Peter Noone

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sets podcast.
My guest tonight is the one and only Peter Nude,
a k A. Hermit of Hermit's Hermits. Peter, so great
to have you. It's great. It's great to be hit Bobby.
I listened to your podcasts, and as you know, I've
been reading your left Sets letter for as long as

(00:31):
it's been out like a fan. Okay, thanks so much
for being a fan, and I'm certainly a fan of
you and your work. But we're here in Hollywood at
the studio. You dropped your wife off at L a X.
You live in Santa Barbara. Yeah, I live in Santa
Barbara and I my wife and daughter are going. My
wife's family have a house in the south of France
and they like to go via Dublin, so they've dropped

(00:54):
him off at L a X. They flying to Dublin
and and to Nice and I'll join them in about
two weeks now. One of the reasons I asked this
is you got married when you were twenty what twenty
one birthday, and you have been married to the same
woman for fifty years exactly. We had our fiftieth wedding anniversary,
and the only person who showed up actually Mickey Moost's

(01:17):
wife and and Mickey mostly was my producer. His wife
and Tom Jones were the only people that we knew
that is still around from our wedding. Okay, so we
all know what being a rock stars like you were
as famous as anybody in the world. How did you
find this particular woman to marry? Um? It was very

(01:40):
it was. It was a strange one. I went to
the Bag of Nails to see Jimi Hendrix, who was
like newly in town. I think Eric Burdon had mentioned him.
And I went to the Bag of Nails and there
was a girl there and she was with another with
her sister, and they were speaking Hebrew and obviously I
can't we can wrote of Hebrew, and they were speaking Hebrew,

(02:03):
so that I because I could speak French, and they
were French, having spent some time in Israel. And the
guy who was with them said, would you dance with
my sister? And were they were aware of who you were? No,
absolutely no idea and the kid would snicks you know
then nothing about me, And of course they knew who

(02:27):
Johnny Halliday was, but there were no other people in
their lives musically, and we we met and we spoke
a little. I had schoolboy French, you know, like a
pretty good schoolboy French. And you know, we actually gave
me her phone number and it was Ambassador double two

(02:47):
six and I kept it on a card and I
went away. And five months later I was in Hyde Park,
which is a big park. It's like walking in Central Park.
And I saw my future wife's sister and I walked
over at said, who where's your sister? And she said,

(03:08):
she's back in England. She's staying my mother's place on
Cleveland Square. That's the Ambassador double two sixties. I said, great,
So I called her and she had no intent, no
intention I have ever seen me again. Um. You know,
she had a dentist appointment the next day and a
headdressed as performance. So eventually we went out to dinner

(03:28):
with other friends. Um, and you know, she found out
I was the real real thing. Then another time, then
we separate again. I went on an American tour and
we she saw me singing on the television on Top
of the Pops and her sister said, look that's the
guy that we that you danced with that night. It

(03:51):
keeps calling, and you went out to dinner with Francois,
and all those people actually goes, oh my goodness, I
had no idea. And she makes a joke. He said
he used to draw pictures of beds and wardrobes and things,
and I thought he was a furniture senter, you know.
So you know, I never learned Hebrew, but my French
got much much better. I only learned French because I

(04:12):
had a good you know, you're always good at the
things you have a good teacher. I had a great teacher,
father Murray. And and I I went to I was
I went to the evenings. I went to the Manchester
School of Music because my dad thought I was. I
needed to be a musician, knowledgeable musician. And there was
a library nearby, the Manchester Library, and on the second

(04:34):
floors where I would go to do my homework because
it was very quiet, and there was there was the
art department. And there was a picture in one of
the books of Bridgie bard Do. And I thought, I'm
going to learn French so bad that I can walk
up to Bridgitte bard Do one day and and and
pick her up. You know, that kind of school boy,

(04:56):
and of course it wasn't Bridgie, but it was someone
even better, which is my wife Mary, much much better. Okay,
so you meet her the second time, then she goes
back to France. How does it ultimately okay, well, how
how it gets going is I come back to England
and I say no, no, no, no no, excuse me. She
moves to Spain. Her mother has a house in the

(05:22):
Ibis in the Baliaric Islands, and I decide to rent
the place next door, which was pretty cool. And I
moved into the place next door, and her mother really
likes me, and I end up spending a lot of
time talking to the mother, who's very interesting, not the
lots of Second World War intrigue and dead husband's from

(05:46):
the Holocaust and the great, great interesting stuff for me.
So uh, we make this friendship. And one day we're
sitting on the balcony of this little apartment of mine
and we hear this voice Peter Noon, Peter Noon, because

(06:06):
there are no phones or there are no communication this that,
and and I got, yeah, I'm Peter Noon, what what
is it? And he goes, I'm from the British Consulate
and you need to come back to England immediately, and
I got what. I think, something's happened to mynd So
I come come downstairs. I go, what's going on? He goes,

(06:29):
your record is in the charts. It's sunshine girl. I
didn't even know it was out and I needed to
be Everyone was looking for me to go on top
of the pops on the Thursday. So, you know, it
was easy in those days. You've got to the airport,
you buy a ticket and you there's no tar, say
there was nothing. You just went, oh, okay, I'll be
back in two days. I went to England, did to

(06:50):
the posts, went back to there, and then I said,
I got to go to New York. My my manager,
Charlie Silverman, is getting married in New York and my
future wife's and I don't do planes, so I go,
you don't do planes. Uh, So we had to take
a ship. We took the America. I think we've called
the United States the fastest ship on the ocean, and

