Sixty-four years on in the making of The Zombies who were formed in 1961 “Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies” Documentary is finally here. Director Robert Schwartzman’s touch is delicate, leaving the stars to tell their own story.
The movie starts with a clicky screen search on “Zombies” resulting in a montage of DJs, musicians and other music fans extolling the virtues of their album “Odessey and Oracle”: some wearing headphones are grooving together to “Time of the Season,” one person is practicing the prowling bass line, and still another person exclaims “What? Is that the song about who’s your daddy?”
One of the most recognized that provocative exhale; with that galvanizing organ solo hit songs in America “Time of the Season” certainly is worth shouting about.
After that joyous fanfare “Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary” unfolds with a hush: We find ourselves floating toward chief Zombies band members Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone who are under the sky-blue vaulted ceiling of Our Lady of Mount Carmel – Annunciation Church in Brooklyn, NY. They are in the organ loft. Blunstone is singing “The Way I Feel Inside” softly, a cappella. The church setting is appropriate. Blunstone sounds angelic. Risking enchantment, we hover closer and see Argent conducting the singing with his hand before gently joining in with music at the song’s ending, placing his wise fingers on the church’s multi-tiered pipe organ’s keys. This sublime moment is forever framed in Schwartzman’s lovingly made film.
Schwartzman is a Zombies fan and a member of the Coppola family. Tom Hanks served as one of the film’s executive producers. The title “Hung Up on a Dream” is taken from the gorgeous hippie reverie of the same title on The Zombies’ self-produced masterwork, “Odessey and Oracle”, which was recorded during the Summer of Love and released the following year.
The Zombies inspired legions of bands that came after them and they are together to this day creating fresh, distinctive music. It all began when the teenage Rod Argent determined he had to form a band after his cousin Jim Rodford turned him onto rock and roll by introducing him to Elvis Presley. Thank you, Jim. Rodford, bassman in both Argent and The Zombies, passed away in 2018.
The well-paced documentary which received shrieks and minutes-long standing ovations at several arts festivals including Austin’s South by Southwest (where The Zombies also won The Grulke Career Act Prize in 2023) — tells the band’s history in personal interviews, previously unseen photos and film clips, and music from their initial, pre-drinking age meeting outside the Blacksmiths Arms in St Albans, England, through the night of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 and beyond.
Among these treasures we see the band performing energetically at smoky social clubs, barely post-war ballrooms and anywhere else they were invited. We see Argent’s father playing piano, the teenage Zombies performing in a family parlour, Argent and Rodford playing football, and we hear a very early recording of the classic Zombies line-up trying on Elvis’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” for size.
We see The Zombies at the Murray the K Christmas 1964 extravaganza in New York’s Brooklyn Fox where they appeared at Christmastime launched by their first hit “She’s Not There.” Other artists on the bill included Chuck Jackson, Ben E. King, The Shangri-Las and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells. Argent and Blunstone reminisce about the 1965 U.S. Dick Clark bus tour, where they won over several of their musical heroes (who were fellow travellers on the bus) by singing The Beatles’ “If I Fell” a cappella with harmonies. As Blunstone put it upon his first viewing of the documentary, “I left in awe at what Robert had achieved and also exhausted after reliving every heartbeat of The Zombies’ career.”
Underscoring the story are Zombies songs, at volumes no louder than a whisper, including the bewitching “I Remember When I Loved Her” and “Smoky Day.”
“Hung Up on a Dream” is told by surviving Zombies, Argent, Blunstone, drummer Hugh Grundy and bassist Chris White. Lucy Atkinson represents her father, Paul, whom Argent describes as “a very unusual guitarist. He really put his stamp on the band.” White remembers Atkinson’s father as being quite strict. While Lucy, whom Atkinson introduced to many kinds of music, notes, “My dad would have been considered a rebel back in the day. It took a lot of guts to do what he did.” Schwartzman integrates clips and memories of Atkinson so well into the documentary it is as if he were actually there with the rest of the band telling his story. Atkinson died in 2004 just a few weeks after joining the band on stage at the House of Blues Los Angeles, a bit of that appearance is glimpsed in the documentary.
The band’s near-disastrous visit to the Philippines in early 1967 is well-documented, with local stock footage interspliced illustrating this strange episode. We see the hulking Araneta Coliseum where The Zombies, second in popularity only to The Beatles in the Philippines, performed for ten evenings to 40,000 people each time. Sold down the river by management — and not for the first time — they were paid less than 100 British pounds for each night. However, they were well-guarded by the promoter who wanted to keep his investment safe. Another promoter who hoped to engage The Zombies on their nights off found his small nightclubs burnt down.
