, “I Remember When I Loved Here”, “I Want You Back Again”, “The Way I Feel Inside” (First Attempt), “Walking In The Sun”, “I Don’t Want To Know”
It was during this session, the first of two, hurriedly convened to record an album, that the Zombies were informed that they’d hit the top of the charts in America.
Rod: “Al Gallico [the band’s American publisher] phoned in and we actually took the call while we were recording. That was brilliant, just fantastic. If we’d orchestrated it from the day we were born, we couldn’t have turned professional at a more fortuitous time. The Beatles had just broken America wide open, and there we were to trot along behind.”
Paul: “Ken Jones put it through the foldback. ‘Fellers, you’re number one in America’. We went mad! And a month later we were there.”
Jim Rodford: “Rod was so naïve that he’d thought ‘we’ll go in and record a single, and it’ll be a hit and we’ll be on our way’, and of course it was! Especially with what had happened just months before, with the Beatles breaking around the world and especially in America, being successful there was an absolute fantasy. That’s how it felt to someone from St. Albans. All of a sudden one of our local bands, and people I knew as friends, were number one in America. It just didn’t compute. It was absolutely sensational locally, the complete ultimate dream, like going beyond the solar system.”
Terry Quirk: "The Zombies gave the young people of St Albans a focus. They had their own band, so obviously the Zombies couldn't do anything wrong. Everybody knew them. There was one time Chris was going up the hill into St Albans, went to turn right and nearly knocked a policeman off his 'noddy' bike. The plod waved him to the side, came over to Chris all irate, but then recognised it was Chris of the Zombies and so that was all right. Though the boys weren't super heroes, there was a lot of identification."
Al Gallico (American publisher): "Joe Roncoroni was a very dear friend of mine from before, when I ran Shapiro Bernstein in the 50s. He sent me a copy of 'She's Not There' and told me that if I liked it he would give me the American rights. When I heard the record I loved it and I immediately called him at home in London to say this is great. I thought the band was fantastic, and I really liked them right from the minute I heard 'She's Not There'. In fact there were some young kids in my office at the time I played the record and they didn't like it, they thought I was crazy. But I told them, you wait and see, that song is a monster. I called Walt McGuire down at London Records and asked him to do me a favour and release the record. He said it didn't happen in England, but I said 'Well, I think it could happen here'. He put it out and the rest is history."
27-11: London ATV House Kingsway, "Ready Steady Go" /
Fly to Norway
28-11: Trondheim, Norway (start of Scandinavian tour)
Colin: "Our first ever tour abroad was to Norway, and the first snows came while we were there, which made it a bit scary going up these mountain paths but it was lovely. We were quite popular there. We also went to Sweden, and we did TV in Finland."
5-12: Stockholm
7-12: Oslo
8-12: (end of tour - fly home from Norway)
Chris: "I met this girl in Oslo who wanted to meet me because I'd written 'Leave Me Be'. Then I got home and got a phone call from the airport saying that she'd arrived. Of course my mum said 'What's this [about a] girl following you from Norway?’ So I told her 'you shouldn't have come over' and she stayed in a hotel. In the meantime, she ended up with Brian Jones of the Stones. Then six months later, Tito Burns said 'I've had the Salvation Army onto me, these people are trying to trace their daughter'. Apparently they were told that I'd lured her over! She had told her parents that I'd paid for her to come over and everything like that."
10-12: Decca, West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'Can't Nobody Love You', 'The Way I Feel Inside, 'I Got My Mojo Working', 'You've Really Got A Hold On Me', 'I Can't Make Up My Mind', 'Work 'n' Play'
At this session a representative from the American trade magazine Cashbox arrived to present them with an International Gold Award for having got to the top of their chart. 'She's Not There' only got to #2 in the rival Billboard.
Paul: "To a large extent Rod would come along with a basic song and play it on piano, or Chris would play it on guitar, and we'd basically learn it, and the arrangement would build itself. Sometimes I would play rhythm, sometimes I'd be playing parts. Rod and I would work out parts together, or I'd come up with something. The fact that the guitar was occasionally inaudible on the records at that young age sometimes bothered my ego, and I fought it sometimes, I'd say to Ken Jones, "turn me up'. I understood what Ken was trying to do, he was trying to make a sound which he'd done very successfully on 'She's Not There', which I give credit to him for. It was Ken's vision, with our arrangements."