(07:15):
it was the worst crossing. Even the captain was sick,
you know, And that was she took planes ever since then.
So we went to New York, married, we went to
the wedding, and then we set off and went to Mexico.
And Porto Rico, and we did that show business stuff
and I said, you know, let's get how about we
get married? And she goes on, I'm not sure. I said,

(07:36):
you know, you should see me on stage, but you
see who I who who who I'm being some of
the time. You may may not like that character. So
we go to vis Baden and we're playing an American
airport base in vis Baden, and she saw the show
and she still wanted to get She said, okay, yeah,

(07:58):
that could be fun to be married. You you'd be fun.
You're a gentleman. And we got married. So how long
did you know her before you got married? Well, I
think September to November. I mean we I've I've finally
got to spend a night with her in September sixty

(08:18):
eight and we got married in November sixty eight. So
when did you that I first met her in April
six I think. Okay, so April to November. Yeah, it
was just that fast. It was. It was really love
at first. My pot everybody gets divorced. What's the secret
to staying together? My wife has a very good sense
of humor. You know, it's you know, it's really She

(08:42):
still likes me quite a lot. You know, I am
I'm amusing and I make fun of him self deprecating,
which is good. You know, I say, watch out, I'm
going to be naked and second stretch the lights often.
You know, she likes all that kind of stuff. She's
got a very good sense of humor. And she's from
you know, she's from a dysfunctional type of Emily and
I am as well. So we know that the family
is the most important thing. So we know that keeping

(09:04):
the family together is the most important part of the world,
of the whole thing that we've got. Now, one would assume,
being a young man on the road top of the charts,
that you would partake as some of the things that
were going on on the road. Would that be accurate
before I got married? Oh yeah, so twenty one is young.

(09:25):
But you just saw her and you said this is
the one. Yeah, you know, I think I probably, um,
I probably was looking for you know once somebody, I
think Saul McCartney said, you know, you can you can
have a full on life in show business. You can
make show business your life, but you may want to
take some time and have a life at the same

(09:46):
time as being in show businesses, and I was really
I thought, because of the nature of my childhood kind of,
I thought it would be really important to concentrate on life.
My parents, um, we're very busy when I was young,
so we which made me into me, you know, because
they were always gone. So I became very independent, and

(10:07):
I thought I would like to have some settling thing.
Some part of me needed to be settled. That's why
I live in Santa Barbara. I live on a golf course.
I've never played golf in my life, and I live
on a golf course because it's a settled place, you know,
it's my Okay. So you're growing up in Manchester, right
in Manchester, yes, suburbs of Ventures Destruction, and I've been

(10:31):
there a few times with some people. So in any event,
your father does work for a living. My father was
a trombone player who became an accountant and he was
in the Royal Air Force. And part of my story
is my father was in the Second World War and

(10:52):
my mother was sent away to some village during the
Second World War and they got married. I think my
mother got married on her sixteenth birthday and my sister
was born five months later, and then in the fifties,
all those people who had been messed up with the war,
I messed up, I can't think of it would but

(11:15):
transported away from their lives. They both went back to university.
My mother went to Cambridge and my father went to Edinburgh.
And this was after they were married. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this was after I know I was six or seven. Okay,
those those places are physically apart. But you went to
the university of that, remember, you earned it, didn't You

(11:37):
couldn't buy your way into a university. They chose which
one you were good enough? Okay, so, but but they
were ultimately separated absolutely. Who was taking care of the
kids grandmothers. We lived my sister and I lived with
my grandmother and that was for how long three three
or four years. My mother got out a year earlier.
But so, but the marriage sustained even though they were

(12:00):
the mary sustain Yeah, they were married until they died. Yeah,
they were married till death to his part. It's a
family kind of tradition, I think maybe in my family.
But but m because they were separated and they lived apart,
that made me want to be sort of more settled somehow,
you know, And I know this is like a psychiatry.

(12:22):
Think here we got going up. But then I I
needed to be settled, and um, I found a woman
who liked that kind of thing, you know, from the
kibbutz to beats to a country and country place in
England to Santa Barbara. Means we've always been very connected, okay,

(12:44):
and then you didn't have a child to like, after
fifteen years you have been married, correct, maybe more than that.
My daughter's thirty one, so maybe twenty nine years after
we met. After we've got married. Now I don't know.
I can't do the maths. And so why did you
wait so long? We didn't. We were very happy not
to have children, and then I think my wife decided
that it would be really now we were pretty well

(13:05):
organized once once we moved. We lived in France for
a bit and it was a bit dysfunctional, and then
then we moved to America and we found Santa Barbara
and we go, this is probably this is probably a
good time for us. We could have children and it
would we could make it work as an airport. I
could go to work and we could do you know.
And I was going through a lot of changes in

(13:26):
myself so it was really good for me what you
were going through. I became ambitious. I had not been
ambitious for a long time. But you know what caused
you to be ambitious. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed
show business, you know, and hanging out with musicians. I
spent too much time with actors and things like that.

