The Zombies - "Bright eyed" in '65

With upcoming news that there is to be a reissue of The Zombies debut album Begin Here, I started by asking Colin Blunstone whether there may be any differences from the previous versions?

“Well, it depends which Begin Here album you're familiar with, if you're familiar with it at all. Because in America it included the hit singles”. Colin carried on “But in the UK, on the original album, they didn't include hit singles. This version will definitely include the hit singles”.

RTS: “Tell her no”, wasn't that on the American release but not on the British?” 

Colin: “Well, "She's Not There" was. I'm not sure about "Tell her no", but it's on this re-release, So there is quite a lot on it.

I mean, there's currently a lot of activity about The Zombies repertoire. This album's coming out now. A few months ago, they released the mono version of Odessey and Oracle, which is how it was originally recorded with The Zombies.

But then originally CBS asked for a stereo version after we'd already recorded it in Mono. Belatedly, there was a stereo version put together in a slightly contrived way. But now, the version that's just been released is how we recorded it in 1967”.

“Now they've released Begin Here, which was our first album. And I think later in the year they're going to release another album of the tracks that were left over by The Zombies, with some of the tracks that were really more beginning tracks of Argent.

It's a little bit of a mixed-up area, where The Zombies were almost playing with Argent in the studio”.

The Zombies with from left - Hugh Grundy, Colin Blunstone, Chris White, Rod Argent and Paul Atkinson

It looks like there are some exciting Zombies releases to look forward to and hopefully some music not heard or released before? We will wait and see. Meanwhile on another front Colin has a solo release and solo Tour in the offing as he told me. “I played my first album, One Year, live at the Union Chapel last year. And there's now a box set of this, it's a DVD and two CDs. When we played it live. Wow, it worked out really well”.

We touched back on the debut album from 1965, what was it like being part of such early success with “She’s not there” plus the pressure to follow that with a popular album, then what must of seemed like a flame going out as interest in The Zombies pretty much disappeared. The reality was that the band members had to look at getting back into the world of “everyday” living. “The Zombies was all I knew from the age of about 15” Colin explains. “It was important to us. And then our first record is a huge hit, particularly in America, we travelled the world together until 1967, and the band finishes fairly traumatically, really".

"I didn't know what was going to come next. I didn't have a plan B. And also, the three non-writers in the band were absolutely broke. So all of us had to get jobs. No choice in that. We had to get jobs. People sometimes say, how could you choose to work in an office rather than make music? I didn't have a choice".

"Then, out of the blue, with The Zombies' belated success in America with “Time of the Season”, I started getting offers to record again. That led to being back in Abbey Road with Rod Argent, Chris White with Peter Vince Engineering, who'd engineered on Odessey and Oracle.

We're back in Studio 3, where we did Odyssey and Oracle. It was a very reassuring situation, in that I'd spent months in Abbey Road recording Odessey and Oracle with Rod, Chris and Peter Vince. And here I was back again.

So if you're going to make that jump from being in a band to being a solo artist, I think that's about the best way that you could possibly do it, because I was surrounded by people who were really supportive and sensitive to what we were trying to do”.

RTS: “That must have been, very reassuring. Did Rod Argent write songs on the first album?”

Colin: “ He wrote... “She loves the way they love her”, which is a very Zombies-sounding song, isn't it?

I sometimes think that, in some respects, One Year is a little bit like a bridge from Odessey and Oracle, but of course we didn't have the strings on Odessey and Oracle”.

Cover for The Zombies Odessey & Oracle which spawned the belated hit in the USA "Time of the Season"

RTS: ”So did you have complete artistic control of One Year? Were you picking the songs?

Colin: “I think it was the three of us. It was Rod, Chris and myself picking the songs. I can tell you with some of the tracks...  I found “Misty Roses”, very few people were familiar with the Tim Hardin version. I also found “Mary, Won't You Warm My Bed”, which was probably the least successful musically on the album. I remember, I was really for “Mary, Won't You Warm My Bed”, but now I'm not so sure. The complete opposite is true of “Smokey Day”.

At the time, I didn't particularly want that track to go on the album. Now, I think it's one of the best songs on the album. It's a Chris White song. I think it's fantastic. It is funny how your tastes change over time. But your question was choosing the material, and it was sort of between us, really”

Colin Blunstone

RTS: “You obviously were all still great friends, all back together for a common cause?”

Colin: “Yeah, I think if you work closely with a producer, it does feel almost like you're in a band. It's almost the same sort of relationship, really.

I mean, there might be some producers who dominate an artist, and there might be some artists who dominate a producer. But if it works well, I think you both contribute equally. And hopefully, because of that, you make a really good album.

I've always tried to not dominate the producer. I wouldn't like it if they dominated me, either. I think you're all on the same team, aren't you? You're all trying to make the best album you possibly can”.

