My British Invasion

by Harold Bronson

  “‘Mrs. Brown’ worked especially well for non–rock ’n’ roll gigs, like weddings and bar mitzvahs. Older people would hear it and uncover their ears and think, ‘Oh, great, there’s a song we can deal with.’ We would change the name to the host’s, like ‘Mrs. Silverman, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.’” At times in the early days when The Hermits performed it, Peter dressed up like a schoolboy, with cap and satchel.

  “Mickie said that we had one day to record an album to capitalize on the hit single. Our first album was essentially our stage act, but straight, without any of the set-ups. We had eleven songs and we needed a twelfth. Mickie was one hundred percent against recording ‘Mrs. Brown.’ It was the only other song we could do. We couldn’t perform ‘Without You’ because it was already a hit by Manfred Mann. We couldn’t do ‘Mashed Potato Time’ as it was entirely a visual number that didn’t sound all that good. So, we recorded ‘Mrs. Brown’ in two takes, complete with the bass out of tune. Part of the appeal of the song is the uncommon banjo sound, which was played by Keith Hopwood on a Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar that had a damper on it. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mickie said. ‘We’ll hide it on side two.’”

  The Americans at MGM knew what they were doing. When they released The Hermits’ first album, Introducing Herman’s Hermits, in February 1965—two months after “I’m Into Something Good” peaked at thirteen on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100—instead of burying “Mrs. Brown,” they placed it second in the running order. DJs looking to play more Hermits chose this track. MGM wanted to release it as a single, but neither the band nor Mickie wanted to, relenting only when MGM guaranteed advance sales of 600,000. “We thought it would ruin our image,” said Peter. The single entered Billboard at number twelve, the highest chart debut in the first seventy-five years of the magazine’s rankings. It was soon number one. Many months later when The Hermits’ debut album was released in the UK, the song was programmed last.

  Interestingly enough, when John Tobler and Stuart Grundy interviewed Mickie Most for a BBC radio series on record producers in 1981, Mickie told them it was the worst record he had produced, and claimed he couldn’t even remember the recording session.

  Most of the British bands tried to play authentic American rock ’n’ roll, which meant disguising their accents. Paul McCartney approximated Little Richard on “Long Tall Sally,” and on their harmonies The Beatles sounded like The Everly Brothers. Even R&B-styled combos like The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and Manfred Mann displayed this dedication. Could anybody really tell the difference between Ray Charles and The Spencer Davis Group’s Stevie Winwood?

  With the surprise success of “Mrs. Brown,” the group saw an advantage to playing up their Englishness. Look at their names. Aside from Karl Green, you’d never find these in a high school yearbook: Lek Leckenby, Barry Whitwam, Keith Hopwood. Peter took endless amusement in rattling off “Peter Blair Denis Bernard Noone” when interviewed. Decades later, I’ve never met anybody else with those surnames, except for Peter’s immediate family.

  The first blow to The Hermits’ rising self-esteem came in January 1965 when Mickie Most elected to use studio musicians for their next planned single, a cover of The Rays’ 1957 hit “Silhouettes.” Similar to most of the chart-riding English acts of that time, The Hermits were covering 1950s hits like “Sea Cruise,” “Kansas City,” and “The End of the World.” The group played it safe, like most of the other artists, by copying the original records almost intact. “If we were told to learn ‘Silhouettes,’ we would’ve copied The Rays’ version, which I liked.” Mickie had something else in mind, an up-tempo, original arrangement.

  “We were in the wrong world. We were a performing act, and when we started having hits, we couldn’t talk between numbers because of all the screaming, and we weren’t the group we started as. When we tried to make records, we were lost. Our first LP and most of the second were, essentially, our live numbers without the set-ups. Then we began to tour constantly and we didn’t have time to work out new songs or record them.” It took less time away from touring and other commitments, like TV and films, to have Peter come to the studio to record his lead vocals, and for Karl and Keith to sing the harmonies.

  For “Silhouettes,” the instrumental backing was provided by Vic Flick, guitar; Big Jim Sullivan, guitar; John Paul Jones, bass; Bobby Graham, drums. Flick had played the distinctive guitar melody on the original “James Bond Theme,” which debuted in Dr. No.