(13:47):
Who are okay? So after your hey day, were you
left with anybody? Not really? But but I never did
it for money, so it never really counted. You know.
I had enough money to buy a house, you know,
And think part of part of the thing that happened
to me was my my parents were very successful in
a business, and they didn't desert us, but they gave

(14:11):
me a massive amount of freedom. And then they their
business failed and I ended up taking care of them,
and a lot of the money that I made I
spent on them. I bought them a house, and I
bought them a hotel, and I bought you know, if
you've got a couple of alcoholic parents, it's probably not
a good idea to buy them a pub. But I
did that, and so so that I didn't really have

(14:35):
a lot of money, although I had probably earned a
lot of mon money. But the question did you become
ambitious because your fine answers were low? No? No, I
was ambitious because I I thought I went to France
and I had kind of retired. I think I was
maybe twenty five, and i'd kind of retired, and I
was making enough money that I could. I didn't really

(14:55):
need to make a lot of money to live a
nice style. And a friend of mine he was he
was making he was the director of the midnight special
and he came to stay in our house in France.
Stan Harris's name was and I had a hit records
in France and in a big hit record, And he goes,
what are you? What are you doing here? How well

(15:17):
it is it? Look it's easy. I can make a
record and I can put it out and I can
make it. You know, it's a it's you've got to
come back to America, come back to America. I said,
I can't afford to come back to America, can't keep this.
And he says, well, you can stay in my house.
I have a house in Beverly Hills. You can live
in my house until you So we couldn't resist the
opportunity to come and stay in his house. In Beverly
Hills and Hanger, and within three days of staying there,

(15:39):
we found a little apartment on Oak Coast, you know,
in Beverly Hills. We moved into a farm. We had
no furniture. We went Robert Rentals or something and rented
all this stuff and we we seally should come here
six weeks at a time. I could only come six
weeks at a time my visa, and and every time
I got a job, I would have to get a
visa again. So we're going backwards and forwards and packtorism forwards.

(16:01):
And then one day we I started a band. I
started a little band called the Tremble. As I got
more and more, you know, I got i'd listened to
the radio and saying, you know I could, I bet
I could make a record. I could like it would
be like Herman's Hermits Part two, you know where where
if Herman's Hermits had stayed together, where what kind of
music would we be doing now? And I became ambitious.

(16:24):
And during that period of trying to put a band together,
I got a job in Pirates of Penzance, just the
touring company, and I think I was really good in it.
And so then I did the tour and then I
did a year on Broadway. Then they asked me to
do the London West End one for a year, so
I did that one. Then I went to New Zealand

(16:45):
and I found out like four years of full on work.
You know, I had insurance, I had Social Security payments,
and I thought, this is like a real gig my foot,
you know, because it's from from the big from Herman's
hermits when I was the sort of money per person
which was ridiculous, you know, the youngest person in the band,
because we've got four pounds ten, we've got to pay

(17:05):
the petrol and there's only enough for us to get
chips without fish. You know. I was not the greatest
manager of money to being somebody taking care of it.
I said, this is great. It's having a gig and
a regular gig. And I became more and more ambitious,
and people started to say the reason I got back

(17:27):
into being Herman again was there was a club in Kitchen,
Ontario called Lulu's and they would call me and they say,
we want you to come and play LULUs And I said,
first of all, I don't know who you think I am,
but I'm not playing in a club called Lulu's, it

(17:50):
sounded like. And he goes, well, you'd be very surprised
if you come up here. We'll pay you just to
come up and have a look at it. And I go, no,
I'm not interested. Just I can't see the words p
noon and luluse in the same sentence. How about performing
Arts center? You know that sort of nonsense. And eventually
they said they call me and they said, look, we
put a band together. They've learned all your songs. All

(18:12):
you have to do is come up and show up
sing your songs and we'll pay you X dollars. And
I will, Oh, that's more money than I've made in
the last forty years or a long time since I've
made this kind of money. So I go up there
and I do a rehearsal with the band, and they're
really nice guys. They're called on the air, and this

(18:34):
kind of all strange luck things happened to me. I'm
in the guitar soul of I'm into something good. I speak,
we begin I always opened, I'm into something good. It's
just like a traditional thing with me. And in the
guitar solo, I'm into something good. I get this thing
like you are not Frederick, You're not even Peter Noon,

(18:56):
You're this guy who sings I'm into something good. And
it was such it was it overwhelmed me. It was
like a I found out who I am in Lulu's
and kitchen. Okay, two questions, what a what year was this?
No idea? And second, what was Lulu's like it was?
It was a five thousand standing room only X came

(19:21):
on that had become a nightclub and it was massive.
And of course I went back three weeks later and
five weeks later inten it became a tradition. I was
one of the guys who played it, you know. It
was Del Shannon and and it was all the big
oldies but goodies actually played up there. And I was
home and I got this. I love this. I just

(19:44):
loved and I really loved all my songs. I have
a bit of a story and that I'm in my
car in Santa Barbara at this time while I'm playing,
while I'm practicing for Lulu's, and i have the window
of my car open and I'm singing along to Herman's herm,
It's Mrs Brown, You've got a lovely daughter. People are

(20:06):
walking past, and I got, oh, my god, you're doing
an impersonation of yourself and people can't see you and
hear it, because you know, you didn't think of it.
You know, you know your own song on the radio.
So I don't know the year, but probably eighty four
somewhere in there. Okay, let's go back to me and Chester.