13-12: London BBC IV Centre, Wood Lane BBC 2: "Open House"
14-12: "Easy Beat” broadcast
23-12: Fly to New York
The year ended with the band journeying to New York to appear as part of Murray The K's Big Holiday Show, alongside Chuck Jackson, Ben E. King & The Drifters, the Shirelles, the Shangri-Las, Patti Labelle & The Bluebelles and the Vibrations. A week before departure visa difficulties almost cancelled the visit, and although they did scotch a planned two-week follow-up tour, the problems were ironed out in time for the Zombies to join the show at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre.
Colin: "When we first went to the USA in 1964 my mum insisted on making me a packed lunch for the plane. I ate the sandwiches but left an apple, and of course you're not supposed to bring fruit into the US but I didn't know that then. So when we went into customs this official took the apple out of my bag, and started eating it in front of me! I couldn't believe this rude bloke. Then we went into immigration and there was this guy with all these badges, and maybe a gun too. Anyway, he looked pretty official to me. He got hold of me by the arm and took me off into a phone booth - I was getting a bit nervous by then - and then got his wallet out and showed me a picture of his wife and daughter and then said, 'If I phone them up, can you just say hello to them on the phone?' So by the time I'd gone through customs and immigration, I was a nervous wreck."
Rod: "I remember as soon as we'd booked into the St George Hotel, Colin and I went outside - for a walk round the block and this cop came up to us - we obviously looked very strange to him - and said 'Who are you, where are you from?' And as soon as he realised we were English, he became super-friendly and took us to the local drugstore and bought us a coffee. And the customs official, on the way in, invited us to Christmas dinner, and I think we went! But my memories of going to America the first couple of trips were mixed. I had to have all my injections and I didn't feel well at all, and I ended up with these big ulcers on my throat as a result of various inoculations. On my first exposure to New York I really didn't like the city. The St George was surreal. It was once a very grand hotel, and the foyer was populated by these ancient people who just used to sit there as though they were in a movie set. I don't think it was in a very good area, and I remember going to bed to the sound of gunshots, which didn't really register with me at the time."
24-12: Rehearsal for Murray The K show
25-12: Brooklyn Fox Theatre, New York (start of residency)
Rod: "My main memory of the Brooklyn Fox was Chuck Jackson singing 'Since I Don't Have You', and during the chorus all the other black acts were on the side of the stage doing an improvised backing vocal, which was just great. On the real holidays like Christmas Day itself, there were very few white kids allowed out, so it would tend to be mainly a black audience. Those days were brilliant really because people like Chuck Jackson and in fact all the black acts would stop when they came to a chorus, and the whole audience used to sing."
Paul: "We were supposed to do a short tour of New England afterward, which was cancelled because of the work permits. We were bitterly disappointed. Those shows were 'She's Not There' and occasionally one other song, five times a day. So in ten days we'd played 'She's Not There' 50 or 60 times. We were rubbing shoulders with all these other great acts, like Chuck Jackson, the Shirelles, and Patti Labelle & the Bluebelles, who became good friends. They did look at us as a novelty at first, it was friendly but it was very much 'you guys are flavour of the month'. I remember Patti Labelle at the Brooklyn Fox particularly: they had this huge hit with 'Danny Boy', a big ballad. Patti would wail and we had to follow them. Murray The K said 'Don't worry about a thing, you're English, it doesn't matter what you play" We went out there and you couldn't hear a thing, we might as well not have plugged in. And Patti came and said 'you guys are cool'. The Nashville Teens and another English band called the Hullabaloos were also on the bill, and the black acts didn't like them. I mean Chuck Jackson wouldn't talk to them, but he'd talk to us. We hung out in Ben E King and the Drifters' dressing rooms, and we'd play poker and sing and play guitar - Colin would sing blues and they were impressed. They'd always say 'TCB, watch for your money', and they were right, because they were getting ripped off all the time." [One of the dancers on the show, Molly Molloy, was to become Paul's first wife.]