  I interviewed Mickie Most in 1972 for a feature in Rolling Stone. It was the first comprehensive interview he had given, and I found him open and candid. I asked him about using session players on Hermits’ recordings: “I don’t think they resented it. The Hermits could have certainly made the records, but making records is so competitive, I want to give it the best shot. If you have people in the band who are more talented than John Paul Jones or Jimmy Page [both later of Led Zeppelin] or the other studio musicians, let them play on their own instrumental backings. If you get the best people, it’s much easier, and I don’t think it’s anything to do with the musicians in the band feeling hurt. I really didn’t want to discuss it, because I was paying the bills.”

  Peter put it this way: “At first the band played, but after it was discovered that Barry the drummer had a problem with his timing, rather than replace him—he was a friend and a nice bloke—we substituted for him in the studio. When Karl Green faded, he was replaced on sessions by John Paul Jones, who was a genius and arranged a lot of our records. He even joined the band for a three-date German tour. The Hermits were afraid of him! The Hermits, in addition to the first two albums, played the backing tracks on ‘Listen People,’ ‘A Must to Avoid,’ ‘Leaning on the Lamp Post,’ the Both Sides album, and the songs they wrote.”

  This wasn’t an issue for the fans as they didn’t know. They saw a band performing on a TV show playing live or lip-synching, so why would they think otherwise? Only with the popularity of Cream in 1967 did music fans become more aware of the skills of individual musicians in a rock band context. Or as John Mendelsohn wrote many years later in referring to the US contingent of studio players known as The Wrecking Crew, “Am I alone in wishing I didn’t know that so much music I loved was performed by persons in clueless haircuts and ghastly cardigan sweaters?” What mattered then, and matters now, is whether the record is any good.

  “Mickie used The Hermits less and less. He and I discovered the process was faster, if not as much fun. We stupidly left The Hermits out of all the decisions, causing them to hate us and, I think, rightfully so. In the callousness of my youth [paraphrasing W. Somerset Maugham] I thought little of other people’s feelings and destroyed my friendships in the name of super success, none of which I regret, sadly enough, because the recordings are of the moment, and I was in the moment and The Hermits weren’t.”

  Herman’s Hermits spent most of 1965 in America. Their first big American tour was in the spring as part of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. Joining them were Little Anthony and the Imperials, Freddie Cannon, Bobby Vee, Round Robin, Billy Stewart, Bobby Freeman, The Ikettes, The Hondells, The Detergents, Brenda Holloway, and Reparata and the Delrons. The tour stayed in hotels every other night, which meant sleeping on the upright seats in the tour bus, which was more like a school bus than one altered to provide comfort for the long distance travelers. Usually Peter would get on late, which meant that he ended up squeezing in next to the three-hundred-pound Billy Stewart or the three-hundred-pound Round Robin. Fortunately, he was skinny. Some of The Hermits tried to sleep on the luggage racks. When Billy and Round pulled real guns on each other—over a woman—The Hermits freaked out and were furnished with a station wagon and driver that followed the bus. Members of Bobby Vee’s band introduced them to cherry bombs by throwing them out of the bus to explode in the path of the station wagon. The Hermits were hooked.

  On August 7, they played a few dates on the West Coast, headlining a concert at the Pasadena Rose
Bowl that drew thirty-four thousand people, the largest attendance until The Beatles drew fifty-five thousand at Shea Stadium a week later.

  On August 15, The Hermits were wrapping up their American tour in Oahu when they heard that Elvis was on the island filming Paradise Hawaiian Style. Curious about the appeal these newly popular British groups were having, Elvis agreed to meet them. By the time arrangements were made, Lek, Keith, and Karl had already flown home, so on August 16, Peter, Barry, and Harvey Lisberg joined Elvis and his crew at the Hawaiian Polynesian Village. Elvis tossed off a few bars of “Henry VIII” for them. “He was making fun of me, but who cares?” said Peter “It was Elvis!” Peter asked Elvis, “How come you made it without long hair?” Elvis and his crew thought the Brits were goofy. Elvis met The Beatles ten days later.

