Zombie Heaven
The Zombies
_____________________________________________________________________
(Scroll down, past the menu for this pages content)
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
1966
While their fortunes on the recording side declined, 1966 was actually a busy year for the Zombies gig-wise, for like many other hit-less acts they found a niche performing on the lucrative college and university circuit.
8-1: London, BBC Paris Studios, "Easy Beat"
9-1: "Easy Beat" transmitted
10-1: London, BBC Bush House, "Pop Profile" (transcription service interview)
15-1: London, BBC TV Centre Studio 2, Wood Lane, “Juke Box Jury”
Colin was one of the guest judges along with Tito Burns on this edition [of JBJ], for which he was paid the princely sum of 30 guineas.
14-2: London, BBC Bush House, “Dateline London” (transcription service interview with Colin only)
Colin: “Ken and Joe did discuss making a solo record with me, at the same time as the Zombies. It was never pursued. This wasn't behind the band's backs, in fact I think it was mentioned when the boys were in the room. There might have been some focus on me as the singer but I don't think I made a conscious effort to put the spotlight on myself. I always felt that we were all more comfortable with it being treated as an entity, and there wasn't a focal point. What I tried to do was to sing from the heart. Even when I was miming, I was doing it for real, and hopefully that would come over. All we were doing was what came naturally. If I could've been coached a little bit, I think I could have moved in a better way. I tended to stand in one place, but then everyone else did as well."
21-1: 'Remember You' released
10-2: Bunny Lake Is Missing premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square
?-2: Lansdowne studios recording: 'Indication', 'I'll Call You Mine', 'She Does Everything For Me', 'Gotta Get A Hold Of Myself'
At this session the band purposely recorded a cover version in an attempt to return to the charts, partly because they were under pressure from Tito Burns and Decca to do so. In actual fact some months previously the group had planned to release a version of the Temptations' 'My Girl', but were thwarted at the last minute.
Colin: "We definitely did a demo of 'My Girl'. That was a heartbreaker, because it was a big hit in America and no one had heard of it here. We did a home demo, it was good, and Rod and Chris were driving over to Ken Jones' house to play it to him. They had the radio on, and Otis Redding's version came on Radio London. So we were probably six weeks away from having it in the shops. We'd demoed it and things were turned around very quickly in those days."
Paul: “A formula wasn't possible, because Rod and Chris just didn't write like that. To their eternal credit Ken and Joe never said to us 'Here, I've got this great song I want you to cover', they could have said 'This band needs a hit, we could get Jonathan King to write them one.' They had the sense not to ever try that. We were doing what we wanted to do on our terms, and even if we failed at least we did on our own terms, without trying to have a hit at any price; doing a Walker Brothers, having a produced career."
Chris: "We were friendly with the Who, and we actually did a lot of gigs with them. I remember we played with them in Brighton and shared a dressing room. I had a starting pistol that I used to use on stage occasionally. I pulled it out in the dressing room, pulled the trigger and Keith Moon's face lit up, and he pulled out his! And then he fired it, and we couldn't understand why all the Who rushed out of the room. Well of course, his was loaded with tear gas! Pete was a fan. PJ Proby, we did several gigs with him when he was splitting his trousers. I always loved the Kinks, they had this different angle on things, and the Who, and the Move."
Paul: "I liked the Kinks a lot, and also liked Eric C1apton with John Mayall, with whom we once played. But we weren't really into other pop groups. I did love the Moody Blues, and we were friends with them. We used to go to their house in Roehampton; they threw great parties."
Hugh: "We were also friendly with Unit 4+2, because they were from the same sort of area. We certainly used to go drinking with them at a pub called the Plough in Cuffley. I got quite friendly with the drummer. Hugh Halliday. The Kinks were in a class of their own. The Stones were not my favourite band, though of course they were quite R&B-ish. I preferred the Beatles."
12-7: CBS-TV, "Hippodrome" transmitted
23-9: 'Gotta Get A Hold Of Myself' released
Rod: "We did the worst television in the world on that one. Colin and I were singing harmony on 'Gotta Get A Hold Of Myself', and for vision they put most of the band here, me over there, and Colin 20 feet in front. We had to sing this thing on this big TV show with no monitors. I was so depressed that I went out to get pissed, and I went out to a pub I didn’t go to very often called the Ancient Briton, which was quite close to me. I went in there, and Colin was in the pub. He'd seen it and he was doing exactly the same thing, and we hardly spoke. It was one of the low points.”
Colin: "I'd been coached by an actor for one song and it was just totally wrong, it didn't work. We were under-rehearsed. This TV show had circus acts and dancing girls on it, and Rod was 50 yards away from me and we're trying to do a very close Everly Brothers harmony. This actor bad said to me 'On this word you do this, and on that word you do that’ gesture was supposed to be planned. Well, the thing that goes out the window is the tune. My hands might be in the right place, but God where the melody went!"
