For the young Rodney Terence Argent, it all began with his older cousin Jim Rodford playing Elvis Presley’s early music to him. From the King, the young English choirboy and budding piano player learned about R&B performers like Big Mama Thornton and Ray Charles. “I became consumed by the music,” he says. “My whole life turned around.”
Formed by Argent when he was a teenager, the Zombies became one of the most distinct and recognizable bands of the ’60s British Invasion. The group, inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, was known for Argent originals like “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No,” and for creating “Odessey and Oracle,” one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the psychedelic era. It contained another timeless Argent-penned hit, “Time of the Season.”
The Zombies still perform with long-running touring players – and sometimes even original members, as in 2017 when surviving Zombies Chris White and Hugh Grundy joined the touring group to recreate “Odessey and Oracle” in its entirety onstage. Lead singer Colin Blunstone still has his trademark breathy delivery, and Argent can still stun on the keyboards (Rick Wakeman of Yes, for one, thinks he’s one of the finest ever rock organists).
The Zombies, with Argent and Blunstone at the helm, will perform live at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville on March 29th, promoting their latest album, “Different Game.” The 78-year-old keyboardist, who also formed the prog group Argent after the original Zombies disbanded in 1969, talked about the band’s early days with Style Weekly via Zoom from his home in Hampshire, south of London.
Style: You and Colin are the two original members still in the Zombies. Who else is in the current band?
Rod Argent: For a long time, my cousin Jim Rodford was the bass player. He had been the bassist for the Kinks on their biggest selling records, like “Come Dancing,” and he’s the one who got me turned on to rock ‘n’ roll. He turned me on to Elvis when I was 11 and he was 15, so I was in awe of him. He later became a founding member of Argent with me. And then, when Colin asked me if I would like to play a half-dozen solo gigs with him, which became 24 years of working around the world as the Zombies, Jim became our bass player. But unfortunately, he passed away recently. So now we have a great Danish player on bass, Soren Koch, and he’s really a lovely, lovely player. He’s got a good voice too. The drummer is Jim Rodford’s son, Steve [a band member since 2001], and Tom Toomey is the guitar player [since 2010]. They are a really terrific band.
The Zombies were from St. Albans, Hertfordshire. What kind of a place is it?
St. Albans is a small city, one of the oldest in the U.K. Under its original name, Verulamium, it was once the capital of England. There are still parts of a Roman wall there and a museum with Roman floors, so it was a pretty famous place. It was a lovely place to grow up and I came from a big extended family. I had, as I was growing up, about 36 cousins all living near [me].
I sang in the [St. Albans Cathedral] Choir and it was a very rated choir, we used to get broadcast on Radio 3, the classical program in the U.K. It’s where I first heard Bach, which has been the love of my life, along with many other classical composers, as well as all of the rock-and-roll you could imagine, as well as the jazz I grew up with, like early Miles Davis with Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly. I can still sing some of their solos. All of that was going abound in a musical circle around me and I loved it.
Your father sounds fascinating. He was an aerospace engineer by day and led a jazz dance band at night: the Les Argent Rhythm Kings.
One thing to say about dad, he was never happier than when he was playing [piano]. He didn’t play at home although we had a piano, obviously. My mom met him when he was 17 playing with his band and he performed his last gig when he was 83. I used to think that was hilarious. But I was telling Colin the other day, we aren’t far from that, you know [laughs].
Was he the one who introduced you to jazz?
He certainly gave me a taste for some of the early big bands. His band wasn’t a big band, it was a quartet usually. He used to play for dances. I first heard Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington because of dad and more middle of the road [fare] like Glenn Miller as well. Actually, I didn’t really like pop music at the time. It was quite an innocuous time for pop music before Elvis and before rock ‘n’ roll. I quite liked one or two of the artists that my parents liked growing up, people like Perry Como and “Catch a Falling Star” and those things. But none of it really turned me on, and that’s when Jim played Elvis for me and my whole life turned around.
You know, I later found out, 30 years on, that Elvis had three of my songs on his jukebox. I know “She’s Not There” was one of them. I was talking to a disc jockey about Elvis and he was an Elvis fanatic and said, ‘I can’t believe you don’t know this but Elvis had three of your songs on his jukebox in Graceland.’ Amazing.
I’ve read that the original name for the band was the Mustangs and that the band started with you and drummer Hugh Grundy and guitarist Paul Atkinson jamming in a garage.
We were the Mustangs for about a week. We couldn’t find a name. We rehearsed for about six months… and couldn’t afford any gear. My cousin Jim loaned us all the Bluetones gear when we first got together. At school, I found Paul [Atkinson] playing in a folk club and really liked the groove he was playing and I asked him to be in a band. He said, ‘don’t mind if I do.’ Two days later, we had an Army corps section in our school and I watched them march past and I chose the guy [Grundy] who was playing the best military drum. (Imitates loud drumming) BAD-BAD-DUM-DUM-DUM. I thought he had the best sense of rhythm and I asked him to be in the band. He’d never played a kit in his life.