  As The Hermits visited with Elvis, “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” was at number one. Where did The Hermits find such an oddball song? Peter explained: “When my grandfather, Tommy Noone, got drunk he would get on the piano—I mean, literally, he would climb on top—and change from his Irish brogue to impersonating an Englishman, and he would sing ‘Henry VIII.’” The song had been a music hall hit in 1910 for Harry Champion, who sang it in a Cockney accent. When “Winchester Cathedral” by The New Vaudeville Band became a hit in the fall of 1966, it ushered in a revival of 1920s music that had all manner of artists, including The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, joining in. It’s hard not to think that Herman’s Hermits primed the trend with “Henry VIII.” New Vaudeville’s mastermind Geoff Stephens also composed “There’s a Kind of Hush,” which first appeared on The New Vaudeville Band’s debut album.

  Herman’s Hermits’ popularity was so considerable in 1965 that among singles released that year they had six in the Top 10 to The Beatles’ four. When the group returned home from Japan in February 1966, with (US) gold album awards for The Best of Herman’s Hermits, the customs officials in Manchester demanded duty be paid on their “gold records,” not realizing there was no value in the tinted metal plating.

  When the Herman’s Hermits/Animals summer tour hit Detroit on July 28, 1966, Peter visited Motown Records. On his way out, he ran into Stevie Wonder. “I was nonplussed that he knew my songs. He sang ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ with the most perfect impersonation of me I have ever heard. Being a quick-witted sort of chap, I told him that I was a huge fan of his work and that by an incredible quirk of circumstance, I had just purchased his latest album. He was duly impressed and signed it right there. Actually, the album was The Moods of Marvin Gaye, and he signed all over Marvin’s face.”

  In 1966, Herman’s Hermits made the US Top 10 with “A Must to Avoid,” “Listen People,” “Leaning on the Lamp Post,” and “Dandy,” and barely missed with “This Door Swings Both Ways.” “Dandy” was written by The Kinks’ Ray Davies about “a jovial person who’s a womanizer,” based on his brother Dave. Mickie Most recorded it with The Hermits after The Animals had passed.

  Peter’s favorite Herman’s Hermits’ record is “No Milk Today,” which hit number seven in the UK and even made the Top 40 in America as the B-side of “There’s a Kind of Hush.” The song was composed by Graham Gouldman (also managed by Lisberg), who had previously hit the Top 10 with The Yardbirds (“For Your Love” and “Heart Full of Soul”), The Hollies (“Bus Stop”), and The Hermits (“Listen People”). His father, Hymie Gouldman, was a poet who occasionally chipped in with ideas or lyrics, uncredited. Hymie, visiting a friend, saw a note to the milkman on a doorstep and gave his son the idea for “No Milk Today.” He even wrote the couplet, “The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn.” Graham fleshed out the song using a bridge he had written for an unfinished song intended for The Mindbenders. When The Hollies turned it down, he offered it to The Hermits. It became their biggest-selling record worldwide.

  “I think it is Herman’s Hermits’ best recording and perfectly captures the moment and the feel of Manchester terraced houses and what was the end of a British era. John Paul Jones played two bass guitars (an upright and a Fender) on the track and also did a brilliant arrangement. I did the lead vocal and then Karl Green, Keith Hopwood, and I did the backgrounds.”

  Despite their clean image, The Hermits could be rambunctious and at times even destructive. This came to a head during a tour with The Who and the Blues Magoos. On the evening of August 23, 1967, at the Flint, Michigan, Holiday Inn, Keith Moon and Barry Whitwam celebrated their twenty-first birthdays with the touring party. (Keith turned twenty.) Keith initiated the mayhem when he started a food fight by flinging a piece from his five-tiered drum cake at a hotel manager who claimed the music was too loud. As it escalated, Keith slipped and broke his front tooth. In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Keith goes into much detail about how he, in an attempt to run away, jumped into a Lincoln Continental, put the car in the wrong gear, and backed into the swimming pool. Pete Townshend refers to the incident in his memoir Who I Am. It was such a great story it became part of Keith’s oeuvre. In actuality, it never happened. Karl Green and John Entwistle accompanied Keith to an emergency dental clinic. Members of The Hermits sprayed cars in the parking lot with fire extinguishers that, by morning, had damaged the paint.