(20:28):
So what was the business your parents ultimately started. My
mother was the CFO of a company called it's called
Austin Walter's and it was they made neon signs and
it was hugely successful. And my father had some history
in Germany. He used to fly over there a lot
at night, never spend the evening there, and so he
could speak a bit of German. He'd been on a

(20:50):
base there. And they decided to go in into another business,
which was making sinks. They were in the neon business,
fluorescent lighting business, and they decided that are going to
use the same factory to make plastic sinks. And that failed,
and that was a big, big failure and they lost.
I remember they had a beautiful house in Manchester opposite

(21:11):
a golf course and they couldn't pay the electricity bill.
I mean, it went down big time. They financially. So
now you're growing up and now, of course in England
they call private schools public schools. What kind of school
did you go to? I started off in a local
primary school. Then I went to English Martyrs, which was

(21:32):
a Catholic, full on Catholic school, because my grandparents thought
that I'd do better if I went to a Catholic school.
And from there there's there's a thing called the eleven
plus and if you pass that, you get to choose
which grammar school you go to. And I thought I
wanted to go to Manchester Grammar School because that was
a good school. But I failed the test to get there,

(21:54):
I think the actual personality test I failed, not the
written test, and I ended up at my father's old school,
which is St Bede's College, which was a full on
you know, priests teaching young boys how to become men.
And I did pretty good. Then I was pretty I
was one of the smartest kids there. Then I got

(22:17):
into some fights and stuff like that, and my father
sent me to Stratford Grammar School. And I arrived at
Stratford Grammar School and all the work that I've been
doing at the St Bede's hadn't been done yet. I
was at least two years ahead of everybody in the class.
So I spent all my time dreaming about music, mostly music.

(22:43):
Didn't have any dreams about being an actor or anything
except music. I I wanted to meet Del Shannon, and
I wanted to you know, I never had any idea
of becoming a singer or I just how do I
meet these people that's so interesting? And I'm one night

(23:04):
I go to I'm very interested in music, and my
mom my mother gets me a job as a disc jockey,
and a disc jockey with a turntable. Let's say, all
they've got at the club that I work at is
a turntable, and you have to bring the records and
you become the disc jockey based on the kind of
music you play. So I'm playing only American music, and

(23:26):
I'm but there's a lot of space between the songs
and everything. But they're pay them in money, and I'm going,
you know, I'm playing Dion and I'm playing all American
records and somebody holing the crickets and one one that
was always requested was at the hop by Daniel and
the Juniors. And I'm a disc jockey, and I have

(23:47):
lots and lots have a massive music collection because my
parents are rich and and I'm able to buy lots
of records, and I have nine jobs as well as
my parents be enriched enriched. I sell programs at Old Trafford,
which is Manchester United football grams. I sell the newspapers afterwards,
and and I one night i'm walking, I go to

(24:10):
a club too, because I had a lot of girls
go to this club. Some girls that I know say
they go to this club and I go there and
this man walks up to me and he goes, you're
Peter done. Yeah, And he said, look, our singer Malcolm
Lightfoot hasn't shown up tonight and we need a singer.

(24:33):
You probably know someone about the songs that we do.
So I said, well what do you do? And he goes, well,
we do the heartbeat by Body Holy them and then
a lot of body Holly material because they called the
heartbeats so they're they're like a body Holly. And then
and they say we do this and they said they say,
I know that I'll never dance again. Bobby Ryddell, I
know that one. I know that one that said so

(24:53):
I know all the songs and I get up on
stage and what were you known as a singer? Okay,
not not at all. I'm just known as a person
who knows a lot about music from girls, you know, uh,
he knows everything about music. That's what That's what that
was the word that was about. And and I did.

(25:14):
I knew a lot more than anybody else about music.
And they say after that, I do a really good job.
By the way, I'm actually pretty good at that. I
don't do any movements or anything like that. Malcolm Lightfoot
maybe did some twisting or side and none of that.
And this at the end of the show, they said,
you know you would you like to join the band?
And I go, yeah, okay, well what does that mean?

(25:36):
And said, well, we've got a gig next week at
the Ermston Football Club and we're getting paid four pounds
and we split it five ways. And I go, well,
that's great. That's just about what I'm making selling programs
on the same night, so I can have two or
three gigs that that. It's all about money at that point,
and of course I get in the band and immediately
my instinct is to take it over. Let's start for

(25:59):
one second, you said earlier that your mother or father,
your father was a trombone player, and he wanted you
to have a music education, so you did study music
when you were a kid. Yeah. I went to Manchester
School of Music and most of it was just theory,
you know, and I just waffled through it. That was
what would happen? Would I be? I'd be in a

(26:20):
in a in a in a classroom with people doing
respigee and Old Delmo, Dolcedor and that kind of stuff.
That was kind of singing lessons. And I could see
in the other room there were some other boys who
had a guitar and then and I went into there

(26:41):
one day and I said, White, what is what is it?
Which class is this? He said, well, we've we've we've
got a skiffle group. I go, oh what and they say, look,
it's dead easy. I remember the guy saying, look, it's
dead easy. If you could play a crank and you can,
then you can play d and you could play every
song that you know. It's like, wow, how great is that?

(27:04):
That's more the music that I'd like to be in,
the simple beautiful, you know. And they were doing Chuck
Berry kind of songs. They were doing nice, simple, beautiful songs,
and I go, that's it. So I became more and
more fantasy of being I became fond of that kind
of music as opposed to the music that my father
wanted me to do, which would be theory and classical.