Hugh: “At the Brooklyn Fox, there was a drummer who I got to know reasonably well while we were over. He was in the band backing all the acts and I remember one night he said to me 'Man, your bass drum work is fantastic, I don't believe what you're doing there!' That just blew me away, because I thought, 'these are the guys I've got it off, and he's saying this to me?' The Shangri-Las were on at the Fox. These were the days before sampled sounds and keyboards, so they actually had a motorbike backstage for 'Leader Of The Pack'. Nobody else seemed to have any gumption as to how to start this thing up, so I used to do it at the appropriate point.
"On New Year's Eve, Chris and I were out walking about in Times Square with the Nashville Teens, and a guy was shot dead right in front of us. There were bullets and cartridges everywhere."
_____________________________________________________________________
1965
The year began on a triumphant note with the end of the Brooklyn Fox residency and a second single in the US Top 10, and indeed for much of the ensuing year the Zombies would focus on the American market, as their fortunes waned at home.
Al Gallico: "The Zombies were a great bunch of kids and I loved their sound, the lyrics, the songs. I still can't understand why they weren't that big in their own country. Maybe it's because they weren't rebels, they were just real nice boys. As with Verulam, Joe, Ken Jones and myself formed Mainstay Music for their American publishing. The boys were very fortunate to have met them, and then myself. I really did everything for these kids in America. I made them - I don't know if they would have happened or not. I worked those singles even harder than the label. I had my own promotion staff, everything. I was one of the best songpluggers in the business - people used to give me a song because they knew I'd promote it. At the Fox Theatre the people just loved them. I saw them in a couple of the cities on their following tours. We took care of them with cash advances, because we knew they were going to earn it."
3-1: Brooklyn Fox Theatre, New York (end of residency)
4-1: NBC-TV "Hullabaloo" (rehearsal)
5-1: NBC·TV "Hullabaloo" (rehearsal)
6-1: NBC-TV "Hullaballoo" taping - ABC-TV "Shindig" broadcast
7-1: Fly back from New York
12-1: NBC-TV "Hullabaloo" broadcast
26-1: London BBC Playhouse Theatre, "Saturday Club"
29-1: 'Tell Her No' released
2-2: London BBC Playhouse Theatre, "Saturday Club"
4-2: Manchester Granada TV Centre, "Scene At 6.30"
5-2: London Kingsway ATV House, "Ready Steady Go"
6-2: Boston Gliderdome / "Saturday Club" broadcast
7-2: Droitwich
9-2: Llanelli - Glen Ballroom
11-2: Photos at Decca
12-2: Leamington Spa - Town Hall
13-2: Dudley
14-2: Camberley Agincourt
16-2: Tunbridge Wells - Assembly Rooms
17-2: Playhouse, BBC Radio, "Easy Beat"
18-2: Kidderminster
19-2: Trentham Gardens
20-2: St Albans - College Of Further Education
21-2: Aston Alpha TV Studios, "Thank Your Lucky Stars" / "Easy Beat" broadcast
23-2: Photos - London
24-2: Bristol - Corn Exchange
25-2: Worthing - Pier Pavilion
26-2: London BBC Aeolian 2 Studios, "Top Gear" (am) and Gravesend (pm)
27-2: Peterborough Town Hall / "Thank Your Lucky Stars" transmitted
28-2: Hassocks Sussex Downs / "Easy Beat" broadcast
1-3: Bath Pavilion
2-3: Decca, West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'Somebody Help Me', 'I Must Move', 'She's Coming Home', 'Just Out Of Reach'
5-3: Loughborough & Leicester
6-3: Redhill Town Hall / "Top Gear" broadcast
7-3: Kettering - Working Mens Club
8-3: Paul sees optician
Paul: "This was when I first got contact lenses, and some people asked who the new guitar player was!"
9-3: Tower Of London - filming for Dick Clark
11-3: Garrison Club, Park Lane
12-3: Cromwellian Club - audition for Otto Preminger
Otto Preminger had directed the critical and commercial blockbuster Exodus, and was in London preparing to film Bunny Lake Is Missing, an odd thriller starring Laurence Olivier and Keir Dullea. Requiring the services of a beat group, the Zombies were recommended to the notoriously difficult Preminger by Decca A&R man Michael Barclay, who also supervised the rest of the movie's soundtrack.
