Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff.

It’s that time of the season once again.

Now an annual event that has been arriving somewhere around the first bloom of springtime in Nashville, the return of British pop legends The Zombies, playing their fifth area show in six years, remains an occasion for celebration. Founding members Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone are the mainstays in the 21st-century touring version of the band, which formed in 1999 after a chance onstage reunion at a benefit show. Truly, no version of The Zombies could satisfyingly take a concert stage without keyboardist/songwriter Argent and singer Blunstone, though that’s not to minimize the significant contributions of the other three co-founding members, all of whom bonded over music as teenage schoolmates in St. Albans, a town about 20 miles outside London. Argent and Blunstone, joined by surviving original Zombies Chris White and Hugh Grundy, made an especially memorable Nashville stop last year on a U.S. jaunt marking a 50-year milestone: the 1967 creation of their masterful 1968 swan song, Odessey and Oracle.

(Zombies bassist and songwriter Chris White spoke with the Pulse in advance of that show; see that 2017 story here.)

On Saturday, March 17, the current touring lineup will appear at City Winery for a sold-out performance, the sixth Nashville Zombies appearance in all since Argent and Blunstone rejoined forces. In 2004, this writer was fortunate enough to be in the house at B.B. King’s in downtown Nashville for the first local Zombies appearance in nearly four decades, an event that might well have felt momentous for Blunstone, who told the Pulse about a tour stopover he recalled taking place in the mid-’60s.

“We played in Nashville, certainly in the ’60s,” Blunstone begins. “We were touring with The Searchers [the British group whose version of “Needles and Pins” peaked at #13 on the U.S. chart in 1964] and The Beach Boys, and for some reason there was a three- or four-day, maybe even five-day stopover in Nashville. I mean, we had a fantastic time. It was absolutely brilliant.”

The multigenerational present-day incarnation of the band, explains Blunstone, had not played in Nashville prior to its 2004 show. “But the original band had had a wonderful time in Nashville and enjoyed all of that wonderful Southern hospitality, and I remember it vividly,” he says with an enthusiastic flourish. The occasion itself, at least, remains indelible for the singer, if not all the actual specifics.

“My memories are somewhat vague after all this time,” Blunstone says after being invited to elaborate, “but as I remember it we spent most of the days swimming and most of the nights partying! My lasting memory is of Chris Curtis, the leader of The Searchers, spending the whole time in his room. I don’t think there was any air conditioning in the rooms so it would have been unbearably hot, and when after four or five days he did finally emerge to get on the bus he was wearing a long thick black overcoat—which in the scorching heat looked incredibly eccentric!”

Perhaps with these pleasant recollections of younger days somewhere in mind, and certainly aware of the substantial amount of time that had passed since performing classic Zombies songs for fans in world-famous Music City, USA, Blunstone charmingly confessed from the B.B. King’s stage in 2004 that “we can’t believe we’re in Nashville. We’re just these little British chaps.” When reminded of the comment, and apprised of the fact that Nashville fans were at least equally enthralled by the occasion—you’re The Zombies, for crying out loud!—Blunstone let out a hearty laugh.

“It’s funny how you always view yourself in a different way [than others],” Blunstone says, “and I always find it quite difficult if people . . . you know, if people are a little bit impressed if they come to speak to anyone in the band. Because to us, we’re just, really, we’re jobbing musicians. We’re just very grateful to be busy,” he says. “Even after all this time, we’re still out there, and there’s still that interest.”

That interest extends from the band’s best-known 1960s output to 2015’s Still Got That Hunger, a successfully crowd-funded album project that is well represented in the band’s current live show. Somewhat uniquely for a band of The Zombies’ vintage, they’ve released three albums of new material in the 21st century. That’s two more than The Rolling Stones (their 2016 offering Blue and Lonesome is comprised only of blues covers) and three more than The Who (whose last half-dozen releases are live albums). Like their higher-profile and fatter-back-catalogued contemporaries, they’ve centered a recent tour upon the live recreation of a classic album in its entirety (The Who similarly staged 1973’s Quadrophenia while the Stones revisited 1971’s Sticky Fingers), but The Zombies in particular have been focused on pushing their sound forward, perhaps making up for the time lost during their decades-long hiatus.

As for the original Zombies reunion and Odessey and Oracle anniversary tour, which finally wrapped in February, Blunstone says that playing together “quite honestly felt like we’d played [only] a couple of weeks beforehand . . . everything just fell into place. Unfortunately, [original guitarist] Paul Atkinson passed away, you know [in 2004], so it was four of the five original players. I suppose that we got to know one another so well in our formative years that that kind of relationship stays with you forever,” he says. “And it just felt extremely natural to be playing with them. I think we played three or four dates in 2008 [commemorating Odessey’s 40th birthday]. But apart from that, we haven’t played together since 1967.

