Colin Blunstone amused to be a museum exhibit
HE might have carved his own place in pop music history with timeless hits such as She’s Not There, Time of The Season and Say You Don’t Mind, and been inducted alongside his bandmates in The Zombies into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But Colin Blunstone seems wryly amused at the thought of now being a museum exhibit.
“It’s a little strange, I was certainly never expecting it in my early life,” says the softly-spoken singer, contemplating the fact that his band have been commemorated in their home city St Albans’ museum and art gallery. “But it does make me smile because I can remember when I bought my first guitar with my parents and that guitar is in the exhibition. It’s called a Framus Atlantis, it was made in East Germany and it was an acoustic guitar.
“It was difficult for them to afford to buy me a guitar and I remember my dad saying to me on a serious note, ‘If you can just learn a few chords on this’. He was worried that it was going to be a three-day wonder and I would lose interest in it. I’m still playing guitar 60 or 70 years later, but if he’d have known then that that guitar was going to end up in a museum I don’t think he would’ve believed it. Neither would I.”
Blunstone feels The Zombies have hit their creative stride again with Different Game, their fourth album since Blunstone and Rod Argent reunited at the turn of the Millennium. “It has changed a few times since we started again in 1999, but I think this incarnation of the band is very special,” says the 78-year-old. “The reactions we get in concert are phenomenal. The majority of the tours we’ve done since we got back together have been in America and we’re really seeing something very special build over there. We got a sense of it when we toured in the UK in the spring last year, we were getting reactions that I don’t think we’ve ever got before and it’s really exciting to be in a situation like that.”
Being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the US, the country where they had their greatest success in the 1960s with the number one singles She’s Not There and Time of the Season, was another feather in their cap. “It’s incredibly prestigious in America,” he says. “I know that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing here, but it’s something I’m thrilled to have been involved with. On the night of the induction we played in front of 17,000 people at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. We were inducted along with Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Roxy Music, Radiohead, Def Leppard and The Cure. It’s a night I’ll never forget.”
This year is the 60th anniversary of The Zombies signing to Decca Records and releasing She’s Not There. Being part of the so-called British Invasion of the American charts did not strike Blunstone as exceptional until years later, he admits.
“It’s funny but when you’re young I think you tend to accept the things that are happening far more naturally than you do when you’re older,” he says. “I think you question things a lot more when you’re older. So I look back and I’m intrigued that we very much took it day by day.
“In the spring and early summer of 1964 we were playing local venues in and around St Albans and by Christmas 1964 we were playing in New York at the Brooklyn Fox with some of our American heroes – although that show did keep us on our toes a bit. We had to follow Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles and I have to tell you they were sensational and they brought the house down.”
With their music somewhere between the beat groups, R&B, psychedelia, baroque pop and proto-progressive rock, The Zombies were a difficult band to pigeonhole. Blunstone believes that’s where record labels struggled to market them. “It wasn’t easy to describe our kind of music,” he says. “To have a unique sound can be a great plus in a career, but it also can be a disadvantage because if people don’t know how to describe your kind of music, you’ll find that the media gets confused.”
The band began to fall apart during the making of their second album Odessey and Oracle at Abbey Road Studios in London in 1967. By the time it was released in April 1968, Blunstone, Argent, Paul Atkinson, Chris White and Hugh Grundy had gone their separate ways and were unable to promote the single Time of the Season, which became their second US number one. Nevertheless Blunstone is heartened that decades later the record has become an acknowledged classic.
The Zombies play at Leeds City Varieties on May 27.