Fifty years later, The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle gets its due
Chris White had no idea that fifty years after he and the rest of his band mates in The Zombies recorded Odessey and Oracle in 1967 that they would be celebrating the seminal album with a tour, a CD and vinyl reissue and a coffee table book.
He didn’t even have a band anymore.
“After we made it, nobody wanted it, really,” White laughs. “Three of the members couldn’t afford to live anymore, so the group split up.”
There wouldn’t be another album under The Zombies name until 1991’s New World, but if the St. Albans rockers were to go out with Odessey and Oracle, what a way to go. Frankly unappreciated at the time, the record has only gotten better with time, something that White admittedly finds hard to explain.
“To be quite honest, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it’s probably because we tried to do something different. We were in a very lucky period in the sixties. We went into Abbey Road Studios after The Beatles had just finished recording Sgt. Pepper. Pet Sounds was out, so there was this whole creative vibe that was going on at the time and we bought into it. Our influences were jazz and classical, as well as popular music and blues, so we naturally fell into that atmosphere that was apparent at the time. So it was a bit of an unusual album. And of course we had a very limited budget, so that limited everything we could do.”
How limited? Try a thousand pounds. But White and Rod Argent, who wrote the entire album, made sure to get the rest of the band (Colin Blunstone, Paul Atkinson and Hugh Grundy) up to speed on the songs during rehearsals in order to maximize their time in the studio. And during the songwriting sessions, there were no concerns about writing hits. They just wanted to follow their muse, even though tracks like “Time of the Season” and “This Will Be Our Year” would eventually become radio staples.
“We never tried to do a commercial record,” White said. “We just wanted to do something that excited us. We only had a thousand pounds to record this album and we just had to rehearse very thoroughly before we went into the studio because there was a limit on the budget. Rod and I were the only writers on this album, and we set up the band to rehearse and we played the songs over and decided which ones we wanted to do. And whatever appealed to us, that’s what we did.”
Yet while it didn’t take the world by storm in 1967, over the years, it has earned its rightful place among the best rock albums ever produced, landing in the 100 spot on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list in 2012. And today, it’s reaching a whole new audience and putting a spring in the step of the gentlemen who made it.
“It’s absolutely fascinating to meet 10 and 12-year-olds who have been brought up on this album,” White said. “It’s very strange, but we seem to cover all ages and it seems to be passed down through generations, which is wonderful. It was only 15 years ago that it began to create a fan base, and now when we’re on stage — we’re still all friends and we always have been — it’s like we’re back into our early twenties again when we perform it. It feels different when we’re getting off stage and we’re really feeling our seventies (Laughs), but on stage, we feel the same age.”
And what better way to stay young than by making music?
“Creating music does keep you young, and what is exciting is touching people with your songs,” he said. “I remember songs that affected my life when I was a teenager and you count certain episodes in your life by the songs that were around at the time. And to have people come up now and say the same thing to us, it’s very energizing, and that’s the wonderful thing about writing and performing music. It affects people and gets them to create their own things as well.”
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