“I think now, having celebrated that 50th anniversary, it’s time for us to look forward, and just to start writing new songs for a proposed new album,” Blunstone reveals, estimating a roughly 18-month period to write, record and release the anticipated next record. “We’re trying to focus on the future now; we’ve had a wonderful time celebrating the past, and now it’s time to concentrate on the future.”

The Zombies in 2015 (from left): Tom Toomey (guitar), Rod Argent (keyboards), the late Jim Rodford (bass), Colin Blunstone (vocals) and Steve Rodford (drums). Photo by Andrew Eccles.

Of course, as far as the future of the band’s live shows is concerned, it’s inevitable that vintage material will be part of the set list, though a Zombies show (perhaps to the mild disappointment of certain fans) is anything but a straight-up oldies revival. Blunstone notes that “all the songs we’re playing in the show, they all will have a connection to us: they’re all either new songs that we’ve written and recorded, or they’re songs that we recorded way back in the ’60s.” According to the singer, the Bo Diddley classic “Road Runner,” included on The Zombies’ 1965 U.K. debut album, Begin Here, has been added as the opening number to their current set. As well as being a bracing way to kick off a set, the song connects the dots to the band’s early and essential American R&B influences.

In eager acknowledgment of these, Blunstone shares an aside: on the band’s early U.S. tours, he would, he admits, feel “quite guilty” about the enthusiastic crowd response triggered by music that was actually native to American teenagers who were likely hearing it for the first time. “If we were playing a set that had a lot of American rhythm and blues tunes in it, I almost wanted to stop in the middle of a show. Because we would be getting this huge reaction, especially in the ’60s, with the British Invasion, we would be getting a huge reaction with songs like ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ by Smokey Robinson, ‘Got My Mojo Working,’ ‘Road Runner’ . . . it goes on and on. I wanted to stop the show and say, ‘You realize this is your music we’re playing. It’s not our music, it’s your music.’ It had merely gone through a British filter, and we brought your music back to you. I did want to tell people that, and at every opportunity I get, I do tell people that. All British acts were incredibly—of that period and right up to the present day—were incredibly influenced by American music.”

Blunstone speaks the truth, all right, but it’s equally true that the subsequent wave of British acts that included The Beatles, The Zombies, The Who and The Yardbirds left a massive footprint on American musical soil. When the band plays its little-known B-side “I Want You Back Again,” it’s preceded by an explanation from Blunstone that it was reintroduced to the band by none other than the late, great Tom Petty, a self-admitted Zombies aficionado who played the song on his own shows. Petty is only the tip of the iceberg, but his prominence and lasting impact makes him a perfect example of just how influential and beloved The Zombies’ high-quality back catalogue has been, and remains, for passionate music fans across the globe.

Blunstone adds that the band’s current set also includes a song that would seem to come from left field. “We’re doing Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love,’ which might take some people by surprise,” he says. “We recorded it on a live BBC broadcast (in the ’60s), and we used to play it live in our show.” While the Bacharach-penned number’s lounge-jazz vibe, taken at surface level, does indeed seem to be out of sync with more typical Zombies material, be it new or old, there’s nonetheless a clear connecting point: musical sophistication.

Songwriter Rod Argent’s longtime fascination with harmonic complexity, be it drawn from Miles Davis, Burt Bacharach or George Gershwin (whose perennial Porgy and Bess show tune “Summertime“ was the first song The Zombies ever recorded), figures into virtually every aspect of the band’s diverse body of work. Blunstone, in fact, reckons that the primary factor linking the band’s broad stylistic reach and considerable evolution can be traced to Argent’s sophisticated writing, along with that of fellow founding band member Chris White.

“We were just very fortunate to have two prolific and sophisticated writers in the band that only really discovered they could write songs . . . when they were about 18,” Blunstone says. Their record producer, he explains, made a “chance remark“ that the band could, if they wished, write songs for their first recording session, which took place as the result of advancing in a talent contest offering a Decca recording contract as first prize. “And Rod came back a couple of days later and he’d written ‘She’s Not There,’ and I think we knew that was a special song right from the beginning. And both (Rod and Chris) grew as writers,” Blunstone says. “I think Rod was already a pretty sophisticated writer right from the beginning, ’cause he’s just such an incredibly talented musician that anything he writes, you know it’s gonna be probably quite sophisticated. Chris was learning his craft a little bit more over those (early) years, and to me, it all came to fruition when we did those Odessey and Oracle sessions,” Blunstone concludes. Between the two writers, a considerable stretch of musical territory was being covered, a trend that continues with Argent at the songwriting helm, joined on occasion by Zombies past and present.