  The band chemistry worked well for two or three years before it began to unravel. There were a number of reasons. Initially it was exciting for these teens: traveling for the first time with numerous trips to America and other parts of the world, staying in hotels, filming TV shows and movies, with girls screaming at them, chasing them and pulling at their hair and clothing, and, in some cases, making themselves available for sex. But their intensive work schedule wasn’t novel anymore, and they began to tire. The band members were more comfortable drinking alcohol than taking drugs, and this became a factor. Even though Peter described his behavior as having been a “brat” at times, he wasn’t the only problem. Karl, who developed a drinking problem, antagonized Lek.

  As a teenager trying to fit in, who are your role models? If the older rockers you hung out with drank, you drank. If they splurged on fancy cars, you did too, even if you couldn’t properly drive. “I’d come straight from school into the world of big spenders,” Peter remembers, “and I thought I should look the part.” He bought a Jaguar, then a Cadillac, then a Chevrolet, then a Rolls-Royce. As a young driver, he crashed more than one.

  As Peter was younger than everybody else on the scene, he “wanted to fit in and to be liked” and thought drinking would make him “more interesting.” “We’d go to the Ad Lib club in London, and John Lennon would buy my drinks because he knew I was only sixteen and I wouldn’t get drunk and try to beat someone up. It was a two-drink minimum and John said, ‘You get two Cokes and I’ll get two Bacardis [rum] and we’ll mix them.’ Because John drank Bacardi and Coke and smoked Larks, I did, too.”

  Wholesome-looking Peter developed a problem with alcohol. “I thought the more you drank, the more you were one of the boys. From seventeen until twenty—the big money days—I regularly drank a bottle of vodka a day.” He attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with his accountant father, also a heavy drinker. “I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic, but I had a job to do onstage, so I cut down.”

  Herman’s Hermits considered themselves a band, yet the more articulate and personable Peter was the one who did most of the interviews with the media, the youngest band member asserting his position as leader. Peter wanted to stretch beyond being a pop singer. If he accepted an offer to act, as he did with The Canterville Ghost (an ABC TV play) and Pinocchio (an NBC TV movie), The Hermits couldn’t work and he felt bad about that.

  Peter also experienced an identity crisis of sorts. When he was a young teen, people called him “Stanley Fairclough,” after his character on Coronation Street. With the success of the band, the media mostly referred to him as “Herman.” For example, in 1965 the press reported that “Herman” had received an award from the British Clothing Federation for being one of the
ten best-dressed men in the country. Who was “Peter Noone?”

  Once they were kings of the hill. But then, in the fall of 1966, The Monkees debuted on TV, and The Monkees essentially replaced Herman’s Hermits in the teen market. As Peter put it of his fellow Mancunian Davy Jones, “He does Herman better than Herman.”

  As rock music progressed, The Hermits were left in the dust by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, and others. Much as they would have liked to have competed—and even pop singer Peter “brooded” about it—they were out of their element. And the band members never distinguished themselves as songwriters. “Because of the popularity of ‘Mrs. Brown’ and ‘Henry VIII,’ there was no way we could grow—even if we were capable—and when flower power and San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix came along, it just destroyed us.” They tried, with Donovan’s “Museum,” an ill-guided attempt at psychedelia that misfired.

  MGM Records had been considered a major label, but toward the end of the sixties it experienced financial difficulties, losing $18 million in 1969. Peter Asher, who had been an A&R executive with MGM that year, described it as “a fucked up, crooked, weird company.” When Mickie Most offered his original productions (The Animals and Herman’s Hermits) to American record companies, they all turned him down. Derek Everett was able to interest MGM because EMI distributed them in the UK. There was now less money for promotion and marketing. The tragedy is that the group was still making good records, but in America, its biggest market, after the summer of 1967, Herman’s Hermits never again had a national Top 20 hit. In Britain they had eight, including four Top 10s. MGM was sold to PolyGram in 1972.

  The group rebounded on the cabaret circuit of adult nightclubs. Peter was able to talk to the audience again, and he says The Hermits markedly improved as musicians. Still, where do you go from here when you’re young and still want to express yourself? A split was inevitable. Peter wanted to do what he wanted, without the obligations to the band, and The Hermits wanted to develop their own sound.