Paul: "Preminger wanted a British band to feature as an incidental. We did an audition for him in the afternoon at the Cromwellian Club, which is a place where we used to hang out at a lot, though we never played there. He just sat there on a stool, and when we'd finished said [stern voice] 'OK!’ A man of few words."
13-3: Cambridge - March Hall
14-3: London King David Suite
16-3: Aldershot
19-3: Party at Paul's home (Paul's 19th birthday)
20-3: Rawtenstall
21-3: Wembley - Empire Pool Spastics Charity Concert
The line-up for this charity event also included Sandie Shaw, PJ Proby, the Pretty Things, the Merseybeats and Lulu. A few days later the Zombies set off on a Tito Burns' organised package that was headlined by Dusty Springfield and the Searchers, and also featured Tony Jackson & The Vibrations, Bobby Vee and Heinz.
25-3: Stockton Odeon (Dusty Springfield-Searchers Tour)
26-3: Newcastle City Hall
27-3: Doncaster Gaumant
28-3: Liverpool Empire
30-3: Wallington (off tour)
31-3: Decca, West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'Nothing's Changed', 'Remember You'
Gus Dudgeon (engineer): "I remember the time when Otto Preminger came to a session. Michael Barclay rang me up beforehand and said he was also going to come down because this guy was difficult and he thought things might become a bit wobbly. Preminger turned up and he was extraordinary, the man was an absolute arsehole. Everybody was just quaking in their boots, and it was a ridiculous atmosphere to have on a recording session. The main thing I remember was when he was standing by the tape machine. We were one of the first studios that had any sort of remote, whereby we could start the tape machine by pushing a button on the console. I hit the remote button to go into record, and he spun around, glared at the machine and yelled 'This machine is rude!' We never quite managed to get a handle on what he was going on about. Thankfully Michael Barclay stepped in then and removed him from the studio."
1-4: Worcester Gaumont
2-4: Birmingham Town Hall
3-4: Bradford Gaumont
4-4: Bristol Colston Hall
7-4: Colchester Odeon
8-4: Salisbury Odeon
9-4: Rehearsal for Bunny Lake Is Missing
'She's Coming Home' released
Begin Here (LP) released
10-4: Wembley Associated-Rediffusion TV Studios, Bunny Lake Is Missing filming
Chris: "We got ripped off on that. We'd been in the middle of a tour with the Searchers, taking a percentage of it, and when we got the returns we were only paid 50 quid a night. Tito said 'Well, I couldn't give you a percentage because you missed a couple of days'. We did two days filming, and then we appeared in the finished film on a television screen behind a conversation."
Hugh: "Preminger was a hard taskmaster, but he had slightly the wrong idea - he obviously wanted to put more of us on film, so he could choose what he was going to use. I don't think we ever quite realised what he had in mind. We were in a simulation of the Ready Steady Go studio. They got loads of kids in, and they got them to rush us as screaming fans, and I do remember being horrified that they were going to have my kit over!"
Paul: ''Actually, Preminger was a monster, and he had something on me. We were doing the lip-synch to the trailer (‘Come On Time') so we weren't plugged in. Preminger comes over to me and says 'Why aren't you playing your instrument? I'm watching you and you're not playing!' 'Well, [quiet voicel we're miming'. 'No! You are playing live! I can't hear your instrument. Plug it in!’ I had to explain to him what lip-synching was. 'I don't care' I want you to play!’ 'OK, I'll promise I'll play!’ So I did exactly the same thing again and he said 'That's right, you did it!' He kept us there all night, we did this stupid promo thing all night long, for which we weren't getting paid. We got £450 to do the whole movie."
11-4: Drifters party at Starlite
15-4: West Bromwich Adelphi and Erdington Carlton
18-4: Aston Alpha TV Studios, "Thank Your Lucky Stars"
19-4: Ross-On-Wye Top Spot
20-4: London BBC Maida Vale Studio 5, "Saturday Club"
22-4: Manchester BBC-TV Studios Dickenson Road, "Top Of The Pops" (transmitted live)
24-4: Evansville, Indiana USA
"Thank Your Lucky Stars" broadcast
The Zombies' second American sojourn was as part of the roving Dick Clark Caravan of Stars, completing a line-up that at one time or another included Del Shannon, the Shangri-Las, the Velvelettes, Jewel Akens, Dee Dee Sharp, Mel Carter, Mike Clifford, the Ad-Libs, Tommy Roe, the Executives, the Larks, and Jimmy Soul. This, the first gig of the six week tour, was preceded by a mad 30 hour dash from La Guardia.