(27:26):
And you know, he wanted me to play. He was
a trombone player who wanted me to play the French
horn or the corin play. That was his idea, and
he never I never hate. Okay, let me ask you this, Okay,
if your parents were well to do, why were you
so entrepreneurial, I think you had to be. I think
a lot of people in my period there were entrepreneurial

(27:49):
called hustling in America. You know, I like the word
entrepreneur better, but I think my my father would have said,
you just a hustler. You know, I would find, you know,
the the job selling programs that old Trafford was. We
would go and we'd sell programs before the game and
at the end of the game when people came out,
there was a newspaper which had the halftime results, and

(28:12):
we would we had a van. We bought a van
so that we could do this. And we were only fifteen.
We couldn't drive it, so we needed to employ people
to get us around so we could. So it was
just everybody was in on it. All my friends at
school were doing things. And when once I was in
a band, everybody in that first band, the Heartbeats, had
daytime jobs. It was I was the only one who

(28:33):
was at school and there's no income from school, and
everybody had to be you know, one was a bricklayer
and one was I went on jobs with Alan Wrigley,
the guy who got me in the band. He was
We were window cleaners. All you needed to be a
window cleaner was a ladder in a bucket and a
chamois and that was it. We were making money and

(28:54):
my parents would have paid me not to do the job.
But it's just they were gone all the time. They
were busy. And then how does it end with you
in school? M h. I stopped going when I was fifted.

(29:15):
As soon as I got into the music business, which
I call the music business. My full time job became
Pete Novak and the Heartbeats. Nothing else in the world
meant anything to me. Nothing else that was that we're
going to get on the radio. And we drove around
in a van and we did hundreds. I mean I've

(29:35):
sometimes look at the dates that we used to go
and people kept records of it. We worked four nights
a week. Every week. We do the lunchtime at the
cavern and we do the evening in Blackburn. And we
were really hustling for work. We would work anywhere that
there would have us. And it turned it every day.

(29:56):
It got better being in the music. Okay, it was
their cartress decision to leave school or just stopped going.
And you know, I was very busy at making making
this band happen, and school I tried to leave school naturally.
I went to the headmaster and I said, I've got
a job. I remember, I've got a job at Carrington's,

(30:17):
which was a as an article clerk. That was the
job that I could get. I knew I could get
the job, so I went and got the job. And
I went to the school and said I've got a job.
I want to leave school. And said, you can't leave school.
The law says you can't leave school till you're sixteen.
So I went, oh, and I just stopped going. I'd
sometimes show up, but every day I'd go out with

(30:39):
Alan Wrigley cleaning windows and selling newspapers. And Alan Chadwick
had this job as a bricklayer, you know, carrying bricks around,
and I just stopped going to school. You know, I
knew everything that they were doing. Anyway, I was, you know,
once there was there was a blackboard that turned around,
and there was a there was a teacher call Goldwater,

(30:59):
Mr Goldwater her and he was a really nice guy.
And I feel bad when I tell the story, but
I had written on the back of the the blackboard
that he turned around, a U H two is a wanker.
And we waited for the whole of the lesson. He
kept kept rubbing it out because everybody knew that it

(31:21):
was going to happen. And eventually, like in a movie,
he turned it around and he turned around to the classroom.
He said, noon, come and see me after the after
the class, and everyone was like, he must recognize the
handwriting or something, right, How did you know it was me?

(31:43):
Why do you think it was me? I think so?
Why do you think it was me? He said, You're
the only one who has done chemistry. You didn't do
it at this school. You know, they hadn't got up.
I had no idea that nobody else in the class
had done chemistry, so it was obvious. So I was
a little bit smarter than everybody else. But I was
also lazy, you know, because I would just make it work.

(32:07):
I'd do my homework on the boss. So what did
your parents say about this? They were really busy. My
parents said it was it was kind of significant that
many working class people on the up and up in
England were really busy. But lots of my friends lived
with their grandparents and ate with that. You know. I
would go home from school and eat my grandmother's not

(32:28):
and it was great living at my grandmother's because they
were old and they were deaf. I mean they were
probably in their fifties, but they were old and they
were deaf, and they went to sleep at nine o'clock,
so you could make as much noise as you want.
You could have girls sleep downstairs and they would never know.
I mean, it was just the perfect So your older
sister and it was just the two of your Then

(32:49):
what path did she follow? She got married when she
was very young to a really nice guy and moved
to Liverpool. They lived in Liverpool, and eventually my parents
moved to the near them in Liverpool's part of my
mystery thing is people in Liverpool think I'm from Liverpool
because my parents lived there, but people in Manchester, no,
I'm from Manchester, but say I'm from Liverpool. So it's

(33:09):
just my accent is somewhere in between the two places.
Maybe St Helen's okay, So you're out on the road.
Is Pete Novak with with the band? At what point
do the Beatles? Of course the Beatles were successful in
UK law before they were successful in America. Well, well
there were, they were underground successful for a long time.

(33:31):
There were this band that I remember being with. My
friends would say, you know, Shane Fenton and the Fentons,
just like a happening band. But you know there's that
Beatles thing going on. That's that's different. And what happened
was that without me and Alan Wrigley, this bass player

(33:51):
from the Heartbeats, we we here, we're rehearsing and we
hear another band. You know, every kid in Reefed House
had a guitar, you know that, every kid, And if
they didn't have a guitar, they were playing music as
loud as they possibly could on whatever piece of equipment
they had. But we could hear this live guitar somewhere
and it was August, and we actually walk across the field.

(34:17):
It's called Abbotsford Park now, but it was then it
was a field and we climb overheage and in another
field and on stage the Beatles going one two one
two tests, you know, so we stick around, we go
that's the Beatles. Look, oh look, the drama's got a

(34:38):
riser like he thinks he's someone really posh, you know.
We you know, our bands do put in the and
and the opening act is Brian Poole and the Tremelows,
who were sensational. They're absolutely sensational. You did. Nobody can
follow them. The Beatles come on and Alan Wrigley after

(34:58):
during the first songs as to me, we're fucked. That's it.
That was the end of it. That's it. He realized
that he was net Any aspiration he ever had to
be in the music business was just you know, he'd
seen what the future was right there and it wasn't
a little van driving around playing shadows and Buddy Holly songs.

