Rod Argent sat down with Larry Crane T for an in-depth Tape Op magazine interview, discussing the 50th anniversary of Odessey and Oracle:
On the signature harmonies that make The Zombies instantly recognizable:
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.
The Beatles had just finished Sgt Pepper, when they entered the Abbey Road Studios. Argent put John Lennnn's Mellotron to good use. On being on a budget for the "Odessey and Oracle" recording sessions:
In a way, that colors what you’re doing too. But it’s that old thing of when you have boundaries and limits, it sometimes is a very creative thing. It forces you to work in a different way, and it forces your creativity into a slightly different path. In the end, I’m so grateful that that was there. Having strings on it would have been a much more ordinary thing. Having a Mellotron gave it a real character. We loved it. We didn’t have much money when we were recording Odessey and Oracle – we had a thousand pound budget out of CBS, and we had to record the whole album. So even though it was recorded over a period of quite a few months, it wasn’t us being in the studio for months. It was a series of three or six hour sessions, and that was it. Typically, a track was done in a day. It was done very much in a live way, but with the benefit of overdubs, which felt wonderful to us. We’d never had the benefit of having seven tracks, I think it was, because one of them had to be bounced down, and one of them had to be used as a sync track with two machines.
The Zombies will perform the album in its entirety in London at the.Royal Albert Hall.
Live dates:- 06/12 Royal Albert Hall, London, UK
- 06/29 Music In The Gardens, Sheffield, UK
- 07/06 Festival D'été de Québec, Quebec, Canada
- 07/11 Ottawa Bluesfest, Ottawa, Canada
- 07/14 Bergen Pac, Englewood, NJ