| VOLUME 7 | ISSUE 6
JULY 2022 BY BART MENDOZA © MUSICSCENESD // MUSICSCENESD.COM
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A Publication of Local Umbrella Media
The Zombies / Live at the Belly Up July 24 It’s safe to say that few bands have had the impact of British quintet, The Zombies. One of rock’s leading lights emerging from the 1960’s, the group scored several hits, including much covered classics such as “She’s Not There,”“Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season,” becoming Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in along the way. The Zombies still feature original singer Colin Blunstone and keyboardist / singer Rod Argent, alongside Steve Rodford on drums, guitarist Tom Toomey, and bassist Søren Koch, and notably, they aren’t resting on their
the road? “If you like playing, I don’t think you ever tire of that,” he said. “I think that we’re really lucky in that The Zombies catalog does have a timeless feel to it. It feels fresh every time we play it. I never tire of singing the songs, but I cult is the traveling. It’s very draining to be traveling long distances every day, we can’t deny that, it is challenging. But the actual playing, I still love it and I still get the same thrill from performing that I’ve ever done,” Blunstone noted.
is a really good version,” he said. “All of these things are kind of validation for what you’ve been doing. Some people don’t like bands doing covers of their songs. I’ve never understood that. I think its fantastic that people want to cover Zombies songs, it helps get the songs to a wider audience to start with, and then there’s that fellow professionals feel the songs you’ve written are worth recording, I think it’s absolutely brilliant.” There is much activity ahead for The Zombies, including more touring and
This year’s tour schedule is particularly busy, “I think we’re making up for lost time, we’ve had two and a half years off,” Blunstone said good naturedly. “I would think that next year we’ll probably play fewer dates, and that may be something for the future that we’ll just have to look at. Because, you know Rod and I aren’t getting any younger, and we both love playing, but to be able to play we have to stay healthy and to stay healthy we’ve got to be a little bit careful about our schedule.” The Zombies music has been covered by hundreds of bands over the years, does Blunstone have a favorite cover?
that upcoming new album, with Blunstone excited about the prospects. Looking back what has been his favorite thing about being a Zombie? “I like to think that we’ve brought some pleasure to people through the songs we’ve written and recorded,” he said. “I do meet people who will say things like, “you got us through
Hunger, put them back on the charts and drew much worldwide acclaim, with new recordings due later this year. The Zombies are currently in the midst of their Life Is A Merry-Go-Round tour, which stops in at The Belly Up Tavern Fans are excited about the pending new album, with several songs already rotating in the set list, including “You Could Be My Love,”“Different Game,” “Runaway (For All My Life)” and “Merry-Go-Round,” but according to Blunstone, details such as album title, artwork and release are all still to be determined. It’s a ten-track release, with nine new songs, including eight by Argent and one by Blunstone, with an additional remake of Argent’s “I Want To Fly,” here recast with a string quintet. “The album was recorded in Rod’s studio over the last two years,” Blunstone said. “For the most part it was recorded almost like a live album, in a studio context, in that we were always all in the same room at the same time. Because often nowadays people record in their own studios and then just send it in to the master studio. But we found on our last album that it really made a difference to have us all in the same room at the same time. There’s just a different energy in the recording if you can do it like that. It was made a little more challenging because of the pandemic, especially as our bass player lives in Denmark. So, it was quite trying to get hm over. But we managed to do it our last American tour” While the Zombies released a series of great singles, one of their best-known songs is an album track,“This Will Be Our Year,” which in recent years has become a standard, especially for weddings. Blunstone is a little surprised but pleased at its discovery by new generations of fans. “It intrigues me how a really good song “It hasn’t been promoted, it hasn’t been marketed. And yet people have found that song, or maybe that song has found people, just of its own volition. It excites me that that can happen today, when promotion and marketing is so sophisticated. A good song can still come through happened. We realize that it is an important song to a lot of people, particularly for weddings, but just in general it’s a song that resonates with a lot of people.” It’s been six decades since Blunstone and the band started touring. Does he still get the same excitement for
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Santana’s “She’s Not There,” which I thought was really, really good. Also the Foo Fighters, “I Want You Back Again”
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music.” That really is why we write and record. It’s in the hope that people are going to get as much enjoyment out of listening to them as we got out of writing and recording them. So that’s the thrill to me, it’s to have people come up to us and say how much they’ve enjoyed the music over the years. That why we do it,” he said. “And that’s our reward.” www.thezombiesmusic.com
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