Over half a century on from their formation, the psychedelic and electrifying sound of The Zombies still roars out from concert halls, still animates young hedonists, and still proves enduring and precious at home, and on a global scale.
From St Albans schoolboys, to breaking into the top of the US charts with hits like ‘She’s Not There’ and ‘Time of the Season’, various line ups have followed, along with hiatuses, reformations, the tragic loss of former band members, and large success with solo projects like Argent and super groups like Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.
The Zombies stand today as a national treasure, awakening many musicians to the possibilities of their art, from the likes of Dave Grohl and Belle & Sebastian, to Wales’ very own Super Furry Animals, they are truly a band that transcend generations and borders.
I spoke to founding member Rod Argent ahead of their Cardiff date, about their recent LP Still Got That Hunger and the band’s musical process.
So last month your released your newest album ‘Still Got That Hunger’. How has the reception been?
“We were in the states for the first six weeks it came out, and we had absolutely stunning reviews, both for the album and for the shows we did over there, from everyone from The Washington post and The Huffington Post to Rolling Stone. We’ve had some absolutely wonderful early reactions actually.”
Do you feel it’s going back more to The Zombies’ roots, similar to early works like ‘Oddessey and Oracle’ or do you feel like it’s a progression of what you’ve been doing with other studio albums since then?
“It’s what we are now, I mean we would never try and recreate anything really, but in the same token we’ve recorded it in an old fashioned way, quite deliberately. We recorded in the studio with everyone in the same room at the same time, rather than just layering tracks and building up tracks in a way that is often done now. We went back to the old fashioned way so that everyone can hear the notes that everyone else is playing, every moment and respond to them. Even the guide vocals went down at the same time, they were supposed to be guide vocals, but in the end it worked out so well that they became master vocals. It’s really just about as live as you can make a studio album really. Even the solos, which we intended to really look at with a microscope the following week, were done live in the studio, so it became very much more a process of capturing the very best performance on the day, in the way that things always used to be…you had to do it that way then. That was a deliberate way of going about things, it meant finding a studio where there was a fine Steinway piano, one that had the capabilities of us all being able to control what we were hearing and put everything down at the same time, it was a great experience.”
What’s your process when writing the material, are you writing it out on the road? Has there been development over time or is writing a Zombies song very much the same as when you first started out in the 60s?
“I’ve always written the same way really, and that is by getting excited about the beginnings of the idea, whether it’s a lyrical idea or a musical idea; a chord sequence or a fragment of a melody or a fragment of lyrics, or an idea behind the song and then just really getting to the point where it starts to get exciting and then just making it work. That’s really a very exciting moment when it really feels that it starts to work. The same goes for when you take the musical idea into the band and the process of it starting to gel and really working together as you build up the structure of the song. You know that’s really very exciting, but that’s really why I’m doing this, why I continue to do it really personally. The process hasn’t really changed, it’s how I’ve always written, right from the first song I ever wrote, well in fact the second song I ever wrote was She’s Not There, so that was about 1964 and I only know one way to write really. I can never write when we’re actually touring, I cant do that, I’ve never been able to do that. I was really pleased with the whole process and very excited throughout.”
Have you found that with the kind of shows you’re playing now, when you’re actually gearing yourself up to perform, that it’s natural for you?
-I mention the sets I’d watched from their performances on KEXP and at SXSW, and the natural confidence that seems to beam out of Argent when let loose on the keys.
“As long as I feel in my comfort zone, as long as I feel we have the control over the parameters and we’re happy with what we’re listening to and how we’re playing, but I get nervous when I’m outside my comfort zone, or I don’t feel in control of what’s going on, maybe you’re at a festival and you can’t hear the monitors properly, so you don’t quite know what you’re playing, etc. Those are the things that make me feel nervous, but I don’t really get stage nerves very much at all now, if we’re playing within our comfort zone. “
Have you included a lot of old material during the recent tours or is it specifically the new album you’re promoting?
“No no no no! Thing is we’re really, really happy to play any or all of the old stuff, as long as it’s within the context of feeling we’ve got a path. So we will be doing four or five new songs but we’ll also be doing things that you’d expect like She’s Not There, Time of the Season, Tell Her No, and we’ll be doing some older Zombies stuff that we’ve probably never played live first time around and that’s exciting too, that’s a process of rediscovery.”
“There’s one track on the new album which is actually a remake of an old single called I Want You Back Again. We did that because we actually heard a version a couple of years ago, Tom Petty did it on an album, and we thought ‘This sounds great! Why aren’t we doing that?’ We’d never played it live though before so once we started doing it on stage we were very true to our original template of the song, but at the same time by playing it on stage it naturally seizes itself and develops itself a couple of steps further, we thought we’d love to actually just record and rework, and that’s the one song we did, so that shows the process that quite often we look for older material that maybe we never played, and that becomes quite exciting as well to rediscover that and get it in the set.”
“We’ll also be doing some of the solo stuff that’s been very successful for us, like I produced a song of Colin’s called Say You Don’t Mind, which was a huge hit in Europe, we do that on stage. We’ll be doing I Don’t Believe in Miracles another one of Colin’s, and Hold Your Head Up, the Argent song which was a top 5 hit, which also strangely enough wasn’t written by him, it was written by Chris White, the original bass player in The Zombies. So that has a real link to The Zombies, it’s a very broad spectrum, we even sometimes do an Alan Parsons song that Colin recorded, Old and Wise, which is really popular, so there’s loads of stuff people will be quite surprised that they recognise, as well as the new stuff that is essential for us to do from the album.”
I was just wondering are there any bands or acts that have really interested you recently?
“I’m very bad at this kind of thing I have to say, it’s probably something to do with age. They’re not a new band, but one of the bands I really really enjoyed not that long ago when I heard them was Kings of Leon. One of my favourite singers from the 60s was Stevie Winwood, especially his early stuff with Spencer Davis, and it feels to me like the singer in Kings of Leon has that same sort of R&B influence in his voice, which almost every band had back in the 60s, butyou don’t hear so much now, and I love it when I hear that. There was just something about their music, from when I first heard it that really quite turned me on actually.”
The Zombies, The Globe, Cardiff, Wed 3 Dec. Tickets: £20. More info here. 2015 LP Still Got That Hunger is out now.
words HANNAH SAUNDERS
photos JACOB BLICKENSTAFF; ANDREW ECCLES