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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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THE ZOMBIES Shepherds Bush Empire, London,
March 9th 2008 |
| It’s
the time of the season. There’s one mother
of a millennial storm forecast for the UK, and London
is red on the map, 60 per cent chance of severe
damage and disruption says the risk-averse Met
Office. Recommendation? Stay at home, lock your
doors, keep away from windows, buy candles, drink
hot drinks. Well, it evidently hasn’t worked
for everyone, as the Shepherds Bush Empire is almost
bursting with brave or foolhardy adventurers who’ve
all come out, forty years on, to witness a piece
of 1968 that never quite happened. |
| It’s
the
Zombies (well almost, as Keith Airey
is taking the place of the late Paul Atkinson on
guitar), the great lost band of the sixties, performing
in its entirety their now much-lauded album Odessey
and Oracle. Now don’t let the spell checker
fool you, Serge – the story is that the guy
who designed the long player’s suitably ‘psychedelic’
cover couldn’t spell Odyssey, and by the time
the error was discovered it was too late to fix
it. Anyway it’s a piece now regarded as a
landmark album – straddling the Beach Boys
and Brian Wilson on the one hand and the Beatles
and Lennon and McCartney (sorry Sir Paul, I mean
McCartney and Lennon) on the other. |
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| Listening
to the album I wouldn’t quite agree –
the songs aren’t as strong overall as their
counterparts, and the album lacks the coherency
that others – notably Sergeant Pepper, offered.
But that’s not to say that it isn’t
very good. And as the band had split up before it
was released (no-one will quite say why, but they
were clearly hard-up and there was probably some
jealousy between the guys who had the song- writing
credits - organist Rod
Argent and bass player Chris White - and those
that didn’t, Atkinson, drummer Hugh Grundy
and stellar vocalist Colin
Blunstone), the opportunity to see it performed
live is too hard to resist. |
| That’s
not that the Zombies haven’t toured of late
– Argent and Blunstone, both of course with
their own successful solo careers, have been fronting
a Zombies ‘touring band’ – I suppose
a sort of self-tribute outfit - for a few years,
with Kinks veteran Jim Rodford on bass, his son
Steve on drums, and Airey on guitar. |
| And
this is what kicks the evening off with a rather
eclectic and not entirely satisfactory selection
of songs like ‘I love you’ (a long-forgotten
B-side from 1965), Ray Charles’ ‘Sticks
and stones’ (one of the R&B standards
that had made up much of their original repertoire)
and even ‘What becomes of the broken hearted’,
during which the audience positively flinched when
asked to sing along (at 8.30 on a Sunday night?).
Blunstone was then accompanied by Argent and a string
quartet through some of his hits – and by
this time it was obvious that this most deliberate
of singers was really starting to find his voice
– notably with the gorgeous ‘Misty roses’.
I can’t actually believe I wrote that because
I used to detest the then impossibly tight-trousered
Blunstone when I was at school, but his voice was
simply magical, and you could, as they say, have
heard a pin drop when he sang this and, of course,
‘Say you don’t mind’. Argent then
had his turn, finishing predictably enough with
‘Hold your head up’. |
|
Colin Blunstone |
| To
be honest the first half probably left a few of
us wondering if we might not have been better advised
to follow the advice of the Met Office and stay
at home – but we shouldn’t have worried.
The Zombies, and Odessey, was introduced by Al Kooper,
famous, amongst other things, for his Hammond organ
part in Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a rolling
stone’, and with respect to this evening,
for getting the album released in the United States,
where ‘Time of the season’ became a
huge hit, ending up, as many of us will remember,
on The Rock Machine Turns You On, the first sampler
album. They took the stage to an ovation, Blunstone
looking nervous and like a Brand Ambassador for
Grecian
2000, Grundy invisible behind his drums, a greying
but hirsute Argent bouncing with the enthusiasm
of a schoolboy, and a portly White defiantly shouting
his sixties credentials by having an Esso
tiger’s tail hanging from his bass. Assisting
on keyboards and vocals was Darian Sahanaja, sometime
Musical Director to Brian Wilson and leader of ‘Powerpop’
band the Wondermints. |
| Well,
apart from a few guitar notes I didn’t notice
a fault with the performance, and the harmony parts
if anything sounded better than they do on the album.
Blunstone’s voice just continued to amaze
and his presence managed to make even the weaker
material on the album transcend a sixties time-trap.
Some of the songs, ‘Changes’ and (of
course) ‘Time of the season’ really
stood out, as did the anti-war ‘Butcher’s
tale’, very well sung by White, with a resonance
for 2008 that he could not have imagined when he
wrote it. It’s a short album, so it’s
a short set, even if Argent is allowed a slightly
self-indulgent (but thoroughly enjoyable) solo on
‘Time of the season’. |
| The
encores, ‘Tell her no’ and ‘She’s
not there’ were simply a prelude to a long,
and much-deserved standing ovation for these surviving
pioneers of pop. And as we ventured out into a windswept
west London one thought continued to puzzle me:
where did these songs come from? What transformed
a pretty good R&B covers band into mould-breaking,
and mould-shaping, musicians? Just what happened
forty-odd years ago to open a Pandora’s box
of beat music and redefine the face of popular music?
And to help you find the answer, I suggest you wear
a pretty floral shirt, put a nicely-scratched copy
of Odessey on your Dansette
record-player, pour yourself a large Scotch and
soda, light up a slim panatella, and ponder. -
Nick Morgan (concert photographs by Kate) |
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