(35:23):
I was inspired. It was totally inspiration to be. I
said that I don't want to challenge them I think
I could have a version. You know, they're going to
want to peep. Know, nobody's going to want to be
like the Beatles, but we could be like something completely
different than them, you know, as you know, every band
had to be different in those days just to get
a job. If you just showed up and did Beatles

(35:45):
the same songs as the Beatles, they'd say, well, we'll
have the Beatles instead of you. So we we grew
from there. We we we started to do less of
the It made us. It inspired us to get other
songs from outside, so we do my Boy Lollipop, Mrs Brown,
You've got a lovely daughter. We started to add different
kind of material to the show so that people would

(36:05):
think it was more more entertaining because one one thing
that I remember vividly about the Beatles on stage at
that show is August the six nine was they loved
each other. You could see they just loved being in
this thing, and they kept looking at each other and smiling,

(36:26):
and they were inside jokes and it was so inspirational
to me. Sat can you imagine these guys have got
everything going from this before they were really writers. I
think they weren't really songwriters. They were just this group
of guys who really loved each other's energy and played
off each other, and I got and that's probably what
my dad had had in his Big Bend, you know
that there was this sort of union and camaraderie amongst

(36:51):
all the players, so that that was inspirational to me.
And and luckily a couple of the people who ended
up in Herman's Hermit much later had also seen that
show and almost been inspired to like work a little
bit harder on being not better but different. You know. Okay,
so you're the business guy in the band and you're

(37:15):
doing all these shows four nights a week. What's the
next step? What it really was miraculous. We do we
do all of my stories. I'm the luckiest guy in
the world, you know when when people ask you and
I'm the luckiest guy in the world. We play this
gig like I think it was a bombs on Ferry
Cross the Mersey. They would take the ship out whatever

(37:37):
was the ferry at nighttime. They would take it three
miles out to see where. Wait, so you're saying the
song Ferry Across the Mersey is about an actual ferry,
and the whole thing No, he's saying to the ferry,
ferry across the Mersey, not very across the Mersey, ferry
across the Mersey to the land. But I always but
I thought it was hypothetical. I remember when with you,

(38:00):
but there was some specific parties that he was singing about. No,
he was singing, ferry across the Mersey to the place
that I love. Because he's from Birkenhead, Oh, which is
in Cheshire. It's not even in Livapool. Ferry cross the
Mersey to the plant. So anyway, that's so, there is
a ferry and you can rent it. I think you

(38:21):
still probably can. But they've had a tunnel for fifty years.
You don't need a ferry anymore. So so so we're
on this ferry and my friends, people who I don't
even know. My manager, Harvey Lisberg, is at dinner with
his parents and this woman who's and he says, he's

(38:42):
asked the question, Harvey Lisberg, He's asked the question, what
do you want to do when you get your degree?
Business degree? He said, you know, I think I'd like
to be like Brian Epstein. I'd like to find a
group and manage them and travel all around the world
and make hundreds of millions of pounds. And she said
and he and she says, you know, I saw this

(39:04):
kid on the ferry the other night at you know,
alf Albert Goldberg's bar Mitzvah, and the kid is really good.
You should check him out. So we were I think
we were called Herman and the Hermits. By now Herman
and the Hermits, he's called herman Um. So he finds

(39:27):
out that we're playing this nightclub and really, you know
under people down the bottom of the it was called
the Seller, the Cave, the Seller in Bolton. And he
comes and sees us there and he says, I'd like
to be a manager. So I said, well, let's have
a meeting. Come back to my mom's house. My my

(39:47):
mom lived in this fabulous house. And this manager, Harvey Ellisburg,
who is going to be our managers it comes to
the house and he goes, oh, that's a lovely piano,
and I go, you want ago you know when my
my mother had this unbelievable expensive grand piano and uh,
he sits down and he plays what did I say

(40:08):
by Jerry Lewis? I said, we don't want you to
be on match. We want you to be in the band,
and he goes, no, no, I don't want to be
in the band. You know, I'm too ugly something like that.
So but I'd like to manage it. Some of my
parents meet him and they go, yeah, okay, you can
manage it, but well, you know, so he immediately becomes
our manager. Then I'm not the manager anymore, which is

(40:30):
really refreshing because he has much more connecting, much more
connected than I am. And he suddenly we're getting we
have a hundred dates on the book, and now we're
looking to replace people in the bend with better people
because now we can offer them more money. Everybody was
in it for money. I asked Keith Hopwood, how Keith
hop would who was the guitar player? Who who created that?

(40:51):
Mrs Browne got a lovely looked daughter sound. I say,
would you be in the band and he goes well.
I said why did why did you join the band
and when did you join them? And he said, well,
I joined the band when I saw how many dates
had booked, And so we we we instantly start to
get very much more busier in Herman and the hermitson
and we start to play the Cavern regularly. You know,

(41:13):
we become regulars at the Junior Cavern in the evening.
We moved into the upper upper echelons, which is like
nighttime at the Cavern, which was a big, big, big deal.
So we're moving along and I think ultimately we were
the only band left in Manchester who isn't signed to
a label. I think it's really as simple as that.
Who came from me and Chester in that era, The Hollies,

(41:36):
Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the mind Benders,
the Dakotas, Billy Ja c you know, everybody, everybody else
from Manchester who was in our league, the twenty pounds
and up league has gone. So we're the top of
the leftovers. And we have this idea. We've seen Mickey

(41:56):
Most this is again the luckiest guy in the world.
We go to see the Everly Brothers and the bill
was the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, the Rolling Stones and
Mickey Most and and Susan Morem or some some unknown
girl singer who had and it's my party version. And

(42:20):
during the show, h Nicky Most comes out on stage
and he kneels. He's like a fifties guy because the
Everly Brothers are fifty and it's all teddy boys in
the audience, and he wins the teddy Boys because he's
got a guitar with no strings. It's got a guitar
with no strings. But we you can't tell from the audience.

