Interview With The Zombies’ Rod Argent On His Timeless Music Career
| 15th September 2015
Music veteran and icon: Rod Argent helped co-found the British rock band The Zombies in 1961.
Rod Argent has had a colourful and expansive career that has seen him being hailed an iconic and influential figure in the music industry and a talented audio veteran and expert. Having achieved more than what most artists hope for with famous hits such as ‘Time of the Seasons‘ and ‘She’s Not There’, with The Zombies, a rock band Rod was vocalist and pianist for after leading it alongside fellow vocalist Colin Blunstone in 1961, and then securing success with his own band, Argent, which he formed in 1969 following The Zombies’ split, Rod is showing no signs of slowing down professionally.
Double Act: Rod Argent played piano and organ and sang in The Zombies, while Colin Blunstone helped him lead the band and later took over as lead singer.
“You can’t go out and really have too much to drink every night after the gigs because you just won’t last. It seems to take about four times as long to bounce back now!” the singer jokes, with a knowing laugh. “At the same time if you look after yourself, like Colin who looks after his voice, he’s singing now as he was, he sings great on this new album. And I think that’s a good testament, he’s just turned 70 as have I and I can sing higher now than I could when I was younger. I think if you work at it and it’s still the most important thing to you and you look after yourself then you can do that. But all the sort of madness after the gigs has stopped now,” he adds, hinting that his touring habits have tamed a bit in his later years.
Lengthy career: The Zombies have been performing on and off since they formed in 1969, their music enduring the test of time.
Indeed, the musical icon must have taken care of himself well, with The Zombies, who have enjoyed many reincarnations and reunions since their split in 1968, set to release their hotly anticipated sixth studio album, ‘Still Got That Hunger’ on October 9th, which will be complemented by a full UK Tour for the first time, kicking off on November 10th, playing at Manchester Club Academy, on December 9th.
Still Got That Hunger: The Zombies aren’t showing signs of slowing down, with their first full UK tour kicking off on November 10th.
Much akin to the title of his band’s new album, Rod still has a powerful zest for making music. “It’s great to make as much money as possible but the first thrust of what you do is always got to be, I feel, to make something work, to be enthusiastic about something and to get excited about the whole process of writing a song or recording a song. That’s why doing a new album like the one we’ve just done is really exciting for us because it means that it feels like a privilege to be at this age and still be able to get excited and feel like there’s a path forward and that you can expand things.”
‘Still Got That Hunger’ promises to be a flawless blend of timeless rock opera, the album track ‘Chasing the Past’ having debuted on BBC 6 Music Radcliffe and Marconi show on July 29th, setting the perfect multifaceted tone of the album and serving as testament to the group’s musical craftsmanship. Rod, who penned nine out of the ten tracks on the album explains that what makes this album special is that to create it, The Zombies went back to their roots in terms of recording techniques:
“We wanted to make sure that in the rhythm section everyone was all recorded together at the same time in the same room. It’s the first time I’ve done anything outside my own studio in quite a long time. We’ve got a producer called Chris Potter and we went into a brilliant vintage studio, with wonderful vintage gear, in Richmond and we laid the tracks down altogether. Colin’s vocal mixes were computed but always live vocals so it was always him reacting with us and then we did the harmonies afterwards. But it was that real feeling of doing things how we had to do it in 1964 because there was no other way of doing it in those days!” the music veteran adds with a reminiscent chuckle.
Separate Success: Rod Argent enjoyed success with his band Argent from 1969-1976 following the original split of The Zombies.
“We only had 4 tracks in those days so you had to do it that way but it was really freeing actually being able to do things in that way and getting a real feeling of spark of the musicians working together and constructing the songs together. So it was a very interesting experience, and we were very excited about the results. It sounds great and we’re really really excited about it!” Rod enthuses.
Modestly, the rock icon is still amazed at his band’s continued success.“We were in the States last year and at the end of the summer tour we did a festival at the Santa Monica Pier. Now, admittedly it was a free festival but we had the biggest ever audience there. We had between 17 and 22 thousand people there. It was just extraordinary to think that that could happen at this stage and that was the biggest audience that we’ve ever played to, apart from the Philippines audience way back in 1967. So the feeling that you can still move forward and that it’s important for you to do that creatively- I think that is part of something which keeps things fresh and honest for other people.”
