I loved this when it came out when I was 11, but it now makes me remember seeing The Zombies at Market Harborough Leisure Centre in 2011.
After he had played his keyboard solo on this, Rod Argent was shaking hands with people in the front row of the audience. I do like small venues.
Also in the band that night was Rod Argent's cousin, the late Jim Rodford. He is also playing on this original recording.
It took 40 years for the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle to be recognised as one of the great albums of the Sixties, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that its opening track wasn't a hit as single.
But Care of Cell 44 sounds like 1967 sunshine in a bottle now: Mellotron, harmonies and a great bass part.
I loved this when it came out as a single in 1972. Almost 40 years later, I saw The Zombies play Market Harborough and Rod Argent shaking hands with the front row of the audience after playing this keyboard solo.
This is beautiful. Sunny Goodge street is a cover of a Donovan song and appeared on Marianne Faithfull's album 1966 North Country Maid.
The Marianne Faithfull site says of it:
Marianne’s two folk albums from the 60's were conceived as a pair. Where her first folk album Come My Way, had largely been compiled from music of the American folk revival, Marianne’s second, released in April 1966 was built around songs from the British Isles.
Rightly hailed as her finest LP of the 60s, North Country Maid conclusively established her as an artist with a unique stylistic approach, and many of its songs (such as Scarborough Fair) were not yet the established folk/pop standards they would soon become.
I recently learnt that Donovan lived in St Albans before fame came calling, and was part of the city's music scene along with the youthful Zombies and Maddy Prior.
You can hear Maddy Prior talking about those days on a recent Word in Your Ear podcast.
Berna León reviews a study of how Britain’s elite continues to reproduce itself through entrenched structures of privilege, despite the appearance of increased meritocracy and diversity.
"It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care ... Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989." Jake Richards introduces his private member's bill.
"Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them." Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party's "rural problem".
Mary Colwell remembers her early encounters with curlews: "I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on."
"Rod Argent was the engine room of the Zombies. He wrote She’s Not There and his playing takes it to another level. It’s very English-sounding, very reserved and melancholy, then out of nowhere he plays this incredible solo that’s soulful but slightly classically influenced. It both fits the song perfectly and takes it somewhere else." Elton John on the piano and organ players who inspired him.
McCartney's father was a trumpet player and pianist who led Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s. He kept an upright piano in the front room, encouraged his sons to be musical and advised McCartney to take piano lessons. However, McCartney preferred to learn by ear. When McCartney was 11, his father encouraged him to audition for the Liverpool Cathedral choir, but he was not accepted. McCartney then joined the choir at St Barnabas' Church, Mossley Hill.
From 1955 to 1959, Richards attended Dartford Technical High School for Boys. He never sat the eleven-plus due to illness. Recruited by Dartford Tech's choirmaster, R. W. "Jake" Clare, he sang in a trio of boy sopranos at, among other occasions, Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II.
His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore "Gus" Dupree, who toured Britain with a jazz big band, Gus Dupree and His Boys, fostered Richards's interest in the guitar. Richards has said that it was Dupree who gave him his first guitar.
His father Lawrence, a foundryman by trade, was a semi-professional musician, playing mainly the saxophone and clarinet. Steve Winwood began playing piano at the age of four while interested in swing and Dixieland jazz, and soon started playing drums and guitar. He was also a choirboy at St. John's Church of England, Perry Barr.
His father, Les Argent, was an aeronautical engineer who machined parts at the De Havilland aircraft factory; he had also been the leader of two semi-professional dance bands, the Les Argent Quartet and Les Argent and his Rhythm Kings. Although his father did not teach Argent music, he was raised hearing him playing the upright piano in the family home.
He decided to become a musician "aged eight or nine", and as a child, he sang as a chorister in the St Albans Cathedral Choir.
For some reason I 've been reminded of this song by the week's political events.
Written by Russ Ballard and released in 1970, Liar was Argent's first single. It was not a hit, but Three Dog Night took it into the US top 10 the following year.
Similarly, when I saw the Zombies play Market Harborough Leisure Centre, Rod Argent was at pains to point out that God Gave Rock and Roll to You, later a big hit for Kiss, was an Argent song first.