14-10: London, BBC Playhouse Theatre, "The Joe Loss Show" (transmitted live)
23-10: Kingsway recording 'Goin' Out Of My Head'
28-10: Belgium
29-10: Paris
30-10: Paris
Chris: "We did the Emperor Rosko TV show, "Dents De Lait Dents De Loups", in Paris, with Sylvie Vartan and Marianne Faithfull."
Rod: "That was the time there was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. She started dancing in front of me when we were playing, and I was very interested. And then someone came up to me afterwards and said ‘I’d be very careful if I was you, that's a bloke!'"
Colin: "The other thing I remember was that they were short on mikes. It was a live TV show and Rosko had to introduce us and then throw me mike. Every time in the rehearsal I dropped it, every time, though I caught it on the actual broadcast. It was a bit nerve-racking!"
1-11: London, BBC Playhouse Theatre, "Saturday Club"
5-11: "Saturday Club" broadcast / Start of Scandinavian tour
Hugh: "We met Elton John in Scandinavia, or Reg Dwight as he was known at that time, when he was in Bluesology. We were driving round in a nice warm tour bus and they were slogging round in an old Transit freezing to death. We did Holland and Belgium at one time, but never went to Italy, certainly never went to Germany, which for then was most unusual; a lot of bands went to Germany to pay their dues."
20-11: End of Scandinavian tour
_____________________________________________________________________
1967
While it was their last year together, 1967 was a period of great artistic triumph for the band, with the making of the Odessey & Oracle album. It also began with the double-edged sword of their visit to the Philippines, where they played to huge crowds but were literally prisoners of their own success.
28-2: Fly to Philippines
1-3: Arrive in Manila
Paul: "Tito Burns had told us 'I can give you 10 days work in the Philippines. It's not a lot of money, but they'll pay all your expenses: it'll be like a paid holiday'. The money was terrible, something embarrassingly low, like less than a 100 quid a night. But everything else, airfares, hotels, food, everything was paid for. All the gigs were in Quezon City, just outside Manila, in a massive stadium called the Araneta Coliseum, owned by this very wealthy man called Jorge Araneta, one of the twelve families that own the country. So we fly all night, and it took thirty hours to get there, stopping about eight times and changing planes in Hong Kong. We get there at two o'clock in the morning, wiped out and completely limp. The plane taxis up to the gate, and there's TV cameras and lights and crowds, they open the door of the plane and the Filipino pilot says 'Hey, you guys are famous!' We get microphones thrust in our faces, and there's 2,000 kids there screaming their heads off at 2am. The head of our Filipino label, the Super Record Company, Sian Yola (SY) Cheng, was there on the steps of the plane to meet us. 'Welcome to the Philippines, you have five singles in the Top 10'. 'What?!How is that possible?' We never knew anything about this. Decca never told us, and Tito Burns certainly never told us."
Letter from Paul, 2 March:
When we finally got to Manila, the crowds there were fantastic! Talk about the Beatles at London Airport; they had dozens of photographers, TV film cameras, girls garlanding us with flowers, Customs men asking for our autographs: then we jumped in a car and headed for this place, followed by about twenty cars in convoy at 60-70 mph all leaning on their horns!
Colin: "I had imagined we were going to be playing in the foyer of a hotel. The Araneta Coliseum was a huge arena, with a cafe complex and a little hotel in there. It was awful because we were prisoners. Araneta didn't want us to go out at all but we did, we hid in the back of people's cars. He had his own little militia patrolling and they had guns."
Rod: "The first thing I did was to turn the television on, and there was a big 24-piece band playing a selection of my songs. All the album tracks, I just couldn't believe it. The following day we did this huge press conference. There were loads of people there, but it was all newspapers. We did these long interviews, they asked us what we thought of the Beatles, and then all the papers the next day said "Zombies Say Beatles Are Louts And Hooligans For Attacking Our First Lady". We didn't know anything about all that stuff that had happened before."
3/11-3: Araneta Coliseum residency
Letter from Hugh, 7 March:
So far on Friday night we played to 27,000 people and last night (Saturday) we played to 31,000 people, which is absolutely fantastic. The people are so hospitable towards us. They do anything for you. Anything I want I ask for and get. It's really true. It's a very rough place though, most people carry guns. I was looking at one this morning, lovely little gun but deadly. If it's not guns then they carry knives. We all go out in a bunch, never alone, in a car with the doors locked. At the TV studio, there were two men outside dangling machine guns in their hands. But don't you worry, we're being looked after very well indeed.
Letter from Paul, 8 March:
The show is produced and directed by Mr Leroy Prinz, a Hollywood director who has made many films including The Ten Commandments. There's a full orchestra, many Filipino singers, all of them very good, especially Diomedes Maturan, the Perry Como of the Philippines, and 24 dancers who are really beautiful.