Rod: "I remember racing over to the States the second time. We were really late getting there and we had a very tight schedule to get to the first gig. It just seemed like plane, car, coach, and then rushing up onto a stage, and there was a big drop on the side off the stage and I recall falling off my stool and nearly falling down into the pit' It became a blur."
Colin: "When we first got on the bus, every seat at the back was taken except for two. Of course we wouldn't sit down the front, because all the happening people were at the back. On one side there was this absolutely gorgeous singer, Caroline Gill, from the Velvelettes, and she had a spare seat next to her, and people were a little bit shy of sitting next to her. And on the other side there was the chaperone for the Velvelettes, Miss Ship, who was a huge, huge lady, a big lady. It was apparent that where you sat when you first got on the coach would be where you were probably going to be for the next six weeks, because that became your seat. I saw this choice, and it just happened I was the second last to get on. Rod was behind me. So I sat next to Caroline and Rod had to sit next to Miss Ship for the rest of the tour. I was so glad I got on when I did! I think Rod only ever got one 'cheek' on the seat for six weeks!"
Paul: "Touring America was incredible, it was amazing. But it was very tough, because we worked every night, with sometimes two shows a night. Then you got back on the bus and crashed at a hotel at some time that afternoon. You'd get up and have dinner, then do the show, and you'd only sleep in a bed once every two nights. The other nights we slept on the bus, and these were not reclining seats. We did 25,000 miles in six weeks on a Greyhound bus, and every seat on the bus was taken. No stretching out. We were just wiped out. I remember being so physically sick at the end of that tour that they had to wire my parents to meet me at the airport and carry me off the plane. I'd lost twenty pounds from exhaustion, bad food and partying too much."
Rod: "On the Dick Clark tour we only slept every other night, so on the nights on the coach, by about 2am, everything would be settled and people would be dozing off, and at that time one of the black singers would sort of go 'hmmm' and just sing a note and they'd build up a chord. And then someone like Mel Carter would sing spirituals, and it was fantastic! The hair used to just stand up on the back of my neck. For me, that was the main reward of the tour because we certainly didn't make any money! They then said to Colin and me 'Right, you sing something', and we did ‘A Hard Day's Night' a cappella, and they all applauded. They loved it and from that moment we were sort of accepted."
25-4: Nashville, TN (overnight stay)
26-4: Murray, KY
27-4: Memphis, TN
Letter from Paul to his parents 7 May:
After the show in Nashville we met an English boy of about 21 who invited us to a party at his friend's house, which was unbelievable: swimming pool, estate, servant, two sports cars, one limousine, and the mother's bedroom was finished in silk and mink around the bed. Next morning her son took me to one of the famous recording studios and there I met and spoke to Chet Atkins, of all people! I heard him recording a new LP and he was very shy and slow-speaking.
We had one of the best receptions so far in Memphis. The auditorium held 13,000 people - it was brand new and really beautiful both inside and out. While we were there we did a TV show and the disc jockey took us to see Elvis Presley. Unfortunately he was out filming, but he has a beautiful home and estate just outside Memphis.
Paul: "This deejay had offered to show us around. 'I can take own to Beale Street, or go over to Elvis' place, or ...' ‘Elvis? He lives here?' So we went down to Graceland and rang the bell. The front door opened and a guy walked down the path, opened the gate - it was his Uncle Vester. We said 'We're the Zombies from England! Is Elvis home?' 'No, he's in Hollywood making a movie, but come on in, he'll be really upset he missed ,'cos he loves you guys.' 'He knows about us? Elvis the king knows about the Zombies?' 'Sure!' So we sat in his living room had a cup of tea, and got a private tour of the house. Amazing and ghastly - I still remember the green shag rugs."
