I heard your first studio session, in 1964, involved a drunk engineer who'd been at a wedding?
It really did, yeah! A very fine engineer actually; we just got him on the wrong day. It was Terry Johnson. I was reading something about Glyn Johns [Tape Op #109], and he mentioned working with Terry Johnson. We loved what he did on the recording, it's just that he was completely abusive; he was shouting and screaming at us! I know that Colin said, "If this is what being a professional musician is, I don't want to know! This is going to be a very short career for me." The piece of luck was that Terry passed out completely, and the four of us carried him upstairs into a London taxi and sent him home. The taxi driver saw to him somehow. He came back the next day and mixed "She's Not There." Gus Dudgeon did take over for the main part of the session. That was genuinely Gus's first foray into being the prime engineer in a session!
Obviously his career went on to be spectacular.
It was. I know.
That was at Decca's West Hampstead studios?
That was the one, yeah.
Was your first album, Begin Here, really done in a two-day session?
The first four tracks that we ever recorded were done in a one-day session. We started into the afternoon and went on until about three o'clock in the morning, as I remember. We recorded "It's Alright With Me," which was the first song I remember writing, "She's Not There," which was the second song that I'd written, "You Make Me Feel Good," which was a Chris White song that turned out to be the B-side, and [George Gershwin's] "Summertime." We recorded those four tracks completely in that one session. The next day we weren't even allowed there. We had a very autocratic record producer who didn't want us around when he mixed, but that's how things were done then. I remember Russ Ballard – from my second band, Argent – knew The Beatles from when they were semi-pro. He was wandering around the West End in London, and they were walking the other way down the street. They said, "Oh, hello Russ. We just recorded our first album yesterday." They did the whole thing in one or two days. That's how records were done then.
Right. So quick.
But I'll tell you what, we tried to go back to some of that feeling when we did our last album, Still Got That Hunger, in 2015. We wanted to go back to this feeling of capturing a performance and not overlaying and overlaying. We got producer Chris Potter [The Verve and Richard Ashcroft], and we ensconced ourselves in the studio. He was in the control room, and we concentrated on performing together. We got Colin to sing guide vocals, which all turned out to be master vocals. The whole thing worked so beautifully. We didn't even use a click track, which Chris Potter was very worried about. He said, "Look, we've got to use a click track if we want to add things later." We said, "No, we don't want to do that. We just want to do things the way that we used to do it and have that freedom." In fact, our tempos were so good that on a couple of songs we did cut between tracks, but you can't tell the difference because the tempo is identical. The idea was that we were going to record the whole album in five days; the following five days of the next week we were going to concentrate on lead vocals and solos, basically, and then do any overdubs and vocal harmonies. In the end, the whole thing worked so well that we didn't replace any solos. They were all solos that were done as we were recording and capturing that performance. Pretty much all the vocals were done live as well. So the following five days we spent on backing vocals; doing that in a leisurely way, double-tracking the backing vocals, and so on. But for the meat of the track, everything was done live. That was us deliberately trying to recapture some of that energy and spark that you get from trying to work up a performance to the point where you feel, "That's it. We've got a little bit of magic." Then Chris took a day for mixing, but we deliberately left that up to him. I know The Stones have just done their new album [Blue & Lonesome] in three days, doing old blues covers.
Right. I heard about that.
It's really good. It's very rough, but great.
I think one thing that really sets The Zombies apart is the chordal colors and voicings that you come up with.
Thank you. We always try to explore music harmonically, in terms of chord progressions, and in terms of voicings and harmonies too. I don't think there were many bands that didn't just do harmonies in root, third, and fifth; everyone singing in parallel, pretty much. We always looked at it as something a bit more. I think The Beatles intuitively did some very creative things with their harmony voicings. And the Beach Boys, of course; Brian Wilson certainly did this.
You've seen the recording process go from bashing it out really fast, to the '80s where we got into MIDI, and then to Pro Tools and minute control.
I did all that! I produced the first Tanita Tikaram album [Ancient Heart] with my colleague, Peter Van Hooke, which ended up selling four and a half million in Europe. Tanita had only ever played with voice and guitar before. Pete would put a very, very simple drum loop down, and he'd get her – in a very comfortable way – to record the songs with just voice and guitar. And then we completely got rid of the drum loop. Pete and I played just about everything on that first album, apart from a couple of featured people we got in on a couple of tracks. We did that in an incredibly layered way. Sometimes we even changed the chords, if we felt that it would be creative for a song. We gave ourselves room to extend in every way possible, but that was only possible to do by layering the tracks. So I have done all that, and I've done it in a very successful way. But we really wanted to get back, this time, into that freshness of feeling that you get. It also means that we can do anything from the album on stage, without a problem, even more easily than on Odessey and Oracle. On Odessey and Oracle I was typically laying down a piano part, and then a Mellotron part. We will be playing it live a lot this year, because it's the 50th anniversary. This is going to be the final time that we perform it, in many places. We have to have extra people to reproduce all the notes that were on Odessey and Oracle. But with our new album, we don't. It is just the five of us; pretty much live. We can get out there and do the songs, and it really works.
I saw you in Portland doing the Odessey and Oracle show in 2015. I thought, "They must be bringing extra keyboard players!"
We certainly did. We were very lucky to have Darian Sahanaja, from Brian Wilson's band. Darian knows the Mellotron parts better than I do! He's such a fan, and it's so sweet. We trust him totally. I'm very worried about doing it with anybody else, in case of him not being available. We are doing it all over the place this year. We're doing it at European festivals, we're doing it in the UK, as well as in America. Of course Darian's still got his commitments with Brian as well.
Right. When you were recording Odessey and Oracle, had someone just left a Mellotron at Abbey Road?
Yeah, that "someone" was John Lennon. Basically The Beatles walked out a week or two before we walked in, having recorded Sgt. Pepper's... We were the next band in and we worked with the same engineers, Peter Vince and Geoff Emerick [Tape Op #57]. We worked with some of the studio's technical, cutting edge advancements that they'd forced the boffins there to make, and we had the benefit of some of the equipment they'd left around in the studio. One of those things was John Lennon's Mellotron. If it hadn't had been there, I wouldn't have used it. But I loved it, and it became quite a defining sound of the album.
Listening to your work before that, it's very organ or piano-based for your parts. Did you have to focus on how you were going to integrate the Mellotron, as far as arrangements?