They do a big production number before we come on; the whole stage is set as a giant cave, with bats flying on overhead wires, smoke rising from cauldrons, witches flying on brooms and the orchestra playing weird ghostly music. Then the dancers come on and do their bit. Finally amidst clouds of smoke, flashing lights and wailing sirens, we appear and play for about 40 minutes to end the show.
Chris: "We did love the Philippines, because we were playing to the biggest audiences we'd ever played to. Leroy Prinz was there from California because he had a tax problem and his accountant told him to get out. The girls used to write the weirdest letters, and there were two kinds of girls there - the ones who knew nothing about sex, and girls who knew everything about sex. Absolutely fascinating country. The Filipino bands are known as the musicians of the east, and you'd go into places and hear beat bands playing our songs perfectly, everything copied. That was a weird feeling. And going to all these ambassadors residences and being entertained and feted like we were the Beatles. We did benefit from the Beatles being cut out of the psyche of the whole nation, because of what they 'did' to the Marcos'."
12-3: Leave Philippines for Hong Kong
Paul: "We'd been playing two shows a night, to 40,000 people, for £100 a night. I was furious. So I got on the phone to Tito Burns and asked what the hell was going on. 'That's the deal I made boys, and you signed it. Sorry, 'bye.' We subsequently found out that he'd bought and sold us. Araneta was paying a lot more than that. So, on one of our rare trips outside the compound - we went to parties and people's houses, and eventually the guards loosened and let us go out by ourselves, though they always followed us, trailed us in a car - SY Cheng said to us, 'You wanna make some money? At the end of this ten days we'll fly you back to Hong Kong.' Araneta had withheld our passports while we were there, so we were total prisoners."
Chris: "We had to go to the airport and pretend to leave. First of all the van broke down on the way there, so we had to walk the rest of the way with all our cases and gear, with all these thousands of kids. They were trying to cut bits off us. Being the eldest, I had to go up to the representative who had these two great big Filipino bodyguards with him and say 'Can we have our passports back please, because we need to check in. Some of us are going back to England and some of us are going to Hong Kong.' I remember holding them in my hands and my knees were shaking. I then said, 'Can you please tell Mr. Araneta that we'll leave when we want to leave'. He wanted us to leave, because we asked for an extra £1000 to do the gigs. We had to because he had an option to carry us on there. We made up their losses at the Araneta Coliseum for the previous three years! So we had these midnight meetings with Cheng, who was pulling favours with the mayor of Manila who was their godson. It was total Dangerman. At the airport, Araneta's representative turned to me and said 'Mr Araneta, he no going to like this.' We then leaped over the counter where there were limousines waiting for us to take us to the El Presidente Hotel. We stayed there and decided we had to go back to Hong Kong and get new visas to come back again. We'd seen what Araneta was like with his own private army. I was alone in my room - all the others had gone swimming at the American Army & Navy Club - on the top floor, and I fall off my balcony, and who's going to know? You just don't realise what's going on with a dictatorship.
15-3: Return to Philippines
17-3: 'Goin' Out Of My Head' released
18-3: Nile Club / El Dorado Club
19-3: El Dorado Club
Paul: "In Hong Kong, we had plotted with Cheng and another promoter to come back to the Philippines and do another two weeks of shows around the islands. We came in, and we played in another part of Luzon - we played there, flew to the next island, opened up the morning paper and the club we'd played at the night before had burned down. Played a club that night, next day it burned down. We were scared, but Cheng said Araneta won't harm you, he's gonna get the promoters', so we did our two weeks and just ran to the airport and flew back to London.
"I didn't even have time to go to the bank, so I had a Qantas airline bag stuffed full of peso notes. I thought 'Shit, I've got all this money, and it's gonna get confiscated', because I knew you weren't supposed to bring it outside of the Philippines. We get to Heathrow, and customs say 'Rock band eh? OK, open everything up.' The usual score. So I'm trying to hide my airline bag, and they said 'What's this?' I explained that it was actually money we'd earned, it was our income. 'Really, and you're paying it in here? That's good, that's export income for England. Congratulations.' So I went to my bank in St Albans and counted out these thousands of pounds worth of peso notes; it was very funny. We got away with it, but that was the end of the road for Tito Burns. He was pissed off at Araneta for revealing the deal he made with him. But apparently they were doing it a lot with English and American bands who played in the Philippines, many were cheated that way."
On their return to the UK, the group, their lease deal with Decca up, began to search out another label. However, Rod and Chris in particular had decided the time had come for the Zombies to make a proper album, and one produced by themselves, rather than Ken Jones. The group signed with CBS, its UK branch still a fairly young company at that time, and were given a budget with which to produce the record. They booked time at the legendary Abbey Road studios and the group began work on Odessey & Oracle.