28-4: Eau Claire, WI (overnight stay)
29-4: Lincoln, NE (overnight stay)
30-4: Sioux City, IA
1-5: St Joseph, MO (overnight stay)
"Saturday Club" broadcast
2-5: Omaha, NE
3-5: Salina, KS (overnight stay)
Letter from Paul 7 May:
We only stay in a hotel every other night; the other nights we travel. This way everyone saves money on hotel bills. We travel all night at such a speed that we arrive after the earliest check-in time at the hotel (say, 6am). Then we all go to bed and sleep til about 2 or 3pm. Therefore we sleep twice in the same hotel and only pay once for it.
At Salina a girl called me up at the hotel and said her girlfriend used to go to school with me at St Albans School! I told her to think of something better than that as an excuse for a phone call. She a bit embarrassed to learn that St Albans School is for boys only. Still, she drove over to the hotel with her girlfriend and took Terry and I for a tour of the city in her car. Nearly all the girls have I own cars here it seems, and they're amazed when we say some of us can't even drive!
4-5: Wichita, KS
5-5: Dallas, TX (overnight stay)
6-5: Austin, TX (overnight stay)
7-5: Waco, TX (overnight stay)
8-5: San Antonio, TX
Chris: "Dee Dee Sharp pulled a gun on Mel Carter. He was always ribbing people, it was a very black thing. All of a sudden they lost their temper and started shouting at each other, it was about the fourth or fifth week into the tour. She went to the back of the bus and pulled a gun out of her handbag. One of the little Ad-Libs said 'cool it, cool it!', and everybody ducked. She had to leave the tour, and literally got off on the side of the road and walked off with her suitcase."
Rod: "I've still got cine film of Colin chasing Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las around some hotel pool. Jimmy Guercio was the guitarist with the backing band, the Executives, and he was besotted with Mary."
Hugh: “One of the other two I'm sure expressed interest in me!"
9-5: Houston, TX (overnight stay)
10-5: San Angelo, TX
11-5: Fort Worth, TX (overnight stay)
12-5: Odessa, TX
Paul: "Hugh got sick in Odessa, Texas and his replacement was Jerry Allison from the Crickets. He had one hour rehearsal, but was pretty good actually."
Hugh: "I had food poisoning, from a piece of apple pie or something. I had to stay in a hospital overnight. My dad used to come home on his bike, pick up the paper, the Evening News, put in his pocket and cycle home. So this one day he got home, sat down, and on the front page there's me, "Zombies Drummer Taken Ill". They didn't know anything about it, because nobody had been in touch with them, and I think it must have given them one hell of a shock!"
13-5: Amarillo, TX (overnight stay)
14-5: Denver, CO
15-5: Salt Lake City, UT (overnight stay)
16-5: Las Vegas, NY Convention Center
Hugh: "The fans used to come up on stage an awful lot. I remember one frightening incident when we played Las Vegas, and the tour bus for some unknown reason was parked some distance away. We'd finished the set, and the idea was to rush out of the door and get to the tour bus as quickly as possible, because they'll come flying out and get us. For one reason or another, I was last in the line of runners to the bus, but the kids had got out and they were coming for us, and they were catching up! And one of the girls caught up with me, reached out and yanked at my hair, and of course that threw me totally off balance and down I went, hit the deck, hit my head and that was it, butterflies. Fortunately, following behind was the tour manager, a big man, and he more or less scooped me up in his arms off the floor and threw me on the bus. I was dimly aware of a thundering noise behind, and hundreds of 'em were bearing down on me! But very exciting, of course."
17-5: Anaheim, CA
18-5: Santa Barbara, CA
19-5: Reno, NV - ABC-TV
"Shindig" broadcast
20-5: Merced, CA
21-5: Sacramento, CA
Lords Taverners LP released
22-5: Salem, OR
26-5: Spokane, WA
24-5: day off - party in Spokane
Chris: "Because we were so English, there was a difference in language between us and the black acts. At one of the tour parties afterwards, everyone was playing so I got up and played bass, and Jimmy Soul came over to me and said 'Man, you're funky on that bass!' I thought he meant I was fluffing it, faking it - which I was! - because I didn't realise what 'funky' meant. Those parties were great, everyone got pissed, and it was with some of our heroes."