Says Blunstone of the band’s stylistic breadth, “I do think that that wide spectrum of musical influences was one of the main advantages  of The Zombies and one of the big disadvantages, because it made us sound unique in the way that we took influences from classical music and modern jazz, rhythm and blues, the blues, rock ’n’ roll and pop songs. Right across the spectrum. But also, people in the media like to be able to categorize what kind of music you play. And I think sometimes we confused people, especially in the ’60s. Maybe even when we got back together again,” he muses. “Because we do play music taken from this very wide spectrum of influences.

The Zombies’ current lineup with new bassist Soren Koch second from left. Photo by Marya Glur.

“For instance, when we first got back together again, there were people who were hoping and expecting us to play a very similar kind of music to what we played in the ’60s. But they have to remember . . . we have 50 years of experience to add to those early songs. They’re gonna sound similar, but they won’t sound exactly the same, and we’re not trying to make them sound the same,” says Blunstone with emphasis. “We’re trying to add to them, we’re trying to give them a depth and an extra color that wasn’t there.  . . . And I hope people will enjoy them as songs that were written in the ’60s,” he adds, “but will also enjoy them even more because we’ve given them a little, a bit more depth, maybe just a bit more gloss, that can come with experience.”

Those decades of experience, however beneficial musically, professionally and personally, could not possibly have helped prepare Blunstone or Argent for the shocking news they received from Zombies drummer Steve Rodford on the morning of January 20. His father, Jim Rodford—the band’s longtime bassist and Argent’s first cousin—had died after an accident involving a serious fall. Rodford, older than Argent, was a professional musician who had been instrumental in Argent’s early musical ambitions. Rodford’s band, The Bluetones, loaned their equipment to the fledgling teenage group that would in time become known worldwide as The Zombies.

Rodford also served a lengthy stint as bassist for The Kinks after first co-founding the progressive-leaning post-Zombies quartet Argent, best remembered for the musically adventurous 1972 hit “Hold Your Head Up.” An anchoring number in The Zombies’ live shows, driven by Rodford’s pulsing bass line, “Hold Your Head Up” will perhaps never be quite the same for the band emotionally. But the song’s universally encouraging sentiment (though initially intended as a female empowerment message) couldn’t be more appropriate as the band works through deep grief and takes to the road without their dear friend and musical companion: And if it’s bad, don’t let it get you down / You can take it/ And if it hurts, don’t let them see you cry / You can make it / Hold your head up . . .

Blunstone, who explains that he hasn’t been broaching the subject of Rodford’s passing in interviews unless prompted, responded unguardedly to the Pulse’s condolences regarding the band’s immense loss. “Well, I mean this has just been a terrible blow to us,” he begins. “You know, we’d only been at home from our last American tour for about three days, and it happened on a Friday night/Saturday morning. And I was talking to Jim on the phone Friday evening. I had a long talk with him,” Blunstone recalls. “And I put the phone down, and the next time the phone rang, it was his son, Steve, telling me there’d been this dreadful accident . . . you know, in some respects it was so sudden, and we all knew Jim so well, I’m not sure that it’s really sunk in yet.”

“But we knew that Jim was very much ‘the show must go on’; he was that kind of person. And, you know, we had to make a very quick decision: ‘Are we gonna do this tour? Or are we gonna cancel?’ And we thought Jim would want us to go on and do the tour. And so, we’ve had to go on sort of remote pilot in a way,” Blunstone says, adding that the task has been made less daunting by the band’s brand-new Danish bass player, Soren Koch. “He’s a brilliant player, and a brilliant harmony singer as well. We’d really only had one rehearsal, before we came to the States, and it’s a miracle—he’s just got hold of it, and he’s doing a great job. Of course, we will always miss Jim. There will always be an emptiness in our lives now that he’s gone,” Blunstone says emphatically and emotionally. “But as musicians, it’s our job now to pick up the pieces and get on with it, and the shows have been going really well, and we’ve just been giving it everything we’ve got.”

Noting that every performance during this touring season is being dedicated to their late comrade in arms, Blunstone touchingly adds that “we like to think that he’s looking down on us and taking care of us while we stumble through this tour, um, you know, desperately missing him. And I think he’s helping give to us the strength to get, to get through it.”