Chris: "It was a fallow period, between 1966 and 1967. We weren't getting any response. There was this lovely time when the Hollies phoned us up, and we went out for lunch at the Serpentine in Hyde Park in my E-Type. Tony Hicks and Allan Clarke were squeezed in the back and they said 'Bloody hell, how can you afford an E-Type?' Rod and I were talking about what we'd like to do, and Tony Hicks said 'Wait a minute - you want to produce yourselves?' And we said 'Yeah, we're looking for other deals'. And he said, 'Well, enjoy your lunch, this is a waste of time!' Because they wanted to produce us, and it was those days when you didn't quite understand. We just thought they could have got us a deal."
Terry Quirk: "Cars figured very highly in the Zombies' life, they all had this thing about investing in cars. I had a Mini I painted in black and white psychedelic art, which became quite a feature. We used to go looning around in that, because it was a friendship maker. Chris originally used to bomb around in an Austin Healey, but then I got an MGB, and I had mine done up so it went faster than his. Rather than get his done up Chris got rid of it and got the E-Type. I had all the keys and my job was to make sure the boys' cars were all running, so I had the run of them all. The school that I taught art at was in Woodford, and my parking space was next to the headmaster's, and he used to drive a really old tatty Morris. I turned up with all these different cars, like Rod's Rolls, a DB4, the E-Type, a black Mini Cooper with the dark windows, that was Rod's drive-about. I had about six or seven cars and I used to take a different one into school everyday and the kids thought it was wonderful."
Rod: "Nothing was happening basically. Decca didn't drop us. Things were just winding down and we weren't getting so many gigs. It was at that point that Chris and I said 'Let's make an album before we finish and produce it ourselves', and we went to CBS and told them that. I imagine we would have asked Ken and Joe for advice: 'Look, we want to do this, it's no reflection on you, but it's just something we want to do ourselves', and they would have advised us who to approach. Chris and I talked to CBS and they gave us the money to do it."
Carole Broughton (Marquis): "Creative writers and musicians such as the Zombies aren't, or weren't always considered to be, the best people to have making decisions about their own work, as they are perfectionists and recordings could take forever and fortunes spent. Ken was quite a strong character and kept this sort of thing in control, as would have most producers then. The time was right when they produced Odessey & Oracle themselves. They were very keen to do it and Joe was not one for standing in their way if they were not going to be happy otherwise. I know for a fact Joe Roncoroni loved Odessey."
Hugh: "One of the reasons that we went to CBS was because they were prepared to give us the control, they didn't say 'Well I'm sorry but you've got to get a producer in', and we didn't want that. We'd had a few good years. I think we approached CBS, we had this other album in our heads and we were rehearsing and one thing or another."
Terry Quirk: "The three of us that had been at art school together, Chris, Duffy Coke and myself, made the break in early 1967 into sharing a flat in North Finchley. We lived two doors along from Spike Milligan. At the flat all the new original material was being thrown at us, Chris with a guitar or two fingers on the harmonium, and his peculiar voice, and then of course later on Rod joined that place. There were things that were happening in Chris' life and a lot of the writing reflected his love life, or trips he made or places he knew. A lot of that I knew intimately, so I knew the background to what he was writing about. I'd be in on those right from the first note. What was interesting was the way they would be written, whether they would be a keyboard-y thing, written on the harmonium. 'Butcher's Tale' was written for the sound, the song is a part of the sound, the feel of it. And what was exciting about those times was the difference between the writing in the living room, in the space they were living in and then having the opportunity to experiment with sounds, because the technology was starting to create that wider range of sound."
Chris: "I remember rehearsing Odessey in that little village hall in Wheathampstead for a week, routining the songs to get ready for the album. It was just 'what songs have you got', basically, we were trying to write all the time. We had stuff that was in the proto stage before that; I'd written 'Beechwood Park' but not finished it, and we hadn't rehearsed it. We had songs hanging around and we just pulled them together, and pretty much concentrated. I remember just being knocked out by the drum sounds, bass sounds, the whole thing, the inventiveness, it was all great. The first sessions were very quick"
1-6: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: ‘Friends Of Mine’ (master), ‘A Rose For Emily’
2-6: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'This Will Be Our Year (master)
12-6: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording: 'Friends Of Mine’, ‘A Rose For Emily', 'This Will Be Our Year' (mono)
10-7: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Hung Up On A Dream', ‘A Rose For Emily' (reduction master)
11-7: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Hung Up On A Dream' (reduction master)
20-7: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Butcher's Tale' (master), ‘A Rose For Emily', 'Hung Up On A Dream’, 'Butcher's Tale' (mono mixing)
Colin: "That Studio 3, the Control room used to be totally separate to the studio, and you'd have to walk out of the door and down the corridor to the studio. And we were on such a tight budget, that I used to run to get to the mike, but when I got there, I'd be panting, and I'd have to wait to get my breath back!"