26-5: Vancouver, BC
27-5: Calgary, Alberta
28-5: Edmonton, Alberta
29-5: Regina, Saskatchewan
30-5: Minot, SD
31-5: Grafton, ND
1-6: Winnipeg, Manitoba
2-6: Montreal Forum, Quebec
The final night of the tour was a major event where another leg of the Dick Clark Caravan, featuring Herman's Hermits and Little Anthony & The Imperials, met up with that of the Zombies and became part of the show.
Rod: "The black acts did seem to have some respect for us, as of course we did for them. I remember in Montreal Little Anthony coming up and saying 'Tell Her No', that's my song', and that knocked me out, because we thought 'Goin' Out Of My Head' was wonderful."
?-6: Jackson's Studio Rickmansworth recording: 'Whenever You're Ready', 'I Know She Will', 'I'll Keep Trying', 'You'll Go From Me' (demo)
24-6: Decca West Hampstead No 2 recording 'I'll Keep Trying', 'Don't Go Away', 'Whenever You're Ready'
27-6: Paris La Locomotif
28-6: Paris La Locomotif
8-7: Decca West Hampstead No 2 recording: 'How We Were Before', 'I Love You', 'If It Don't Work Out', 'I Know She Will', 'Don't Cry For Me'
15-7: Chicago McCormack Place (Searchers tour)
16-7: Chicago McCormack Place
17-7: Chicago McCormack Place
Paul: "We came back in July that year with the Searchers, and did another tour where we did 45 minutes each. That wasn't so successful, because it wasn't very well organised by the William Morris Agency. Very spotty - some shows were not well promoted at all, but some were great."
Colin: "Instead of leaving my passport in my suitcase, because I thought someone might nick it, I put it in a drawer in a hotel room or something like that, and went merrily off around America and forgot my passport. So when we got back to New York everyone went home but I couldn't, I had to stay over one day, which was a real drag. I did get it back eventually. In Chicago we had to change hotels because there were just so many girls hanging around. Hundreds of them around the hotel, and the management just got fed up."
Chris: "We did get in a lot of trouble with girls chasing us. I'll always remember in Chicago, one hotel we were in, the lift was packed and these girls suddenly got into the lift wanting autographs. We told them 'No, no you're not supposed to come up here'. So we went up to our rooms, but they found us. Then someone stood there with the door open and said 'These girls are under eighteen, if you get caught with them in your room you'll be in trouble'. We said 'Don't be daft', but then the detectives came along, and it was lucky this fellow had been at the door. There were all these statutory rape charges [e.g. Chuck Berry]. You suddenly realise that you have to listen to the people there and relearn what you're doing."
19-7: Nashville Auditorium
21-7: Terre Haute, Auditorium, IN
23-7: Montgomery, Coliseum, AL
Paul: "I remember the gig in Montgomery, Alabama, a big arena with 15,000, 20,000 people, with the Beach Boys, Del Shannon and a number of other acts. We fan out on stage, plugged in and gradually as my eyes got accustomed to the light, I nudged Chris 'You see the audience?' We were freaked out because they were segregated, there were wedges of white and black sections. Unbelievable. We were all horrified, and we vowed not to play to segregated audiences again."
24-7: Jacksonville, Coliseum, FL
25-7: Winterhaven, Nora Mayo Hall, FL
26-7: Orlando, HI LI Fronton, FL
27-7: Miami, FL
Colin: "In Florida, we were just going to get on the bus and go, but some of the guys decided they were going to stay the night and fly up the next day. This really beautiful blonde came up to me and said 'Listen, I'll drive you to your next gig'. It might have been in Miami and we were going to Pensacola, I didn't know how far it was or where it was, but I said OK. That was just typical of the risks you would take. So I'm standing with this American girl and thinking 'Great, this beautiful American girl is going to drive me to the next gig', and she says, 'and this is my boyfriend who's going to be coming with us!' I could still see the bus and I'm thinking 'If I run, can I catch up with the bus?' This guy had long hair, and he really wanted to be in a band. It was a nightmare. The journey was hundreds of miles, and we got there just in time. In the end it was getting really late and they were doing 100 mph. We were going off the road but luckily there you could go off the road and get back on it, there was a lot of grass on either side. When I got there the band were rehearsing whatever tunes they could do without me, like 'Mojo', and I think Rod even had his harmonica out. They were very angry with me and rightly so. They'd been awarded the freedom of Pensacola, and I was a bit hacked off that I missed that. I knew it was a mistake and I could have probably got the plane with them if I'd been a bit more switched on."