But with being such a rare musical gem to have remained at the height of pop culture for so long, performing at this year’s Glastonbury festival and even the likes of Eminem having sampled ‘Time of the Season’, what has helped make The Zombie’s music withstand the test of time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Yl8g8PNvw
“I always remember when Chris White, the original base player with The Zombies, first called me up in 1978 and said ‘You know ‘Odessey and Oracle‘ that album that we had out in 67?’ I said ‘Yeah’ and he said: ‘do you know that’s becoming a real cult album with young people?’ and I thought ‘no it’s not’ but he proved me wrong. I found out it had started to and people like Paul Weller had said it was his favourite album of all time, something he said again a few weeks ago, actually and I realised that that was true.
“Now I think there are several factors there one is the fact that when people like Paul Weller discover it and then at the time turned on a whole new generation of kids by saying ‘this is my favourite album.’ It meant that they started listening to it and getting turned on to it and then people like Dave Grohl saying the album changed their life, I think that has a constantly turning over effect.
Influenced: Dave Grohl told Scandanavian TV that The Zombie’s ‘She’s Not There’ was the track that changed his life.
“But I think another thing is, and this is only a theory, that we never tried to be fashionable, like in 1964 we never thought ‘OK what’s really selling a hit single now? What we’ve got to do is get to the hook in 30 seconds or we’ve got to do this thing musically because that’s what everyone’s doing at the moment’. We never did that, we only ever really approached it from enthusiasm and trying to make something work for our sound. In the short term I think some of that worked against us because some of our records were a bit unusual like ‘She’s Not There’ or ‘Time of the Season’ and took a while to actually take off but I think when they do take off it means that they don’t date maybe as much as some of the other contemporary records did. People of this generation can make a listen to ‘She’s Not There’ or something or ‘Time of the Season’ and it does seem to still mean something to people.”
Enduring the test of time means Rod and The Zombies have witnessed a lot of changes to the musical industry over the years, including the advent of the internet, streaming and the overwhelming presence of mobile phones at gigs.
“When that first happened with mobile phones I was appalled I thought ‘oh my God we’re going to have all this terrible footage everywhere, awful sound etc, etc. but it’s worked in totally the opposite way to what I thought it would work. It means that all over the world really people can, if they’re thinking about coming to see us, check out some of the Youtube footage and they can see that we can still play, that we can actually get up on stage at our age, which is a huge advantage I think and in fact as far as we’re concerned it’s spread the word,” concedes Rod, admitting that touring in the age of mobile phones “feels exactly the same as when it did when we were 18- years-old, absolutely no different,” which is a “hugely energising thing, particularly when there’s a younger component in the audience” to break up the “tedious” travelling that touring entails.
But with all these successes already under his belt, does the gifted vocalist believe he has peaked? Nope, he doesn’t believe peaking. “I don’t think of things in those terms, it’s always about getting excited for the next piece of material and we’ve managed to get an album down that’s really good, that feels every very exciting and I just want to try and make sure we get it on the radio. I love the fact that you know you hear’ Time of the Season’ all the time and ‘She’s Not There’ even over here on the radio but if I hear something new that we’ve done on the radio it’s a huge amount more of a thrill and it always feels like that about if something is reacting to it, liking it and sometimes being really moved by it.
“We played in the Philippines a couple of weeks ago and there was a girl that came along, who was the daughter of one of the people that came to the show and we met her, she was quite a well-known person, she came back stage and she said ‘I’ve brought my daughter along. She didn’t want to come, she’d never really heard of you and didn’t want to know’ she said but then she told us that her daughter has said she had cried! We played a track from ‘Odessey and Oracle’, ‘A Rose for Emily’ and she said ‘Oh my God I just cried in that song’ and she became a huge fan! Now if you can actually somehow, with this weird thing that’s called music, which I’ve never really understood, how you can have a series of vibrations-which is what notes are- that go out there and you can alter one note in this complicated sequence and it can leave somebody cold or you can have one note different and it can move someone to tears, that’s a purely magical thing. If you’re able to actually do that and have that effect, just occasionally then that feels like ‘making it’ to a huge degree to me.”