How the Zombies made Time of the Season on a £1,000 budget

It is now one of the most recognisable songs of the 1960s, but Time of the Season began as a modest, rushed and occasionally tense piece of work. In a Guardian “How we made” interview, Zombies keyboardist Rod Argent and singer Colin Blunstone recall a recording shaped by a tiny budget, a ticking studio clock and a band on the verge of splitting.

A £1,000 album and a self-produced gamble

By 1967 the Zombies had only one UK hit, She’s Not There, which Argent wrote at 18. They had signed to CBS and been handed £1,000 to make their second album, Odessey and Oracle. Argent says that was not a lot of money even then. The band recorded in a handful of sessions spread over six months and, for the first time, produced themselves.

The money ran out quickly, but Argent argues the pressure helped. The tight timeframe gave the record a spontaneity and freshness he still tries to preserve in his work, he says, partly because it is “just much more fun”.

The last song written, and a hunch it was a hit

Time of the Season was the final song Argent wrote for the album. He was sharing a flat with bassist Chris White, and the two swapped ideas by wandering between each other’s rooms. Argent recalls telling White he thought he had just written a hit.

He ties the lyrics to the mood of 1967, when television brought pictures of war into living rooms and some viewers decided they wanted no part of it. The “Who’s your daddy?” line, he says, nods back to Gershwin’s Summertime, an early song the band performed together. “Is he rich like me?” was meant to carry a double meaning, with “rich” suggesting an understanding of how to live.

Abbey Road, the Beatles and a heated session

The band recorded at EMI Recording Studios, later renamed Abbey Road. The Beatles had been in just before them making Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Zombies shared some of the same engineers, notably Geoff Emerick. Argent credits him with a distinctive way of combining the bass and tom-tom sounds. Argent suggested the clap before the beat and the exhaled vocal sound that follows it.

Blunstone remembers a less serene experience. He was still learning the song as he sang it, watching a red recording light and a clock while studio staff enforced strict finishing times. At one point a piano was wheeled away mid-take. With Argent in the control room demanding precise phrasing, tempers frayed. Blunstone says he told Argent to come in and sing it himself, and the reply was blunt. He finds it funny now that he swore at his bandmate between takes of such angelic lines.

Blunstone also admits he did not rate Time of the Season as the album’s best shot at success. He thought Care of Cell 44 sounded like a hit single, but it flopped. The album emerged in a misspelled sleeve after the band had already split.

Death rumours and a delayed hit

The version of events available here cuts off before the full story of how the song found its audience. The article’s introduction and captions hint at it. A DJ in Boise, Idaho, reportedly would not stop playing the track, and a later passage mentions that Al Kooper became a CBS staff producer after leaving Blood, Sweat & Tears. The standfirst also recounts that, a year after the split, two bands toured the US as the Zombies, with one claiming a new singer because a member had supposedly been killed in a car crash. The headline adds that a death was reported in Rolling Stone.

Even so, the interviews offer a clear picture of a classic made quickly and cheaply, with plenty of friction. Argent says of the song, in a caption, that he has never worked out how it can be both of its time and timeless.

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