What's your name? Who's your daddy? Is he rich? Is he rich like me?
I knew the song was old but not how old. I didn't imagine a band in flower power kaftans but a single wax faced destroyer with slicked back hair and a close-fitting suit. He emerged from the shade of the terrace with a jaded smile and folded himself under the skin of the pretty young woman standing alone there. He would consume her from the inside out in the muted light of his chic apartment and rest, exhausted, recharging for the next one.
I think I got the image from the guy on the cover art of Frank Zappa's Weasles Ripped My Flesh, a record whose atonality and jazziness scared me. I don't know why I associated the character in the Zombies song with that image but it happened. Thereafter, the zombies had a cache for the sinister borne entirely of a casual misassociation of mine. So, when the hits 'n' memories station played She's Not There or Tell Her No they came from the dark end of the stage. That's before you get to the band name.
Decades later I picked up a cheapo CD compilation which opened the image out to reveal a British invasion sound stirred with a little jazz and even some classical influences. I'd also picked up the repute that their troubled magnum opus might have rivalled Sgt Pepper for breakthroughs. The comp had a few tracks from the album so, finally, in the teens of the 21st century, I found a copy.
Care of Cell 44 I already knew and enjoyed but here it was in context as an album opener. A few plinks of tack piano and were strolling through a typical late '60s four on the floor sunny day song. Then the title occurs to you and you start listening to the words. Colin Blunstone's grownup choirboy tenor lights above the jaunty Britpop and the chorus bursts out of a humming vocal quartet into a brilliant high spot with harmonies but Penny Lane this ain't. He's talking about his girl who's getting out of prison today. It's not so much the prison aspect but the driving optimism of the performance without so much as a glance at the elephant there in the corner: in prison for what? I'm biased, I suppose, but given the era my thoughts hurtle straight to Mary Bell (Google is thy friend and sage). And, of course, is it even a prison?
A Rose for Emily takes the tacks out of the piano. Blunstone pipes in with the tale of a lady whose roses nurtured the love of everyone who picked them but never received one herself. Loveless from youth to death, her pride protecting her from love's pain, Emily has lived entirely for the distant pleasure of other people. The chamber choir and piano arrangement and sweetness of the melody belie that, while this does not have the nightmarish storm of an Eleanor Rigby, this song does not let up in its recounting of human futility. It's sad but it's also severe. There's a real need for all that Mozartian pez candy in the harmonies.
Maybe After He's Gone begins with a minor key vocal melody countered with a descending bass that bursts into a bright chorus featuring the title. The plaintive verses insist on the narrator's memories of a love, the minor descent telling us of their futility. The chorus is all hope and choral backing vocals ... but still futile. After a stark, simpler-backed admission of dark loneliness the chorus repeats with diminishing backing finally ending in an acapella call and response that sounds like his own voice just repeating his futility.
Beechwood Park comes in with a very similar counterpoint but with a gentler mix of organ and guitar through a Leslie speaker. Blunstone's chalky tenor leads us through verses of beautiful memories that end in the the dark in Beechwood Park. A major key middle eight tells of his compulsion to return to the memories before the chorus circles back with the distance of the time. He's longing but enjoys the melancholy without descending into the madness of morbid jealousy of the previous song. Bittersweet, not just bitter.
Brief Candles leads a vocal with a gentle but richly melodic line on the piano with the voice doubles. A man resists the truth of the need for the affair to end as the woman telling him this tenses at the table and tries to work out how to exit. The chorus speaks for both identically as they think of themselves as the brief candles of Macbeth's soliloquy. A beautiful song with a chorus that rouses even though it shouldn't. The verses, incidentally, are sung by the three different vocalists in the band. Blunstone's chalky choir tenor is easy to pick but the others are difficult to tell from him. Telling.
The old side one ends with the first of two epics left to close LP sides. Hung Up on a Dream begins with a key-stretching piano intro. The band swell behind it until a cymbal crash gets us under way. It can be easy to forget how steadily rocking this song is, given the ethereal choiring and Summer of Love fantasising it goes into. The chalky tenor enters describing a world made flowers, vibrations and neon. He understands that he might well just be hung up on the dream and it's easy to forget, as he was barging in past you that he is remembering this, not predicting it. With its cinematic climaxes and restarts, lush with thick Mellotron string sections, gleaming clean electric guitars and otherworldly backing vocals it soars and spreads more like proto-proggers the Moody Blues than anyone else. But lingering on the mind of the listener as the angelic aahs and crashing cymbals play us to the final trailing Mellotron chord that the dreamer will never regain the ecstasy of the dream. The silence at the end of side one is thick with the most gorgeous despair you will hear in a 60s album.
Side two kicks off with a Mellotron flute piece a little sweeter than the one that drew life from the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. But that's ok as we've cleared all that darkness of the first side and we're back in the late '60s. A beautiful wassailing chorus bursts into bright counterpoint singing of a girl's beauty in the different seasons. The solo vocal verses observe her a little more cynically as she walks by with the accessories of adulthood like Dolly Bird dresses and diamonds. We proceed through seasons that bloom in variations of the opening chorus and the verses age and sage her until the final one starts under water with the piano playing a strange offbeat until both make their way from the right channel to the middle as the charges of ephemerality are again drowned by the carol singers who blithely sing the seasons on until the last word is heard on the flutes that began us.