Peter Vince (engineer): "One fairly unique thing was that up until the Zombies came in to do their album, Abbey Road had been virtually exclusively EMI, a service industry to its own labels. Odessey was one of the first albums that was done there for an independent and not EMI. It was very rare to see anybody recording, except visiting American artists who were usually signed to associated labels anyway. I don't know what special concessions were made, but somebody must have known somebody somewhere because it was quite a rarity, particularly at a time when a lot of other EMI groups were big and studio time was at a premium anyway, and it wasn't easy to get in. So there would have been pressure, not from outside people as such, but just from the fact that there was so much EMI product that the studios were constantly booked."
Booked they were, which is why the next session was held at Olympic.
7-7: Olympic Studios, Barnes recording: 'Beechwood Park', 'Maybe After He's Gone', 'I Want Her She Wants Me'
15-8: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'This Will Be Our Year' (brass overdub)
16-8: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Brief Candles', 'Prison Song'
17-8: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Prison Song' (master), 'Brief Candles' (master)
?-8: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording: 'Time Of The Season' (master)
Chris: "The way I remember it was that we all went in with great enthusiasm to do the album and halfway through Colin wasn't happy."
Rod: "By the time we did 'Time Of The Season', Colin really wasn't very interested at all. I recall it being quite hard work, simply because he had taken the decision that he was moving away from all this, so it was hard to keep him interested. Because of that, in his head, Paul had also made the move. It wasn't like real enthusiasm. So my main memory is of trying to keep Colin and Paul enthused enough to do a good job. I mean I really did want Colin to sing 'Time Of The Season'."
Colin: "I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't really like 'Time Of The Season' at first and found it quite difficult to sing but Rod convinced me to keep trying and I'm very glad he did. Rod had to motivate maybe all of us, but especially me. I felt a bit beaten, but I would have never walked out, that was my spot!"
Peter Vince: "There was never any ill-feeling which threatened the sessions, I saw no evidence of that. Because they were well rehearsed when they came in and had a pretty good idea of what they were doing. It was a lot like acting; I'm sure things happen backstage but when it's the first night and you open to the public, you go in and do it irrespective of what the feeling may be backstage."
Carole Broughton (Marquis): "It would mainly be Rod and Chris [who] came down to the office at 37 Soho Square. Colin too, because at the time of recording Odessey he went through this phase of wanting to audit Decca. I remember Joe trying to calm him down and talk him out of it. He would get dissatisfied with the performance of the record companies. The Zombies were very honest people themselves, they didn't want to be cheated if it appeared that a record company might be dishonest. It was also because they had had such bad experiences with Tito Burns."
6-9: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording: 'Prison Song', 'Brief Candles' (mono mixing)
22-9: 'Friends Of Mine' released - Paul and Molly engaged
30-9: Walsall - West Midland Training College
Paul: "Rod used mellotron a lot on Odessey & Oracle but of course it wouldn't travel. And he tried to take the B-3 on the road for some of our late, very last gigs, but our road manager refused to carry it up and down the stairs. I seem to remember playing some of the Odessey material on the road, like ‘Friends Of Mine' and ‘A Rose For Emily'. But that stuff was really written to be recorded."
Colin: "I seem to remember that we played one or two songs off Odessey & Oracle live, but I don't think we got a particularly good response."
Hugh: "In the Decca days I'd go in and do the drum overdubs, but I didn't get terribly involved in the post-production. Looking back on the way I played in the later records, by then I'd been playing on stage three, four or five times a week, and I knew I was getting an awful lot better. I was starting to play the kit properly. So therefore I enjoyed the recordings in the latter part better. I did think the sound of the drums was very important, and I was always saying to them, 'get the drums up, get the drums up', because that was what made people get up and dance and created an interest in a record. I really didn't have much to do with the production of Odessey & Oracle, it was Rod and Chris' baby, but I do remember being quite thrilled that we were in the studio that the Beatles recorded in."
3-10: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording 'Time Of The Season' (mono mixing)
7-10: City Of Leeds - Teacher Training College
10-10: London, BBC Maida Vale Studio 4, "David Symonds Show"
11-10: London, BBC Aeolian 2 Studios, "Pete Brady Show (Swingalong)"
13-10: Edgbaston - High Hall
14-10: Leicester University
16-10: "David Symonds Show" (segments also broadcast on 20-10 show)
20-10: Newport - Harper Adams Agricultural College
21-10: "Pete Brady Show (Swingalong)" broadcast also on 27-10
23-10: Paul & Molly married
7-11: EMI Abbey Road No 3 recording 'Changes' (master)
12-11: London, BBC Maida Vale Studio 4, "Jimmy Young Show" / "Pete Brady Show"
13-11: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording 'Changes' (mono mixing), 'Changes', 'Hung Up On Dream' (stereo mixing)
16-11: London, BBC Aeolian 2 Studios, "Monday Monday"
20-11: London, BBC Playhouse Theatre, "Pop North"
23-11: "Pop North" broadcast
27-11: "Monday Monday" broadcast
29-11: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 recording 'Butcher's Tale', ‘A Rose For Emily' (stereo mixing)
Rod: "We were well controlled and we thought we had it there, and then they asked us to do a stereo mix and I remember it being an extra £200 each, that Chris and I had to pay."