Photo Credit Megan Finnerty

The album One Year was an artistic triumph for Blunstone and as he says it was almost The Zombies mark II, it gave him the platform and mental strength to pursue his solo career fully. Though of course it wasn’t all plain sailing “In those days, it seemed to be traditional for artists or bands to record an album a year. And looking with the benefit of hindsight, I think it's too much. Especially if you're touring as well".

He elaborates, "I was touring all the time. You've got to try and write songs and record and Record companies used to really pressure artists in those days to record. And in a way, it's almost forcing you into making a mistake because you can't keep on recording albums year after year. It's not possible. But anyway, we did Ennismore, I think that worked pretty well.

Although a lot of those songs were written sometime before we recorded them. By the third album, Journey, which was in 73, so it was 71, 72, 73, my material was starting to get a bit thin on the ground. And eventually, through one reason or another, I ended up on Rocket Records in the middle of the 70s.

Rocket Records were wonderful. And they really, really supported all their artists. But I think, if I'm to be honest, I think I've written myself out by that point.

And I probably needed a bit of a break. But again, I was making an album nearly every year. And made three albums for Rocket Records”.

The musical landscape was also changing as the late sixties / early seventies singer songwriter peak was waning and there were new radical influences on the horizon, it had it's effect on Blunstone “Punk started to come in here, while it seemed in America that everything was disco, although punk eventually arrived there as well, but it was a little bit later, I think.

So it was very hard for people like me to get any kind of radio play or media attention in the late 70s because it was punk and disco. And these things happen, you know. You just have to go with it, really”.

RTS:  “It must have been a very difficult time for yourself. From, what was that, 76 up to about 1980 ... ?Because you're  under pressure to think, do I go with it or do I stick to what I do, what I'd like to do, and just hope that we get through it?”.

Colin: “Yeah. I've always tried to stick to what I believe in and what interests me musically, really. I've never tried to follow ten trends.

Even more recently with The Zombies, Rod, myself and the band, we recorded three or four albums from about 2001. We didn't change the way we recorded the whole time, in that we got the best songs we possibly could and we tried to record them to the best of our ability”.

Not someone to sit still for long Colin Blunstone has an upcoming Solo Tour so another busy year just coming up as he elaborates “I'm taking the solo band to Miami and we're going to go on one of these musical-themed cruises. It's called Flower Power. I've done several of these tours. We did one called Rock Legends, I had to follow Alice Cooper after he just had his head chopped with a guillotine. It made a huge impact on the audience and then we had to follow that. So that was an interesting experience. And this time, Flower Power, I don't know who all the artists are, but I know The Beach Boys are doing it.

So we're doing that in about a month, six weeks time. And then we come back and we do a UK tour. And I think the thing is that if you've got a solo band, you have to work. You can't keep putting a band together every time you're on a tour. So it's difficult".

RTS:  “Are they the same band members you've used before?” 

Colin: “Yes. we've got Dave Bainbridge, a wonderful, very versatile player, great keyboard player, really good guitarist too.

He was in The Strawbs. Chas Cronk, also from The Strawbs, again, worked with many, many great players. And then Steve Rodford from The Zombies and Søren Koch from The Zombies.

Although Søren has gone from playing bass to playing lead guitar, and he's very, very good on both instruments. It's a very musical band, they're wonderful players”.

Photo Credit Alex Lake

From this point I asked Colin Blunstone if we could talk about 4 specific songs from his post Zombies career as they form a cross section of his expansive repertoire and would be interesting to get some background on them and the collaborations involved.

Say You Don’t Mind - released as a single in 1972

“Well, first of all, going right back to the beginning, I think we were probably one or two tracks short on the album. And we remembered a song written by Denny Laine that we played in The Zombies. To my knowledge, it was never a hit, "Say You Don't Mind", for Denny Laine. But it's a great song as Denny's a great songwriter. The Zombies used to play that song.

We loved it, I think we used to finish our show with "Say You Don't Mind".

And we thought, what about if we made a new version?

And we tried a rock and roll version of it, which didn't work at all. But we'd been working with this wonderful string arranger called Chris Gunning. He'd already done quite a few tracks on the album. This was the last one that he did. And we thought, well, let's try Chris. And I had no idea what he was going to come up with. It's a 21-piece string orchestra. No rhythm section. No electric instruments at all. No keyboards. Just strings. No drums.

I think it's the rhythm comes from the cellos Sadly, Chris has recently died, I'm afraid. But obviously, his music lives on, I think all his arrangements on One Year are wonderful. And it probably has a higher profile now than it had when it first came out, particularly in America.

I never once thought it could be a single. CBS, to their credit, released it and it pretty much straight away started picking up radio play”.

Planes - released as a single in 1976

“I've played it many times. It's a great song. I was recording with Gus Dudgeon, he was Elton John's producer, and he just said to me, look, there's this great song that Elton and Bernie (Taupin) have written and they've recorded it, but it hasn't been released yet.