Successful bands always have dues to pay in one form or another, and while the younger Zombies had never faced anything as difficult as the loss of an active band member—approaching the eve of a planned overseas tour, no less—the band was given ample opportunities to be hardened by adversity. While their initial deal with Decca Records played almost like a fairy tale, the lumbering ogre of commerce and standard-issue industry protocol would soon enough rear its gnarly head. The failure of the band’s management to properly compensate the young musicians was probably the most heinous act committed against them, yet they faced artistic challenges from the outset of their career.

With a mixture of good humor and the residue of decades-old disbelief, Blunstone unpacks anecdotes that illustrate how cursorily the young band and their musical goals were regarded in the recording studio. Discussing The Zombies’ 1965 track “I Love You,” a Top 20 U.S. hit three years later in a more developed cover version by American one-hit-wonder act People!, Blunstone enthusiastically agrees with the suggestion that the band’s own recording was too rushed to realize its own potential. “Absolutely. We were under incredible pressure,” he says. “Firstly writing, but even recording, you know, everything had to be done very, very quickly. I think that if we had worked on that song a bit more, we could have got more out of it.”

The win-win final scenario is that The Zombies ended up adopting the thoughtfully mapped-out People! arrangement for its 21st-century live version of the song. “In a way,” says Blunstone with a laugh beginning to bubble up, “we’re The Zombies doing a cover version of People! doing a cover version of The Zombies, and [big laugh] . . .  it does get a little bit complicated. But you know, music’s like that. Songs grow over a period of time, and I think you should absorb all the ways that a song grows in your performance, and we’re thrilled to use elements of the People! version,” he affirms. “Because it was a great version.”

In an aside both comical and mildly ironic, Blunstone tosses in a mention of a recent “Got Milk?” TV commercial featuring the version of “I Love You” originally recorded by The Zombies. “It’s not quite as cool as having a hit single, but to have a commercial on national TV, you know, that’s a really exciting thing for a writer and a performer,” says Blunstone. “Although it’s taken a long time to work its way through, we are seeing signs of success with that song some 50 years later, even though it’s in a milk commercial. See, the cream will come to the top [much laughter ensues]. That’s a very bad English joke. Please forgive me!”

Returning to the original subject, Blunstone concurs that the success of the People! version confirms the commercial potential the Chris White composition had possessed from the get-go. “I know, I mean at the time I think it was pretty frustrating—we’d used it as a B-side, and I think at the time we desperately needed a hit single, and there we are, another band covers a B-side of ours. But you know, that’s life in the music business. There’s gonna be lots of ups and lots of downs. And you have to have . . . it’s a strange combination,” Blunstone says, “because you’ve gotta be sensitive enough to write and perform, but you also have to have a toughness to get you through the difficult and challenging periods, and I think that probably was a slightly challenging period.”

“I remember Rod did ‘Got My Mojo Working’ for the first album, and he deliberately sang it in a different way (than in band performances),” Blunstone recalls. “It was one take, and he wanted to go back and sing it in the way that he normally sang it, but the producer we had at the time was fairly dictatorial. And he just said, ‘That’s fine. Just leave it as it is, it’s fine.’ And Rod will still talk about that to this day—‘I wish I’d had another chance to sing “Got My Mojo Working.”’ Even after all this time.”

With a slight chuckle, Blunstone says, “I’ll tell you about another song—‘Tell Her No,’ which went on to be a huge hit in America. We were recording a lot of songs in one evening. I think we probably recorded about five backing tracks in one evening, and I wasn’t involved in the backing tracks. It was getting late, and I fell asleep,” says Blunstone. “And they woke me up to sing ‘Tell Her No.’ And it’s on the second chorus—you know, I was half asleep—I slur the lyric. It doesn’t make any sense. And I said to the producer, ‘Well, listen, I need to go back, because that lyric doesn’t make any sense . . . I slurred it.’ And he said, ‘It’s fine! Don’t worry about it!’ He wouldn’t let me sing it again. That was released, and it was I think a Top 5 single in America! So who knows?

“Sometimes these things can work,” Blunstone allows. “But . . . I think we would have liked to have been more involved in the sound of the records and mixing the records, and generally speaking, I think they would have benefited. If we’d just taken a little more time on the quality of the sound of the recording, I think the tracks would have benefited a lot. We would record, very quickly, and then we were asked to leave while the producer, who was Ken Jones, and the engineer mixed the tracks. We weren’t allowed to stay for the mixing.”