Peter Vince: "I don't remember them being in for a great length of time, even for the mixes. Chris oversaw those more so than Rod, and he was pretty fussy as to what he wanted, but even the stereo mixes would have been at a much cheaper cost, because they were done in a small post-production room (Room 53)."
Chris: "We had to concentrate more on the stereo mix, because we thought 'How on earth do you spread four tracks?', and then we were trying to do things with the treble and echo, all those great big fader knobs. I remember the crux of the decision to split was based around the fact that CBS wanted stereo as well as mono mixes and we were the only ones who could pay for it.”
24-11: 'Care Of Cell 44' released
According to the press articles that announced the group's split, the band had made the decision based around the success of the 'Care Of Cell 44' single: i.e., if it was not successful, they would break up.
8-12: EMI Abbey Road Room 53, recording 'This Will Be Our Year', 'Care Of Cell 44', 'Brief Candles' (stereo mixing) and Braintree Institute (pm)
9-12: Bingley - Teachers College
11-12: Manchester - Didsbury College Of Education
12-12: Keele - University
14-12: Worthing - Assembly Hall
15-12: Ashton-Under-Lyne - College Of Further Education
Press reports of the split mentioned the Keele University date as the band's final show, so it is uncertain if the last two gigs took place.
Hugh: "Instead of doing the university and the college-type gigs, which is what we'd been doing, mostly at the peak, it started drifting away to some of the lesser dance halls. It was obviously for that reason alone, whereupon we said 'Rather than let it keep on drifting away and drifting away into nothing, let's call it a halt right now, finish the album and split'."
Colin: "One of our last gigs was with Ten Years After, and of course they were in the ascendant and we were in the decline. That was one of the only times I felt someone played better than us. We were very different bands, so there's no real comparison, but they had a lot of energy, and it was the end for us. We played like a tired band. I remember the last gig. It was another unfortunate thing. Our second road manager Dave Blaylock left, and we were running out of money, and rather than trying to find a road manager for four weeks work, which was probably going to us cost a lot, Paul and I said we'd do it. That didn't help either really: long drives, and Paul and I were getting all the gear out at the end. Our PA was a bit heavier than an old AC-30! Bit of a sad old ending really."
19-12: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 'Changes', 'Friends Of Mine' (stereo mixing)
27-12: EMI Abbey Road Room 53 'Time Of The Season', 'Beechwood Park', 'Maybe After He's Gone', 'I Want Her She Wants Me' (stereo mixing)
28-12: EMl Abbey Road Room 53 Odessey & Oracle (master)
Terry Quirk: "I was at the Odessey sessions as I was doing the artwork. Rod and Chris came and said 'we'd like you to do this as you know us as intimately as anybody else'. The notion was you sat in a corner and you listened and that instigated certain thoughts, so you took your sketchbook and the photos were taken and you talked with the boys over a drink during the breaks to get a feeling of what the music was about. I was looking at the sorts of psychedelic artwork that were coming out of the West Coast anyway, and the sleeve to Bee Gees' First was an influence, there were elements of that, but you didn't want to repeat it. What I was asked to do specifically was to create a bit of artwork as a painting. At that time I was doing a lot of that sort of graphics anyway for clubs in town, posters for Middle Earth and the Marquee.
"The basic thing was within the title. The thing about Odessey & Oracle was that it was classical mythology, in terms of what the songs were about, what the stories were about; they were about journeys and places. The art had the romantic Romeo & Juliet figures, and God figures in it, and the swirls as a device, which were very much to do with universal matters. I cocked up on the spelling of course; here is this ex-university student and he's spelt Odyssey wrong, but the reality was that it was done at a time when it could have been changed. I wasn't secretive about it, and I was working in a place the boys were coming in and out of all the time."
_____________________________________________________________________
1968
1-1: EMI Abbey Road Room 53
Odessey & Oracle original master (stereo)
Peter Vince: "I remember enjoying the Odessey sessions, it was the first of what I call the 'interesting lyric' albums that I worked on. Prior to that much of it had been very pop-orientated, but this was very much along the lines of the Floyd or the Beatles type material, and some of the lyrics I found interesting or strange. It was important how they sounded. There wasn't the commercial driving element, they were making an album the way they thought it should be made. I just remember it being so different to the usual run of the mill thing."
