The Zombies Odessey & Oracle 40th Anniversary Concert at the Hammersmith Apollo

by Parsley on Tue, 2009/05/05 - 2:44pm Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK – NORBERT J. HETHERINGTON REPORTING
Concert Review : The Zombies, Odessey & Oracle, 40th Anniversary Concert, Hammersmith Apollo, 25/04/09

‘Nothing succeeds like success’, or so the saying goes. Try telling that to The Zombies, a five piece UK band whose sixties’ tenure spanned barely five years from 1964 to 1968. Their ‘success’ was their first single ‘She’s Not There’ which was a worldwide number one in 1964 from July in the UK to October in the US. Their label Decca booted them out after nine failed attempts to emulate that success.

Fast forward forty years on, and here I am watching them playing one of those ‘album’ concerts, recreating their April 1968 second and final album Odessey & Oracle, a record whose quality and success still seem respectively to inhabit different solar systems.

The band’s reformation has been a slow genesis with members guesting alongside lead singer Colin Blunstone from the early days of his rejuvenated gigging career in London clubs in the 1990s. Perhaps it is their likeable innocent appearance, perhaps the simple beauty of the songs they perform, perhaps their incongruously macabre name; Colin Blunstone’s angelic and powerful vocals, Rod Argent’s bluesy Hammond-rooted keyboard manner, Chris White’s melodic bass riffs and Hugh Grundy’s metronomic stutter; maybe the combination is too good to be true. It could be the academic weight of their combined 50 exam qualifications, maybe the God of Record Success just got peed off with them for not employing a cover designer who could spell Odyssey.

Whatever the reason for its lack of commercial success, this album of songs has continued to dance regally beyond the ears of a fickle public for over forty years. Even now a few looks around the hall reveal empty seats at the back (though there are still more here to enjoy the gig than probably bought the album on its original UK release back in April 1968).

They’ve borrowed a replica keyboard for Chris White’s ‘Butcher’s Tale’ and Rod Argent has hired a cumbersome and bulky mellotron for its many featured sections on the album. Argent does the talking as if he’s chatting to a few mates in a local pub,

He bemoans the loss of the band’s original guitarist Paul Atkinson who died in July 2007 (Atkinson later worked in A & R, and was credited with the signing of ABBA, Bruce Hornsby and Patti Smith) but welcoming his own cousin and Kinks’ bassist Jim Rodford, the keyboardist from Brian Wilson’s live Smile project Darian Sahanaja and guest guitarist Keith Airey. All these joined the first half of the concert, showcasing old Zombies’ and Argent material like ‘Tell Her No’ and ‘Hold Your Head Up’. For Blunstone’s ‘Say You Don’t Mind’ a string quartet is produced at the concert just for that one song, exactly as featured on the original. If I had planned the set list, I could hardly have picked more favourites.

The Zombies broke America in 1964 with their first number one, just weeks after the arrival of Beatlemania, and Odessey and Oracle emerged less than a year after Sgt Peppers. The Zombies have lived for forty years with this album of songs but have never had the chance to perform them to their audience. People my age have also carried these songs around as music in their head, certain they would never seen them performed live. But here they are, and the familiar bouncy piano intro takes us into ‘Care of Cell 44’, sung as breathily and cheerfully as Blunstone did back in August 1967. On the CD of the album you can hear him breathe and his lips part during the piano intro. I can’t quite pick that up today, but the hired mellotron perfectly reproduces that scratchy chordal metallic glow throughout.

The next song that always gets me on the album and certainly did this time is ‘Beechwood Park’, the flange guitar reproduced perfectly by Keith Airey and the choral harmonies (aided by Jim R and Darian S) of ghostly-accurate goosebump-inducing quality. Hearing it as it was intended to be heard this far down the line feels like suddenly being lowered into the throes of passionate guiltless sex with a long-forgotten girlfriend.

I looked around and the faces of people across the aisles held the same expressions of unabashed reverence. Then straight into the broken melodies of ‘Brief Candles’ and Chris White’s bass riffs interspersed by the piano pieces for Blunstone’s dreamy vocal. The delivery of ‘This Will Be Our Year’ was also indulged with a brass section. ‘Time of the Season’, the last track on the album, was only a challenge as far as the vocals were concerned, but still rang out like a massive choir. A strange uncategorisable song, not really belonging to any obvious era, and sounding fresh in 2009, having utterly failed on release in the UK in April 1968.

It could all have been so different if they’d had that missing ingredient, success. But as the band wave goodbye to their ecstatic audience, I’m thinking that with that additional ingredient could have come the products of subsequent excess: arrogance, complacency, cynicism, drugs, early deaths… We would still have had a Zombies ‘Odessey & Oracle’, but I would never have seen them forty years on at the Hammersmith Apollo, determinedly striving with magnificent success to recreate the beauty of one of the greatest pop albums in history. Because of this I haven’t had to endure a soulless stadium concert of contract filling follow-up tracks or be forced to wonder where it all went wrong. It didn’t.

The Zombies remain as exciting and inspired as they were when they first went into Abbey Road and Olympic Studios in 1967 to record the album as twenty-two year olds. This evening it’s like time has stopped for forty years and nothing’s changed. I’ve rarely had such a full and sustained delicious musical experience at a gig.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [previous contributions available via www.gardenrecords.com]