Zombies

1968 marked the end of the road for the Zombies. The St. Albans quintet was just one of the many lovely flowers that bloomed in the sun of the British Invasion only to wither early, with a couple of American chart hits ("She's Not There", "Tell Her No") to their name that nobody remembers anymore. After moving from Decca — still reeling from letting the Beatles slip through their fingers, and now signing anyone who even vaguely recalled the Fab Four — to Cbs, in 1967 they were granted a deal by the label that already smelled like a swan song from the outset: unconditional artistic control over the album, total autonomy and independence in production — basically: lock yourselves in the Abbey Road studios, who knows, maybe it'll bring you luck, and do whatever you like.

So, while all hell was breaking loose out there (1968 was just around the corner), our heroes spent their days hunched over the mellotron, in the shadow of a musical revolution that was seeing the giants of beat overturn the table with one revolutionary record after another (the Zombies walked into the Abbey Road studios shortly after the Beatles finished recording "Sgt. Pepper's" in those very same rooms; less than a year earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, a certain "Pet Sounds" had come out).

The record was sent to press under the worst omen in the history of bad omens: on the cover, amid impeccably sixties colours and spirals, sat a colossal spelling mistake — "Odyssey" turned into "Odessey". The blame fell on the roommate of bassist Chris White, who had been entrusted with the album's artwork. Nobody had the heart to point out his shortcomings in spelling. White and Argent, the band's keyboardist, got tangled up in a wordplay of poetic licence and Shakespearean quotations to justify the typo. It didn't help: Odessey or Odyssey, the record was a total flop.

Perhaps it was the Zombies' image even more than their music that failed to click in those years: nerds before the term existed, little inclined to noise or rockstar poses, with classical training behind them that paradoxically alienated them from the rowdy, unlettered rock'n'roll community. Their image as choirboys with crystalline voices could only clash against the iconoclastic fury of groups like the Kinks or the Small Faces. The album's commercial failure delivered the final blow to these gentle-souled walking dead: the group split up and everyone went their own way.

But, as history teaches us, the nerds' revenge is always just around the corner.

It took the sharp ear of Al Kooper — architect and guru of Dylan's electric turn — to grasp the potential of that "clap – aaah" and that domineering bassline that open "Time Of The Season", the song that, despite itself, would become one of the sacred anthems of psychedelic youth in the golden years. The track climbed the American charts and brought the Zombies posthumous fame. Fame that, however, wasn't enough to bring the band's members back together, already busy breaking in their respective solo careers (White and Argent would soon go on to form the prog group Argent).

"Odessey and Oracle" began, in 1969, a slow climb that still doesn't seem to have run out of steam today: first up the American charts, then up the British ones, and further up, year after year, along the stairway to heaven, all the way to that rock Valhalla where Elvis, Jimi, Buddy, Janis, John and all the others watch over us, smiling.

The whirling jazz-tinged hammond solos, the perfectly limpid vocal harmonies, singer Colin Blunstone's sensual whisper, and, not least, the faint pagan atmosphere, the sacred and the profane blurring together as if secretly witnessing a clandestine fertility rite, make "Time Of The Season" one of those songs that, forty years on, can still conjure an entire world before your eyes. The Sixties we'd all love to have back, the ones we feel nostalgic for even without having lived them ourselves. Always with that rhythm in our ears: "clap – aaah".

But this record's revenge — one that has over time reached the status of a genuine cult favourite — isn't achieved through its exceptional single alone. The Zombies' polite psychedelia and baroque inspiration shines through in other gems scattered across the album: the hazy, sepulchral beat of "Beechwood Park", with organ and alien guitar-riff reverbs supporting a delicate web of minor-key memories; the dialogue between mellotron, percussion and choral harmonies worthy of a sun cult, an ancient liturgy of solstices and equinoxes, in "Changes"; the sonic build-up, with instruments following one another in single file, and the vocal interludes in pure Beach Boys style of the delicate "Care Of Cell 44" that opens the record; the more light-hearted episodes of "I Want Her She Wants Me", "Friends Of Mine", "This Will Be Our Year", where piano and harpsichord peek through, testament to the irreplaceable artistic contribution of Argent, the group's composer alongside White.

Forever poised between the modernity of its sonic exploration (the use of the mellotron; a treatment and mix that still surprise today for the freshness of their sound) and a retro refinement typical of someone raised with impeccable manners, along with a Victorian gloom that makes the Zombies a one-of-a-kind act, the record stays remarkably cohesive despite its surprising musical episodes. The second track, the diaphanous piano-and-voice ballad "A Rose For Emily", casually name-checks Faulkner in its tale of a lonely woman destined for solitude, while outside boys offer their sweethearts roses stolen from her garden. It's a small masterpiece, built with the aesthetic sense of a goldsmith or a miniaturist, one that brings out Blunstone's velvety tones of the eternally broken heart.

At the close there's room for a piece of historical vignette too: "Butcher's Tale" is a song in which White gives voice to the madness of a soldier lost in the pain and horror of the First World War ("And I have seen/ a friend of mine/ hang on the wire/ like some rag toy"). It's a role White carved out for himself, delivering a surprising performance: over a bed of church organ, his trembling, broken voice, which in the chorus disembodies into a prayer first screamed and then whispered, paints the apocalyptic landscapes of a soul devastated by war.

And it's on the notes of "Time Of The Season" that the album finds its emblematic conclusion. Amid mystical openings, good manners, baroque flourishes, sunny touches set against lunar melancholy, and a gothic aftertaste that makes them better suited to intimate listening in the cryptic depths of the bedroom than to the light of the Summer of Love, the Zombies plant their flag in the heart of the late Sixties, already carrying within them, in nuce, the darkness of times to come.

Buried by the wildly fortunate failure of "Odessey And Oracle", the Zombies are being reborn today for an army of nostalgics, in this dawn of postmodernity where life after death has become a common, accepted fact. No one with a heart has forgotten them, the ones who for a brief spell were the priests of the season of love, nor their gospel, nor the way they taught us to pray: a handclap and a sigh.

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01/03/2009