(42:41):
But even though he's got no strings on the guitar,
he has the balls to kneel down during the guitar solo,
you know, I mean when we're completely and of course
all the teddy boys love him. And the Stones come
out and they are dying the death of all deaths.
You go, oh my god, they're like mods, they're not

(43:03):
at all, and they do come on by the chuck
Berry come on and the audience t'lly go, oh well,
they're all right, and they're forgiven. And at the end
of the show, at the end of the show of
the Stones and the Everly Brothers and Bold Didly come
out and they get on a bus. But Mickey most
comes out and he opens the hood of his car,
puts his guitar in it, opens the door for his girlfriend,

(43:24):
puts her in the car, waves us as if he's
the star of the show, and gets in there. It's
a Porsche that's why I put the guitar on the front.
We've never seen anybody with no engine in the car before.
We've never seen a Porsche before. God, that is the
coolest guy who is here is some South African guy.
And but his name comes up in ideas for producers
because he's got this record out called I'm Crying by

(43:46):
the Animals like I don't don't knock, And it's like
this great singer that we know him from the animals.
We know what they can do, but we didn't know
anybody who could record him. So now we go, how
do you get to Mickey Most We've got my sister
call Insane Herman and the Hermits, you know, and hanging up,
and Harvellist book says, I'll send him a plane ticket

(44:07):
to Manchester, which in those days is like unheard of,
you know. I mean it's two hundred miles, took seven
hours to drive it. We'll send him a plane ticket,
and we booked him a night in the Midland Hotel,
which is the Posh Hotel right by the station, and
and we'll drive. We'll get a driver, we'll get a
nice car roven up. We'll borrow your dad's Rover ninety

(44:28):
and we'll pick him up at the hotel and we'll
take him to see you at the club in Bolton
down the stairs. And what we'll do is we get
all the girls to scream. We'll play the audience to
a plan. So when when you do a song, of
course that happened. All of that happened. But the girls
all screamed in the wrong place, you know. They never
scream where you think they they're just going so but

(44:51):
he liked the band, No, he didn't like the band.
He liked Peter Noon. Let's talk in the third person,
and he wanted to get rid of the band and
make records without the band. And now we're a band.
This is a band. These are my friends. We we've
built this monster together, you know. And he goes, okay, well,

(45:12):
come to the studio and let's let's try and do something.
So we've got a couple of songs. Awful. Now I
listen to them. I'm embarrassed that that we had no
we had no idea what we were doing. And we
make a session and at the end of the session
he says, look, the only way I can work with
you guys, is if you get rid of him. And
him and we play and we said we can't get

(45:32):
rid of him. He says, okay, so he will not
be the lead guitar player. He will become the rhythm
guitar player, and that drama you get get a drummer
who can play in time. So it's like it's the
most horrible moment for me because we're now we're going
to have to get rid of these boys that have
been my mates, my bandmates, you know, the union of

(45:54):
a band, and we're all loving each other, but the
music thing is that happening. So luckily Harvey Lisberg once
again and we get lucky. There's another band in Manchester
that's on the up and up called the Whalers and
Big Wally and the Whalers, and we want just the Whalers.
We don't want Big Wally because he's too big. And

(46:15):
we signed to the two guys from the from the
Whalers joined Herman and Herman's Herman and the Hermits, and
we change our name April the first, we change our
name from Herman and the Hermits to Herman's Hermits and manager.
We don't have my mom's phone number anymore. We've got
you know, I used to say, you know, Herman's Herman
and the Hermits bookings, Ermste because my mom had a phone.

(46:41):
It was in the hall down the stairs, you know.
And it's suddenly we became like this big time thing.
And Mickey most sent within days of us putting together
this new band, he sends us a demo, a Carol
King demo of I'm into something good. And he said,
come and come and record that and do that other
song that you played, that other rubbish song. Learned that

(47:01):
again with the new guys, and come in the studio
and we'll make a record. And we listened to it,
and you know, it's we actually thought we were making
a surf recording. We didn't even know a surf record well,
but you know, we we thought that we needed the
surf sound. And Mickey knew this piano player, a session

(47:22):
piano player who was a Roger Webb his name was,
and he had a band called Roger Webb Trio, which
were pretty he was pretty famous. And he sat in
that studio and we were kids, you know, I think
I was fifty sixteen maybe, and all the Hermits was
sixteen seventeen in there. You know, we were really teenagers.
A real boy band, and he sat with us and
we rehearsed it with him like a hundred times, and

(47:46):
we finally we we took a run at it, and
the vocal that I did at the run became the
lead vocal. That was the one that that we kept,
you know, and then we just over everything was over.
The mickey would mix down to one track and then
put stuff. You know, we had two track machine and
it makes it all down to all the drums and
all the instruments on one track. Then we throw more