Rod: "The idea of the title didn't come until afterwards. We didn't see it as a concept. We thought it was brilliant when we finished the album, but we knew that was it. It did all seem so ephemeral. It felt like we were pro for far longer than the three years we were. Things weren't really taken seriously back then. I mean, we took it seriously in the sense that we were trying to do things really just as best as we could; it was a real expression of what we were doing and of our enthusiasms. That was where the seriousness was, it wasn't the sitting down and saying 'Right, now we have to make sure we do the proper thing here', We were just 'Hey wouldn't it be great if we did this song and what if we do this'; it was just an outpouring of enthusiasm really and the talents and abilities that we had. We had a platform to express them. But it didn't seem like anyone would ever remember this in three or four years time. It didn't ever cross our minds, we just moved onto the next thing. I really didn't want the Zombies to split up, but once the decision had been taken, then all I wanted to do was to concentrate on getting something together with Chris, and that was what my head was totally into."
Jim Rodford: "Though I was busy playing in the Mike Cotton Sound, Rod and I always talked over the years. He'd play me all the acetates, asking what I thought of them. I always thought the Zombies' records were of the highest quality but I thought the production let them down on some of it. It was maybe a bit lightweight compared with the competition, and therefore the deejays and media dismissed the records, but the songs were always of the highest quality. The grungy heavy guitar sound of Clapton and Hendrix was predominating, that was the real fashion thing, and anyone who had that ingredient in their sound had a far better chance of coming across. Even people like Dave Davies of the Kinks, who'd started that sound, were beginning to sound scratchy and limp, and the Zombies too - the guitar was never to the fore. Their records always had a really good balance and sweet production, but it was out of step with what was really selling at that time."
30-3: split announced
5-4: 'Time Of The Season' released
19-4: Odessey & Oracle LP released
The end of the Zombies was quick and relatively painless for most of the band. Having already adapted mentally to the split, each member immediately moved on to a different pursuit. Chris and Rod busied themselves with songwriting, the formation of their Nexus production company, and laying the groundwork for their next project that became Argent. Hugh and Paul played sessions and worked briefly in other areas - Hugh in a car dealership, Paul in computer programming - before they both ended up working in the A&R department of CBS Records. Colin, the most drained, artistically and emotionally, retreated back to the straight world, However, within a few months he was thrown back into the pop spotlight by producer Mike Hurst under the nom de disque Neil MacArthur, with an oddly arresting version of 'She's Not There' that hit the UK Top 40 in February 1969.
Colin: "Odessey & Oracle shouldn't have been the end really, it should have been a new beginning. It's such a shame. But it seemed there was no interest in the album, and we were tired. Also for the three of us who weren't writers finances were getting a bit difficult. So I went back to the first place that offered me a job, and it just happened to be insurance. It was a career move, and I wasn't biding my time; I was out of pop music."
Paul: “At the start of 1968 Colin was going back to work at the Sun Alliance Insurance Company, and I think Hugh was selling cars, and Rod and Chris of course were putting together Argent, and I didn't know what I was going to do. A friend of mine brought me along to some sessions as a guitar player at [the] Lansdowne and [the] Mayfair [studios]. The money was good but I hated it. So, for most of 1968 and half of 1969 I became a trainee computer programmer at a place called Computers In Business, underneath Waterloo Bridge. I had to programme a computerised chart for Record Retailer and the BBC, with decks of punch cards. Very primitive. I was running it all night on Monday night and then I'd give it to the BBC on Tuesday morning. Colin had that record out under the name Neil MacArthur, and he said 'You're doing that? What's my chart number'!' I said I'd find out about two o'clock in the morning, because I was on the night shift. So he called and asked 'What position am I?' 'You're #23.' 'Oh damn, I didn't make the Top 20! You couldn't help me could you? Push it up a couple of notches for an old friend?' I said I could - in those days there were no safeguards - but I wasn't going to. He called me names, but it was OK, it was a hit anyway! "
Colin: "We'd grown up together and we had all lived round one another before, but when we finished I didn't see them very much for a whole year while Neil MacArthur was going on until we started the One Year album. We used to go to the same pubs, and the Hatfield Jazz Club on a Monday night, and we'd all be there. But we wouldn't speak much. Then Chris gave me a lift somewhere, towards the end of the Neil MacArthur thing, and he said 'Look, why don't you let Rod and I produce you?' and I said 'Great!' It's the same people as Argent backing me - Jim Rodford, Bob Henrit, Russ Ballard and Rod all played on One Year, and on some of Ennismore. I wanted them to keep playing with me, but by then Argent were happening."
