Andrew Eccles
Colin Blunstone staning in front of some abstract art with a smile.
Colin Blunstone is happy to keep The Zombies' music alive on stage.
In the liner notes to the 50th anniversary reissue of his 1971 debut solo album, One Year, longtime Zombies vocalist Colin Blunstone described the release as “stepping into the unknown.” It’s a philosophy that has kept things exciting across his 60-year career.
“You can't know at the beginning what's going to happen when you record,” Blunstone says during a Zoom interview with Isthmus in advance of his appearance Sept. 19 at the Barrymore Theatre, on a bill that also features The Fixx and Peter Asher. “Songs can take so many different paths once you get into the studio…. They take on a new life.”
Blunstone has continued that exploratory journey, recording a new currently untitled George Moore-produced solo album slated for a spring release. The project marks a historic milestone: for the first time, Blunstone holds a writing credit on every track.
He regrets not recording more of his own songs in the past. “I'm thrilled that the basis of the album is my writing,” Blunstone says. “These songs are all stories about either things that have happened to me or people I know that I've observed. They're not just made-up lyrics to get a rhyme… It's 12 stories set to music.”
His solo career is the primary focus now that founding Zombies keyboardist Rod Argent retired from touring a couple of years ago due to a stroke. Even so, Blunstone wanted to keep The Zombies' music alive on stage. With the help of his solo band, featuring former members of both The Zombies and progressive rock band The Strawbs, he started adding more Zombies songs to his sets.
“I do treasure a lot of those Zombie songs and wonder if they would be played if I wasn't playing them,” Blunstone says. “I'm deeply connected to these songs, and I think they deserve to be heard.”
He notes that Argent caught a performance in May and “really enjoyed us performing the Zombies tunes."
His set features many of the band’s biggest hits as well as some deep cuts. “A lot of them are obscure tracks,” he says. Yet during this spring’s UK tour the “obscure Zombies tracks went down incredibly well.”
The Zombies albums Begin Here and Odessey and Oracle weren’t commercial successes when they were released in the 1960s, so he’s grateful for the group’s recent surge of popularity. “I am eternally grateful that people are still interested in the Zombies repertoire,” he said. “I think Zombies tracks do have a sort of a timeless feel about them.”
Blunstone traces the band’s origin to pure coincidence in a high school classroom where students sat in alphabetical order. Blunstone sat directly behind Paul Arnold, the band’s original bass player. Arnold invited him to jam with Argent.
He originally joined the group as a guitarist, and jokes that he was “promoted or demoted into being the lead singer quite quickly.”
“That essentially was my audition into the band,” Blunstone said. “If we hadn't been sitting in alphabetical order, I probably would've never joined.”
What followed was a whirlwind. Within months of winning a local competition as 15-year-olds, they signed with Decca Records. By the winter of 1964, they had a massive global hit with "She's Not There” and were playing in New York alongside some big-name acts. The teens took the success in stride.
“Looking back, I can see that it was anything but natural,” he says. “I think we did well to cope with it in the way we did. I don't think anybody got carried away with the band being more successful. We were always more concentrated on what comes next rather than, do we have a hit record or don't we have a hit record?”
Madison audiences may also know the history of the band from the documentary Hung Up on a Dream, which screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival in 2023.
Though the band’s original lineup stayed together for only three years, Blunstone and Argent reunited in 1999, eventually reclaiming the band's name in 2004. That second, 20-year incarnation culminated in their 2019 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Blunstone calls an “absolutely breathtakingly wonderful evening.”
These days, Blunstone is embracing a slower touring pace, but his enthusiasm remains intact. He is excited to tour alongside fellow mainstays Peter Asher and The Fixx. He shares a deep history with Asher dating back to the ‘60s.
“American audiences are very enthusiastic and very vocal, and they let you know they're there,” he says. “And that energy and excitement…lifts your spirits as a performer and helps you to give a performance that would be very challenging to do if the audience was more passive.”