I Want Her She Wants Me is every band's choice of the fusion of now and then, the harpsichord. But this isn't the blues soloing of Ray Manzarek on Love Me Two Times, it's a far more comfy arpeggio rolling over the bass and drums. Blunstone coos his story of an uncertain love exploding into the joy of mutuality. A little minor key reminder that all was not always well and we're back with such confidence that we end with countless affirmations of the title. Two minutes and fifty seconds of bliss.
This Will be Our Year features Blunstone singing sweetly over thumping Beatlesque piano. A brass section comes in for what sounds like the best pub singalong of 1968 (before Hey Jude came out, that is, so there wasn't a lot of time). The handclapping last drinks is brought down by Blunstone's persistently melancholic vocal timbre but lifted by his riffing on the opportunities given him by the fruity chord progression. It sounds like a closer but there will be more.
And stranger. With a grinding frown straight out of the first side The Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) starts with a harmonium vamp that feels like trying to walk in mud while every step sucks your foot into the void. Some eerie booms and echoes enclose the chords before the vocals enter, sour and tired but with the perfect diction of someone whose voice must be heard. Bassist Chris White sang this song of his penning after failing to get Blunstone to do it. The performance is perfect, plaintive and angered drawn from the best of Brecht and Weill soaring to a heart rending cry of the shaking that all who face such horror must suffer. Rod Argent's harmonium part mixes the grinding that anything more energetic that one chord per bar makes of the instrument (generally powered by foot pumps) and a J.S. Bach like grandeur.
Too grim? Well now it's back over the channel to Swinging London to a four-on-floor flurry of parties and happenings where the roll call of names choirs out under the chorus as Blunstone's vigorous but pure tenor repeats the chorus: they are friends of mine, friends of mine. The second verse has a angelic descant like the one in Dream but it's much chirpier. It starts it charts it ends.
Which brings us back to Do.
Dundun Dun ts ahh. Dundun Dun ts ahh. Time of the Season announces its sexiness before the first line. What could be an arch hedonist's sigh at the sight of beauty in the dark or the daunting thrill of a corridor to adventures over voting age announces that we're in for something fresh and strange. It is both stately and depraved. Blunstone's vocal enters wearing a cape, announcing that it is "the time of the season when love runs high". And a line or two, to "let me try with pleasured hands." The song shifts to the next step on the grand staircase to talk with harmonies flashing of the sun and promised lands until the massed angels of the band's vocalists converge in mighty blinding chords to sing: IT's the TIME of the SEE-EA-SON for LOVE ING. After a breath the opening tomtom and breath resumes but the vocal field changes. Blunstone's lines are countered by Argent or White, sometimes echoing them, sometimes predicting them. We do not know if the demon is centre stage or on the shoulder. This is the verse I remembered from childhood about who's your daddy and is he rich. The ringmaster of the rites has blended with the crowd enough to lure prey into the shadows. "Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live?" the questions slithering around each other until the steps to the chorus are met again and again the host of light reminds us that it's the time of the season. Instead of another verse we get a Hammond B3 solo so jazzy that it qualifies as sinful in a rock song. The second verse repeats as that is the one that finds the most success in the dark. Steps up to the chorus and then another solo plays us out. If the summer of love is being invoked here it is not the one felt in California. This is Belle Epoque not Bel Air. Less Leary than leery. Less Ashbury than Crowley. Good stock not Woodstock.
But there's the thing. As brilliant as this and all the other songs on this set are they do not add up to a cohesive whole. This album was recorded after the fabs had left the building with Sergeant Pepper in the vault. But where Pepper still feels like a concept album despite the concept being dropped early in the piece, Odessey and Oracle doesn't, despite a high cohesion in style between songs and a clear thematic vein running through most of the two sides. Why?
First, it was a year out of time. Recorded in 1967 (it really was recorded just after Sgt Pepper) but released in 1968, it's tack piano, harpsichords and novelty arrangements eclipsed the inventiveness of the songcraft by sounding like last year. The Fabs themselves would end the year with a double LP clad in an almost featureless white cover. Odessey's Carnaby St cutout and paisley artwork would have looked like an album with the word punk in the title in 1978. Listening now, none of this matters. The songs are good and set in deathless arrangements that neither embarrass with self-conscious psychedelic styling nor feel bloated by a lack of ideas. The album would not find its audience for decades. In the so retro it's new stakes, the mellotron strings and verby harmonies sound as now as Polyphonic Spree. There's no shame about an album being unloved in its own time. Odessey joins such wonders as The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow and Big Star's Sister Lovers, Nick Drake's Pink Moon on that shelf (among many others).
The album was also the soundtrack to the band's disintegration. The songwriters worked on new material (included on 2000s re-releases of Odessey) and were persuaded to contribute to a new LP under the Zombies name but it fell to earth. This is astounding when listening to the set with its riches and engaging themes and authentic golden age production and arrangements. But at least it is here and we can again let it fold around us with the strange warmth of its pessimism and the great flinty wonder of the most worldly choirboy who ever lived. If this has eluded you so far, choose it before something better known and judge them by it. Drink it in and enjoy the vengeance of it.