Then I had a friend who was building a bass guitar who’d never played a note of anything, and for a very short while, well before Chris White joined us and well before we made our first record, this guy Paul Arnold joined the band on bass. But he left to study and became a doctor in Canada, where he still is.
Arnold was the one who thought up the name, the Zombies. Right?
He did. We were called the Mustangs and the Sundowners for about a week and we knew that they would be names that other bands around would use, because they were [taken from movies]. The Searchers was a prototype for that really. When Paul Arnold suggested the Zombies, Colin didn’t even know what a zombie was. I sort of vaguely knew that it was something from Haiti. The first popular zombie film was in 1967, “Night of the Living Dead,” and I still haven’t seen that. [Laughs]
I love how the name was so aggressive, while your public persona was as the nice, polite band. You guys were thought of as the smart, studious ones who loved jazz. Two of you wore glasses.
That whole image in the beginning came about because we were very badly managed. We’d only just left school and we’d made “She’s Not There” which everybody loved, and they said, you’ve got to have a press profile. So this photographer took some pictures that we hated, even at the time. And the press needed a story to write. They’d ask, ‘What have you done?’ And we’d say that we haven’t done anything, we had just left school. ‘Well, how did you do at school, did you get any O levels?’ And O levels were like basic academic exams that could get you into University. And, well, yeah, three of us had.
So they put this whole thing out about us being so academic and with these [terrible] pictures, which followed us around. A lot of newspapers, being lazy, would always use the same picture when they did articles on us. Later we had fantastic pictures made but they were never used. Sometimes, even today, some very kind newspaper will dredge up these old pictures and we’ll say, “Aaaahha” [laughs].
But that image was largely manufactured because there was nothing else for them to say at the time, and we were saddled by it to some degree. You’re right: two guys in the band wore glasses. Paul Atkinson did for a year or two and his whole image changed completely when he got contact lenses. He was a real babe magnet after that. But we were [trapped]. In those days, everyone thought that rock and roll was only going to last three years. So we were made over by managers and agents at the time because they thought they needed to get all of the money they could because there was going to be no longevity. The ridiculous thing is that the music [of the period] has lasted longer than any other form of popular music.
You mentioned original Zombies guitarist Paul Atkinson, who passed away in 2004. He became a major figure in the music industry after the Zombies disbanded, signing major artists such as Elton John, ABBA and Virginia’s own Bruce Hornsby.
Yes, he was. And Mr. Mister too. And he did a lot of work with the Beach Boys. He worked closely with Brian Wilson.
Is it true that you got your recording contract in 1964 by winning a battle of the bands contest?
Yes, it was called the Herts Beat Competition. And we actually, to my smiling horror, beat Jim Rodford’s band as one of the finalists. (laughs) After the show, Dick Rowe from Decca, we didn’t even know he was there, knocked on our dressing room door and told us he wanted to offer us a contract for a recording session, and make a single and see what happens. We said, “Yeah, OK. Great.”
We were going to record Gershwin’s “Summertime” [for the first single] although I’d already written [our first original] song, “It’s All Right With Me,’ which is still heavily streamed today unbelievably. We were talking about doing it for the first time onstage since 1964 on this tour. We might even open the show with it. We can tell the audience that we’d love to do three very old songs that were on our first EP. And then we can take it right up to “Different Game” and span the time.
Your first single, “She’s Not There,” was a huge hit. Did you guys think: Wow, this is easy.
At the time, it made the 9 o’clock news in the U.K. because we were the first band after the Beatles with a self-written song to get to #1 in America. It was a dream, an absolute dream. Certainly with me, what I loved more than anything in the world was playing music and having that acceptance. But then there’s all sorts of peripheral benefits, such as some really lovely young ladies being very interested in you as you were going around. What an adolescent’s dream. My god, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Partly it felt easy, yes. And then it was a bit of a shock… the follow-up singles in the U.K. were not what we wanted at all. [The managers] just wanted to throw things out really quickly. It drove us crazy. You had managers like Andrew Loog Oldham with the Stones, Brian Epstein with the Beatles, and the Who’s managers, who really understood everything about image and the importance of having a great follow-up single and [getting] just what you wanted to furnish your image … we didn’t get any of that. Things were beyond our control at that time.
You followed up “She’s Not There” with another big hit, “Tell Her No.”
That was a hit in the states. We were pleased with that record. But in the U.K., the follow up was “Leave Me Be,” a Chris White song that was OK but it was never a single and it was quite timid in sound and we thought that was totally the wrong thing for a second single. We thought that there should be some explosions, some joy about it. So in America it wasn’t released and they put “Tell Her No” out instead, which we were very happy about.