28-7: Pensacola, Municipal Auditorium, FL
In addition to being given the freedom of Pensacola, the Zombies were so popular in this particular town that there was a major petition delivered some months later asking them to return.
29-7: Panama City, Municipal Auditorium, FL
30-7: Tampa, Fort Home Hesterley Armory, FL
31-7: Columbus, Municipal Auditorium, GA
1-8: Augusta, GA
4-8: Knoxville, TN
6-8: Norfolk, VA
Paul: "This was another time when two tours 'merged' for one night. Here we shared the stage with Tom Jones and Peter and Gordon, amongst others, so it was a bit of a Brit reunion."
10-8: Charlotte, NC
11-8: Day off in NY
9-8: New Haven, Arena, CT
10-8: Burlington, Armory, VT
11-8 Biddeford, Palace Auditorium, ME
12-8: Piltsfield, Boys Club, MA
13-8: Oklahoma City, Springlake Park, OK
14-8: Oklahoma City, Springlake Park, OK
15-8: Oklahoma City, Springlake Park, OK
16-8: Los Angeles ABC·TV, "Shindig"
19-8: Los Angeles ABC·TV "Shindig"
Paul: "We played the Whiskey in Hollywood, though it wasn't scheduled. We'd bumped into Johnny Rivers somewhere and he'd said 'come jam'. They had these go-go dancers in cages hanging from the ceiling and we did get up and play with Johnny, or maybe a couple of songs by ourselves. I recall other impromptu gigs after the shows, where we'd go to a club late. As well as Shindig we also did the Where The Action Is TV show a number of times, but sometimes that was taped in London."
20-8: Return to UK
30-8: St Albans Old Albanian Fete
At this gig the band were welcomed as conquering heroes returned. However Paul's diary stopped around this juncture and there is little surviving information regarding live appearances from this point onwards.
Paul: "We had a victorious homecoming gig in St Albans, and my girlfriend Molly came to that. We were the biggest thing that ever happened to St Albans."
3-9: London Kingsway ATV House, "Ready Steady Go"
'Whenever You're Ready' released
6-9: London BBC·TV Shepherds Bush Theatre, "Gadzooks" (transmitted live)
This shortlived BBC 2 pop programme was one of several occasions on both television and radio that the Zombies, hopeful more than ever for a hit, plugged 'Whenever You're Ready'. The group joined in with the shows other guests Lulu and the Small Faces in a rousing finale of 'I'm On My Way Great God'.
8-9: ABC-TV, “Shindig” Broadcast
11-9: London BBC Playhouse Theatre “Easy Beat”
12-9: “Easy Beat” Broadcast
19-9: Aston, Alpha TV Studios, “Thank Your Lucky Stars Summerspin”
20-9: London, BBC Aeolian I Studios; “Saturday Club”
25-9: “Thank Your Lucky Stars Summerspin” Transmitted
2-10: “Saturday Club” Broadcast
8-11: Manchester, BBC Playhouse Theatre “The Beat Show”
10-11: Decca West Hampstead No 2 Recording “Is This The Dream”
11-11: “The Beat Show” transmitted (Northern region only)
26-11: “Is This The Dream” released
28-12: Wembley, Associated-Rediffusion TV Studios, “Five O’Clock Club”
31-12: “Shadows” by the Second City Sound released
Rod's jazzy instrumental 'Shadows' was never recorded by the Zombies, but a studio-only outfit put together by the brothers Malcolm and John Jackson of Jackson's Studios in Rickmansworth released this version on Decca. The track is noteworthy for one of the earliest uses of a mellotron.
Rod: "The Jackson brothers' dad was a deejay, Jack Jackson, and this was a piece of music I did for them. It was one of the few things that I wrote for other people, another being 'If It Don't Work Out' for Dusty." 