It was after their return from the Philippines that the band decided to take charge of their musical future and on a remarkably small budget recorded “Odessey and Oracle” with the assistance of their favourite control room crew: engineers Geoff Emerick and Peter Vince. “I really love the bass and tom-tom sound he got together. I really don’t know what he did, but it really sounded quite special,” says Argent about Emerick and the recording of “Time of the Season.”
Although it was a critical success, for reasons still unclear “Odessey and Oracle” did not sell at the time. The band broke up. Argent and White as songwriters, signed to honest publishers, were making enough money to remain in the music business. Their near-penniless fellow Zombies had to find employment elsewhere. One of Blunstone’s first job opportunities concerned selling ladies’ underwear to retail shops. Grundy sold cars for a while, and once back in the music industry discovered Queen only to have his bosses at CBS turn them down. Atkinson went into computers but was also drawn back to music and championed among others Mr. Mister, Judas Priest and pre-Eurovision ABBA, this last band dubbed Atkinson’s Folly by non-believers.
Visiting Abbey Road Studios in time present, we find Argent and White in a control room at a mixing board pushing the sliders and discussing the nuts and bolts of “Odessey and Oracle”. As they rediscover their old roles and joke around, we see how these lifelong friends still get each other. Many will grow astounded wondering why these two, the powerful drivers of Zombies’ music, are not still sitting together creating anew.
Back together with Blunstone and Grundy in the Studio Three live room, the four friends are taken with nostalgia and wonder what they would have created together after “Odessey and Oracle” had they not split up. Both Blunstone and Grundy in retrospect feel they could have been starving artists a little longer. “It’s one of the things you learn early on. It’s how to survive,” says Blunstone.
The film also visits artist Terry Quirk and his “best spelling mistake I ever made.” It is the impish Quirk’s design and his infamous substitution of the letter “e” for the letter “y” in “Odessey” that adds more mystique to “Odessey and Oracle”. (The artist would sometimes explain this away as the American spelling.) Quirk also painted the album cover for The Zombies’ 2015 “Still Got That Hunger”. It would have been wonderful to see more of his joyful artwork; much of it is Zombies-related. In fact, this Renaissance man’s diverse body of work is deserving of its own documentary. Quirk passed away in 2020. At the time of his death, Quirk was working with White and White’s wife, Vivienne Boucherat, on a musical about a chapter in the life of The Zombies. Boucherat is also a visual artist and her animated illustrations of “Odessey and Oracle” songs are sprinkled throughout the film.
In the second part of the 90-minute documentary, post break-up, we see the formation of the band Argent and the Lennon-McCartney-style songwriting agreement between Argent and White. The successful, first product of that song writing partnership was “Hold Your Head Up.”
Later, Al Kooper is seen at an event speaking about discovering “Odessey and Oracle” on a shopping trip to England and convincing Clive Davis to release “Time of the Season.” Further along, we are introduced to the Boise, Idaho, DJ whom Argent always noted during his in-concert introduction to “Time of the Season” as starting the “ripple effect,” which launched the song into the Cashbox and Billboard charts. The DJ remained unidentified for decades. In early 2019, I was determined to track down this mysterious Idaho DJ, who was so instrumental in changing the arc of The Zombies’ career. Joining forces with Art Gregory, founder and president of the History of Idaho Broadcasting Foundation, Inc., we found him — Dick Stott of KYME-FM.
Stott was so enamoured of “Time of the Season” that he played it almost non-stop on his show. He championed the song as it got picked up by radio stations across America and hit the Number One spot in Cashbox in March 1969. Stott, who passed away in 2022, is interviewed in the film. He was a humble man, but without his influence there may never have been a return of The Zombies, nor this documentary.
As “Time of the Season” climbed the Cashbox and Billboard charts in America, back in England phones began ringing at Blunstone’s stop-gap, burglary insurance office job. Asked to record — inexplicably under the name Neil McArthur — Blunstone made three singles. Fortunately, he was soon asked by White to return to the studio with himself and Argent. The two producers imagined a Bartok-influenced avant-garde sound with strings for this new project. The result was Blunstone’s timeless and beautiful first solo album “One Year”.
What is apparent in “Hung Up on a Dream” and what forever keeps The Zombies together is the love and appreciation they have for one another and their music. Argent and Blunstone who both turn 80 in June 2025. They were born ten days apart. Both men share the humour, skills, vision, friendship and love to create more Zombies’ music. Making that point, near the end of the film, Argent says, “We’ve only just finished recording an album [2023’s “Different Game“], but we’re thinking about how great it would be to record some more.” These are promising words to have on record!
While you cannot fit the entire saga of The Zombies into one movie, Schwartzman’s heartfelt documentary brings to the screen a captivating story, fresh information, music, love and magic.
The Fat Angel Sings 