I don't think they'd even finished it as a recording, but we could hear the bare bones of the song, he said, I can get that song for you for the album if you like it. I mean, I think Elton and Bernie are just wonderful, wonderful songwriters.

I was really thrilled that I got the opportunity to record it. But it's because I was recording with Gus Dudgeon that I got the opportunity to record it".

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted - released as a single in 1980

“Well, Dave Stewart, it was his idea to record that song. All of the arrangement is all Dave Stewart. He wanted to find someone to sing it and he was also working with a girl called Barbara Gaskin, interestingly enough, also comes from Hatfield, where I am from. I actually went to school with her so she was familiar with me and suggested to Dave Stewart, why don't you try and get Colin Blunstone to sing it? But Dave didn't know how to contact me but Rod Argent had a shop in Denmark Street at the time that sold keyboards and Dave used to go in there to buy keyboards so Dave Stewart went there and while he was in there, he asked someone if they could get a message to Rod to see if he could get my phone number. Eventually, Dave contacted me and played me the track and I just loved it.

I've got to emphasize, it's Dave's idea and Dave's arrangement and he produced it. I literally just came in at the end and put a vocal on it. And there was no doubt in my mind when I heard it that I really had to have a go at singing it. I thought it was fantastic, I think Dave's a very talented guy. And so that's how that came about".

Old and Wise - released as a single in 1982

“Well, Alan Parsons worked on Odessey and Oracle in Abbey Road. At the time, I seem to remember he was an assistant engineer so he was just starting out on his early career. So I knew Alan from then, from the late 60s, when he started making the Alan Parsons project, he tried to contact me on the first album to sing something but I was living in America at the time so I wasn't around. But he actually contacted me on the album Pyramid which I think is the one before the relevant album which is Eye in the Sky.

“Old and Wise” is on Eye in the Sky. So I sang a song on Pyramid. It's a really good song called “The Eagle Will Rise Again”.

"And having spent a bit of time with Alan and his silent partner, very very important he was Eric Woolfson who wrote most of the songs, I was walking out of Abbey Road with Eric Woolfson having spent some time down there and he said, we've got this song, would you consider singing it? We were literally walking from Studio 2, where they usually used to record, up the hallway and Studio 3 was on the right, where we recorded One Year and Odessey and Oracle. We went in and he just sat down at the piano and he played “Old and Wise” to me. Eric was a great musician but also he's a really good artist as well, so he put the song over so well. And I'm sure he could have done a great version himself".

"He said, well, would you consider singing it? And I said, absolutely, yeah".

"Just as a side story, on the first two songs I sang for them, which were “The Eagle Will Rise Again” and “Old and Wise”, I had a week to learn the song. But then as things went on, I did two or three other songs with them and they would call me and say, come down to the studio, we're going to play you a song and you can learn it and sing it at that time, I think that was quite challenging".

"I quite liked having a week to learn it. With "Old and Wise", I've always loved that song and Eric explained the meaning. It's not important and the song should mean what it means for you?"

On April 17, The Zombies will release the definitive version of their 1965 debut album Begin Here (Mono Remastered), on LP, CD and digital, on their own label Beechwood Park Records.

Remastered in the original Mono mix, the album combines all 17 tracks from the original UK and US releases.

Available for pre-order in 4 colours including a limited edition Marble Gold LP and an exclusive 7” with “She’s Not There” and “The Way I Feel Inside” as an add-on option.

Begin Here (Mono Remastered) Pre-Save & Listen Now link: HERE

As mentioned Colin Blunstone is out on his "Believe in Miracles" Tour:

Thu, May 7 - Newport (Isle of Wight) Strings Bar & Venue

Fri, May 8 – Canterbury, Colyer-Fergusson Hall

Sat, May 9  - St Albans, Pioneer Club

Tue, May 12 - Milton Keynes, The Stables

Wed, May 13 – Manchester, Stoller Hall

Thu, May 14 – Stroud, Sub Rooms

Sat, May 16 – Gateshead, The Glasshouse (Sage 2)

Sun, May 17, Glasgow St Luke's 

Tue, May 19 – Lytham, Lowther Pavilion

Wed, May 20 – Leeds, Howard Assembly Room

Fri, May 22 – Bristol - Bristol Beacon (The Lantern)

Sat, May 23 – Cardiff, The Gate

Sun, May 24 – Coventry, Warwick Arts Centre

Tue, May 26 – Wimborne, Tivoli Theatre

Wed, May 27 – Worthing, Pavilion Theatre

Thu, May 28 – London, Union Chapel 

TICKETS AND MORE INFO ON COLIN BLUNSTONE VIA:  https://www.colinblunstone.net/

Interview by Dan Reddick for Return To Sound