Talk about Chris White. I always thought that you guys complemented each other well – he wrote the more wistful, downbeat songs, like “I Can’t Make Up My Mind,” and you usually wrote the more optimistic numbers, like ‘She’s Coming Home.” Did you know at that time that your styles nicely balanced each other?
Yeah. Chris has been a friend throughout life and he’s been a great writing and production partner.
He later worked with you in Argent too, after the Zombies disbanded.
Right. He didn’t want to play any more at that point but still wanted to be like a silent member of Argent. He and I always used to play our ideas over to each other and modify them each, and it was great. I shared a flat with Chris for three or four years before I got married.
White wrote songs that were hits for others. But was there ever any friction between you two because you wrote the big hits for the Zombies?
Never any friction. Chris was and is the most generous of personalities. He’s a lovely, lovely guy and always has been. It’s lovely to have had him as a friend and colleague throughout a large part of [my] life.
After “Tell Her No,” the hits stopped coming for a long time, even as you were making some great music. What happened?
I think it’s because we never had any control over recording. Our producer [Ken Jones], an older guy from the generation before us, did a brilliant job in the first session because he was just taking the music as it was presented to him and getting the best out of it. From that point onwards, because he was an older music man, he was trying to analyze what made “She’s Not There” a hit. He was looking for a gimmick. And he fastened onto the fact that the actual production process had meant that you could hear Colin’s breathing on the recording — and he wanted to concentrate on that. He took the balls out of the instruments after that first session.
We got really, really upset about it. We were never allowed in the mixing sessions and everything was done quickly. He would send us off to the pub for an hour and we’d come back and he’d play it. I remember this song called “Is This The Dream” that was really rocking when we rehearsed it and when we recorded it. We thought it was really stomping and was absolutely what we wanted to get out of it, a real rock-and-roll driving song, When we came back and heard it, Colin said, “Is that us playing? Is that what we just did?” Ken had recorded it in a very undynamic way. It drove us crazy.
That’s why we recorded the “Odessey and Oracle” album. Because it was in the cards that we might split up. Paul Wilkinson was getting married; he didn’t have any money. Even though we had scored number one hits in many places in the world, no one made any money at all out of performance. And we were headlining tours, sometimes playing to really big audiences. In the Philippines, we played to 40,000 people a night for a ten-night residency and we got 80 pounds a night between us. Someone, I think I know who, was making a fortune out of us. Again, it was that scenario where they thought they only had a few years to make all the money they could.
So “Odessey and Oracle” was sort of a last gasp from the start?
It was in the air that we might be breaking up. But Chris and I thought that we had to try and produce an album ourselves, to get our songs across the way we wanted. We left Decca, and they were thinking about it anyway because they weren’t making much money out of us by then. And we went with CBS.
And our producer, Ken Jones, given the fact that he was no longer in control, was really helpful. He got us into Abbey Road, which was called EMI Studios at the time. At the time only EMI artists could use it, but Ken somehow had some influence and he got us in there, which was fantastic, and we had the benefit of working with [Beatles engineer] Geoff Emerick, and we were one of his favorite bands to work with, and Peter Vincent, who also engineered for the Beatles. They were really great. At the end, we thought, this may never sell but this is the best we can do and it does reflect how we hear our songs.
The Beatles even helped in the recording of the album, right? They had some of their instruments lying around and you used them.
They did and we did. We never asked, obviously. (laughs) They walked out a week before we walked in. We didn’t record everything at once, because Chris and I were writing as we went. But they walked out and John Lennon had left his Mellotron, a pretty new instrument at the time, so I thought ‘wow, we can’t afford an orchestra so I’ll try this out.’ If I’d had a choice, I would definitely have used an orchestra but as soon as I started playing it, I realized that it was something that has its own cachet. It was great to do that and thank you John, so much for that.
We were recording very quickly as, in fact, our new album (“Different Game”) was recorded. We came back after our induction in the Hall and immediately recorded two new songs at home in my studio and we thought they sounded great, and we couldn’t wait to carry on. But then COVID got in the way and we had to stop for about 2 1/2 years. I said to the guys, it’s been a gas playing on stage but let’s go back in the studio and record like we did in the old days and record the basic track live.
The new album doesn’t always stick closely to that patented Zombies sound. What’s the challenge of writing and recording new original songs?
It’s the same as it was when we started. The only reason I’m doing this at all is because it energizes and rejuvenates me to actually create new material. And we still attack and approach it the same way we did when we were 18 years old. I don’t know any other way to do it really.
The Zombies appear at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville on March 29. For more information and tickets: https://www.jeffersontheater.com