To be fair, not all young bands would necessarily have the talent and vision to participate in production- and post-production-related roles in the studio. At the time, particularly in England, studio roles ranging from producer to lab-coated engineer to lowly assistant tape operator were rigidly defined and performed. But with prodigy Rod Argent deftly arranging musical parts and complex vocal harmonies that his bandmates (most if not all of whom had been church choristers) could execute with skill, this was a band whose gifts and potential belied its youth and relative inexperience. It’s to The Zombies’ credit that its early material overall holds up beautifully, given the constraints they were under. The ultimate proof in the pudding is, of course, the band’s self-produced Odessey and Oracle, a colossal leap forward in terms of production and musical scope.

That artistic triumph, however, was followed by the dull thud of apathy from radio programmers and record buyers alike. Being ahead of one’s time (though Odessey is also an album very much of its time) can also cost an artist dearly. And it did: The Zombies, whose hopes were badly dashed by Odessey’s poor reception, dissolved soon thereafter, leaving all but the songwriting members of the band in financial crisis, as Blunstone explains.

“There were three non-writers in The Zombies, so myself, Hugh Grundy and Paul Atkinson . . . when the band finished we had no choice. We had to get jobs, because we’d been very poorly managed,” he says. “And although we’d had hit records and we’d played all around the world, we never managed to accumulate any financial security. But it happened that Rod and Chris, the writers, they had a different income stream. It came from a different company, who were very, very honest, so Rod and Chris were quite financially secure. But the other three of us, we weren’t. So I spent about nine months just working in an office, in London,” says Blunstone, who went from playing for thousands of fans a night to handling insurance claims for burglary victims.

The epilogue to the story is brighter; Odessey’s closing track, “Time of the Season,” became a smash hit in America about nine months after the band had broken up. This belated success fueled interest in some new recordings, though no further commercial fruit would be forthcoming under The Zombies banner. Blunstone, then too devastated by the band’s dissolution to face the music business as a career option, only gradually allowed his old bandmates to lure him back into the studio. “Slowly but surely,” Blunstone says, “I started recording with Rod and Chris again. And they co-produced my first three albums.”

Blunstone, who tours with his own band when not working with The Zombies, had a successful solo career in Europe, releasing some 20 singles. He was also an in-demand guest vocalist on numerous projects including several for The Alan Parsons Project. Parsons’ platinum-selling 1982 album Eye in the Sky, in addition to spawning the widely played and high-charting title track, houses the modestly successful single “Old and Wise,” featuring a soaring and emotive vocal performance from Blunstone that remains a highlight in a career that’s seen more than a few. In addition to Blunstone’s own remake, half a dozen other covers have since emerged and the song has been sampled in more than a dozen 21st-century hip-hop and electronica versions by artists including Kendrick Lamar and Daft Punk.

While Blunstone may still be most at ease as “a little British chap“ simply feeling fortunate to be a working musician, he and Argent are bona fide musical legends. But while Argent’s career ambitions never lapsed, Blunstone once stood at a crossroads that could have led to something far less satisfying than the career that has ranged from the breakout hit “She’s Not There” in his teens to the sublime, bittersweet “Old and Wise”—a song that still turns up on the set lists of 21st-century Zombies concerts surely undreamt of when Blunstone was recording those earlier works. The vocalist’s eventual choice to return to a musical profession was in fact part of the process of finding his own wisdom. For that matter, though, so was his forced hiatus from performing and recording, which provided a valuable opportunity to get wise before getting old.

“Actually, in a strange way I think I learned quite a lot from my time out of the music business,” Blunstone says thoughtfully. “It gave me a sense of discipline, knowing I had to be in work at a certain time. Up until then I thought that if I arrived somewhere on the correct day I was doing quite well! And because it was a large, very busy office, it helped me get over a period of great sadness after The Zombies finally split,” he says. “I simply didn’t have time to dwell on the past!

“And perhaps most of all, when I saw the celebrations for a man retiring having spent his whole life working from the same desk in the same office, it taught me that working in an office was not for me and that just maybe it was time to start writing and recording again.”

It’s all been part of a more than 50-year odyssey encompassing many times and seasons for Colin Blunstone and his mates. Indeed, Nashville is fortunate to be one of the recurring stops along the way. Welcome back, Zombies. Welcome back, springtime. Y’all make a great pair.

The Murfreesboro Pulse joins the Nashville music community and the many Zombies fans of Middle Tennessee in honoring the life and musical legacy of Jim Rodford. We extend our sympathies to the late Mr. Rodford’s fellow band members, crew, management, staff and family.