Quite why Argent weren't more successful is a bit of a mystery to me, but you can enjoy their two biggest hits elsewhere on this blog:
After seeing the modern incarnation of the Zombies play Market Harborough 10 years ago I wrote:
We discover popular music backwards as well as forwards. I loved Argent's Hold Your Head Up when I was 12 and Colin Blunstone's early solo work reminds me of listening to Radio Luxembourg under the covers at the same age. But I doubt that I had then heard of the Zombies - I can remember my surprise at learning that Carlos Santana was not the writer of She's Not There.
And here is that Santana version. It reached number 11 in the UK singles chart in 1977, one place better than the original version managed.
Talking Pictures TV is always discussed by the press in terms of nostalgia, but the old British films it specialises in are not as tame and twee as we are told.
Matthew Sweet once wrote:
Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back.
Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags.
It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails.
And what strikes me about those top-of-the-bill films is how vividly the villains are painted. Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, for instance, remains sexy and dangerous more than 70 years on.
The good young character he is contrasted with, a trainee constable played by Jimmy Hanley, appears utterly insipid, but then I suspect he did when the film was released.
Other villains from this era to seek out are Peter Sellers (playing it utterly straight and with a Liverpool accent) in Never Let Go (1960) and Ronald Ward in Ealing's racing drama The Rainbow Jacket (1954):
"There's a certain gentleman I know - using the term in its widest sense - who wouldn't be at all pleased if you were to win the Leger on Fair Noon."
When I wrote Caroline Goodbye, it was about my girlfriend, the Bond girl Caroline Munro. I didn’t want everyone to know who it was about, so I tried to find another name, but nothing fitted.
I admitted defeat and thought that only my close friends would know it was Caroline. However, a journalist found out and I ended up with a two-page spread in the Daily Express, so the secret was out.
Spencer Davis Group - Georgia On My Mind
"I can't overestimate the effect that Stevie Winwood's amazing voice had, and his wonderful soulful piano and organ playing. He came out of nowhere and blew people away. I remember Paul Jones [Manfred Mann singer] saying, 'I've been in a blues band for four years, and suddenly this 17-year-old-kid comes out and he sounds like Ray Charles, and he plays like him!' What a talent: to emerge fully-formed at that age was extraordinary, and it had a huge effect on every musician around that time."I am reminded of the reason Eric Clapton gave for playing a Stratocaster:
Hank Marvin was the first well known person over here in England who was using one, but that wasn't really my kind of music. Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.The version of Georgia on My Mind that Argent chooses is not the live one with Winwood on the organ that I always listen to, but this studio version where he is playing the piano.
"We needed a piano player so I brought Steve along. He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open.
Because he was under-age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."
I’m feeling quite emotional remembering all the many years we’ve been touring and recording which have brought us to this career defining moment!
I would like to give my most sincere thanks to all our loyal and tenacious fans who have supported us so wonderfully through the weeks of the fan vote and to all the members of the Rockhall who have voted for us to join this most exalted institution!We don't hear much about it here in Britain, but the Hall of Fame does appear to be a big deal in the US.
It is with deep sadness that I learned this morning that my dear cousin and lifelong friend, Jim Rodford, died this morning after a fall on the stairs. More details are not yet known about the exact cause of death.
Jim was not only a magnificent bass player, but also from the first inextricably bound to the story of The Zombies. An enormous enabler for us. He was actually the first person ever to be asked to join the band, way back in 1961.
Because he was in the top St.Albans band of the time (The Bluetones), he turned us down at first, but from day one helped us chart our course. He loaned us The Bluestones' state of the art gear for our very first rehearsal, arranged the rehearsal space, and even showed Hugh the first kick and snare drum pattern our original drummer ever learned.
He was responsible for the first song I ever wrote (for The Bluetones - which they recorded); the person who organised most of our early gigs, and the very first person outside the group ever to hear - and pass judgement on - our first record, "She's Not There"(he loved it).
Years later, he became founder member, with me, of Argent; and then, for eighteen years, throughout a hugely successful American period for them, was bass player for The Kinks. ...
Jim was a wonderful person, loved by everybody. When Colin and I, shocked and hardly able to talk, shared the news this morning, Colin said " I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him..."
He will be unbelievably missed. Goodnight and God Bless dear friend. - Rod xI heard Jim Rodford play when the Zombies came to Market Harborough in 2011. He is in the centre of the rather indistinct photograph above.
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