Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone recall how the Zombies made Time of the Season

The Zombies recorded their entire second album, Odessey and Oracle, on a £1,000 advance from CBS — and "Time of the Season," written last and released almost as a favour, became the song that outlived the band. Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone have told the story of the track's making and its unlikely afterlife in a new first-person account.

Argent wrote the song while sharing a flat with bassist Chris White during the album's 1967 sessions. "I said: 'I think I've just written a song that could be a hit,'" he recalls. The Zombies recorded at EMI Recording Studios — later known as Abbey Road — over a few sessions spread across six months, producing themselves for the first time.

The Beatles had been in the same studios cutting Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Zombies worked with some of the same engineers, notably Geoff Emerick. "He found this special way of marrying the bass and the tom-tom sound," Argent says. Argent himself suggested the clap before the beat and the vocal sound after it, which became the track's famous exhalation.

How do you write a hit with no money left?

The band burned through the £1,000 quickly, and Argent argues the tight timeframe helped rather than hurt. "Because of the tight timeframe we were working to, there was a spontaneity and freshness that was very valuable," he says. "It's a method I try to preserve. It's just much more fun."

The lyrics, he explains, reflected the mood of 1967, when war was on television nightly and people were deciding, as he puts it, "I'm not going to be part of this." The line "Who's your daddy?" reached back to Gershwin's "Summertime," one of the first songs the band performed together. "Is he rich like me?" carried a double meaning — "rich" in the sense of understanding how to live.

Blunstone, meanwhile, was learning the song while recording it. He remembers the strict studio clock, the men in long brown coats moving equipment, and one occasion when they wheeled a piano out of the room mid-take while the band worked out harmonies. Argent coached his phrasing from the control room — "No, this phrase should be on the beat but the next phrase should be pushed" — as Blunstone watched the big hand creep toward five o'clock.

Things got heated. "I was saying, 'If you're so bloody good, you come in here and sing it,' and he said, 'You're the bloody lead singer, you stand in there until you get it right!'" Blunstone recalls. "The language was probably richer than that." He says it makes him smile now that he could break off from "saying the most terrible things to Rod" to sing the "angelic lines" of the chorus.

What happened after the band split?

Blunstone admits he didn't champion the song at the time. He thought "Care of Cell 44" was "the epitome of a hit single" — but it flopped when released ahead of the album. By the time Odessey and Oracle appeared in Terry Quirk's famously misspelled sleeve, the Zombies had already split.

The album's rescue came from Al Kooper, who had just left Blood, Sweat & Tears and joined CBS as a staff producer. Back from London with around 80 albums unavailable in the US, Kooper singled out Odessey and Oracle as the one that stood out. On his first day at the label he told president Clive Davis: "Whatever it costs, we have to get this album." Davis replied: "We already have it. We were going to pass on it — it's not commercial."

CBS released two singles that disappeared without trace. Blunstone believes "Time of the Season" was put out only as a favour to Kooper — until one DJ in Boise, Idaho, refused to stop playing it. Radio interest snowballed from there.

The success arrived more than a year after the breakup, and impostors noticed. Blunstone says other bands toured the US as the Zombies, one including two members of ZZ Top. A manager of one such group claimed Colin Blunstone had been killed in a car crash. "It turned out my death was reported in Rolling Stone," he says.

Did the Zombies ever play it together again?

Not until 1997, when a box set launch at the Jazz Cafe in London brought the surviving members onto Blunstone's solo stage, unrehearsed. They played "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season," and it sounded, Blunstone says, "really good." His verdict: "You know what? There really was something special about that band."

The song never charted successfully in the UK, yet it keeps surfacing — in films set in the 1960s and, just as often, in commercials, where Blunstone says it sounds current. "I've never quite worked out how it can be both of its time and timeless," he says. Nearly six decades on, the track's second life in licensing suggests the answer doesn't much matter.