Jim Rodford: "With the Mike Cotton Sound we'd peaked creatively. Rod and I were talking and he said ‘I’d like to form a band where this happens, and that happens, and we could take the balance of great instrumental playing', which is what he wanted to push himself through, 'as well as great vocal harmony'. There wasn't a band around doing that, and we thought 'Wouldn't it be great if we could utilise all those facets'. It was around 1968 and we thought we'd better try this, so we started looking for people who might fit the bill."
With the supreme irony that had characterised the start of the Zombies career, the last single pulled from Odessey & Oracle, 'Time Of The Season' became a huge hit in the United States and indeed all over the rest of the world except Britain, in the early months of 1969. By April of that year it had sold over a million copies.
Al Gallico (American publisher): "I had sold the album to Jack Gold and Bill Gallagher at Columbia, just before Clive Davis got in on the act there. But after one single they decided not to release it, so I said I'd go elsewhere with it. Jack had the tapes in his office waiting for me to pick them up. There was this young fellow that they had just hired for A&R, Al Kooper, and he saw these tapes on Jack's desk and said that he had heard the album in London at a party and thought it was terrific. So Jack calls me up and says 'We'll put it out'. But AI Kooper wanted to release 'Butcher's Tale', and I said 'Nah, that's nothing, forget that record'. They put out the album on their subsidiary, Date, and released 'Butcher's Tale' and believe me, they bombed. So I called him up and said 'Look Jack, you got the album out, do me a favour, put out 'Time Of The Season',' and needless to say, the song really exploded. I called up Rod and he didn't want to know about the Zombies anymore. 'We're not the Zombies, we got a new group, we're Argent'. Now, at this point their contract had run out, and because 'Time Of The Season' was getting hot, Clive Davis calls me up and says 'The contract expired, you got to get it for us'.
So I went to England but they still didn't want to be the Zombies, they said 'We are Argent'. I said 'I don't care what you are but you got to resign with Columbia. We got a deal'. What was happening in America was there were guys claiming they were the Zombies doing one niters, booking themselves as the Zombies and playing 'Time Of The Season'. I said to Rod that 'those guys are ripping you off', but he replied 'I don't care, I'm not coming over, I'm Argent, and I don't want to know'."
Rod: "I suppose the existence of these fake Zombies was inevitable in a way, because we had a number one record and we didn't exist anymore, and I'd made it quite clear that I didn't want to re-form. I wanted to move on to the next thing. We got offers for what was quite a lot of money in those days, but it seemed more important to keep the momentum going, and not dwell on something because that felt like standing still. It seemed to me if we'd said right, we're going to exploit the situation and go back to the States because we can make a lot of money now, that would be wrong. Because in the long run you get the best result by being true to what your enthusiasms are, and our enthusiasm had definitely moved to a different place, and that would have been just like retreading old ground. In a way, the fact of having a hit from nowhere was wonderful, it was like having a hit without any of the responsibilities, we didn't have to think of the follow-up. It would have been a real downer if we had regrouped and then failed."
And so in a lopsided fashion, the fairytale of the Zombies came to a happy end. The band Argent, led by Rod with Chris in the producer's seat, went on to scale commercial heights that rivalled the Zombies' own. Colin's solo career picked up speed and gained him commercial and critical success, whether on his own or guesting with others such as Dave Stewart and Alan Parsons. Paul became a successful A&R man, managing the recording careers of such notables as Abba, Aerosmith and Paul McCartney (who never let Paul forget he was once a Zombie). Hugh eventually pulled out of the music business but is still one of the best drummers around. There have been sporadic reunions in the recording studio over the past thirty years but each member is cognisant of the special time and place the Zombies occupied. The band's music lives on, more popular than ever and continuing to bring joy to millions of listeners the world over.
Terry Quirk: "I always felt a sense of desafinado, of being out of time, with the music the Zombies were making. Certainly, with Odessey & Oracle, they were a little bit in advance of what other people were playing and doing, and I don't think the audience were with them. As friends we were aware of where the music was going, so we felt a natural progression, but for a lot of people they were still very much into a more pop sort of sound. You prick a Zombie acquaintance, and they will talk with great affection about those times and about the boys themselves. That underlying niceness was the nature of the guys, because they weren't weirdos or off-the-wall egotists, they were and are just lovely people. The creative element, the advanced nature of the music they were writing has stood the test of time, simply because it is unique music."
Chris: "Everything was pure luck, to be honest, it's not just to do with talent. If it wasn't for that contest and the thrill it gave us winning it, the emotional reaction to it, we would have dropped it. We were going to split up, it was all arranged, and we would not have made a record. The best groups are made up of something that happens with personalities. We actually liked the people we were working with. It's like having been through a war, because we all still talk to each other and it's still the main thing in our lives. And the most pleasing thing of all is knowing that you affect other people's lives."