(48:08):
stuff on it and the background vocals and then put
some hand clapses all over the place. But it just
captured who we were. You know. When I listened to
the record, now I go, well, that is just that's
exactly somebody made a recording with exactly what was going on. Okay,
let's slow down for a couple of seconds. Lizberg, is
your manager? Does he make you sign a contract? You know,

(48:30):
I don't know. We couldn't sign contract. We were all
under age and you had to be twenty one. And
what was his percentage? Ten percent? I think maybe because
he had a partner. We didn't We didn't care about that.
We just wanted to know what being important down the line. Yeah,
tell the story of how it ultimately became Herman and
the hermits Um. Well, we were playing. We used to

(48:53):
rehearse in a pub in outskirts of Manchester, near Derek Lecambye,
where he was a guitar player. There was a pub
there and they let us rehearse there, and the publican
let us use He had a microphone. And we're Americans,
tell us what a public it is. The owner of
the pub, the landlord of the pub is there and

(49:16):
he lets us use his stage and his microphone. It
has a microphone and a speaker, and so it was easy,
and you could rehearse until five thirty. So none of
us went to school anymore, and we'd go there and
rehearse when the pub closed at three o'clock till five
thirty when they opened again. None of us were eighteen,
so we're there and we were doing Boddy Holly songs
and I would wear when it's so ridiculous that I

(49:39):
am the luckiest man in the world. So I put
these horn room glasses on. I had horn room glasses
already and I put them on, and we do a
body Holly song so people would know anybody who knew
Buddy Holly would go, oh yeah, we're a little things
you see and do, And I could mimic him like
I thought I was doing a brilliant job. But we

(50:00):
nish that would be the day, And and the guy
who owns the pub, the publican, comes and he says,
who the bloody ell was that? And I look at him,
You're stupid, can't it's Buddy Holly. You were Boddy Holly
because you don't look anything like Buddy Holly. You look

(50:21):
like Herman from the Bullwinkle Show. And everybody, like all
the future the heartbeats all thought that was the funniest
thing that ever heard because it was Sherman and Professor Peabody.
But he thought he thought it was Herman and Professor Peabody.
So that was kind of part of the joke that
he was so stupid he didn't recognize the body Holly song.

(50:41):
And he also got the name Sherman and Professor Peabody wrong.
You know, you look like Herman from that Herman from
the Ankle Show. And everybody laughs, similar to your laft there,
And he says, what are you look laughing at? You
can call yourself the Bloody Hermits. So that man, who
we don't know who he isn't forgotten. It's I've been
dead for fifty years. He named the band Herman and

(51:02):
the Bloody Hermits, and we immediately we said, that's the
that's a great name for this operation because it's completely
different from anybody else. You know, it's all Beatles and
searchers and movie titles, and you know, everybody's going a
little bit more sophisticated than Herman and the Hermits, and
that we The drummer was the drummer then was called

(51:25):
Steve Titterington, and his We could rehearse his place as
well after the public could go to his place because
his sister was a cop a constable, and you could
make as much noise as you wanted until any time
you wanted. And it was important to the band to
be able to rehearse a lot because we were useless.

(51:45):
We needed to rehearse every song many many times. And
we went home there and we told his mother that
we've we've we've going to change the name to Herman
and the Hermits. And she made suits for the Hermits
out of sacks, potatoes, sacks, and I said, I'm I'm Herman,
I'm going to wear this blue suit and okay, and

(52:09):
they when we did we did a gig. There was
a there was a guy called Jimmy Saville who was
a manager of the Plaza in Manchester who liked Herman
and the Hermits. He thought ultimately he was a big
presenter and got in trouble after his death. Yeah, he
was probably a horrible man. But we we was the
manager of probably many many people in the wrestling business
in those days who became managers of ballrooms were probably

(52:32):
not nice people. But we we didn't care whether we didn't.
We didn't have like a stress test to see if
we could work with people. They had a job and
we would take it, you know. It was that part
of the career. And then he we did a lunchtime
show and the Hermits, the new Hermits, showed up in
these sack things with their little white English legs hanging

(52:53):
out of the bottom. It's just a potato sack, fifty
six pound bag of potato sack with the neck cut
out and the hands, but the guitars and and the
Steve tit Twington's ass was worn out from sitting on
the drum school in the the things. So that lasted
for one day, but we kept the name Herman and
the Hermits, and we once we played that gig in

(53:13):
the plaza, people liked the name, you know, the girls
who came to see us. I remember, like at the cavern,
we we'd always wherever we played, there would always be
somebody that we knew sitting at the front and the
cavern there was always a girl called Margaret and she
was there right from every time Hermit's Hermits played at
the cavern, Margaret would be right at the front. We

(53:34):
never spoke to her, which she we didn't know how
to deal with fans. She we didn't know about groupie's
or we knew was our sisters. And in my case,
my sister had like a plastic you know, Sister Agnes
statue implanted in her forehead and went to Catholic schools
and confession and you know, no sex before marriage. So

(53:55):
that we thought all girls were like our sisters. We
didn't know any ravers or group year or that we
treated fans like they were are on par with our sister,
you know, because we thought all girls would like to
be protected and behave well with girls. And we grew
this band into It was always Margaret and bit I did.

(54:16):
We'd go back to the cabin and there'll be seven
girls at the front, and then the ten never boys,
never like Herman Hermits. Then at the beginning they didn't
like us because we didn't play rock and roll. We
played kind of pop. So that was a bit romantic,
you know, the different talking about So we were romantic.

(54:37):
Can't into something good? And when you have playback, do
you say this is a hit or you say, well,
this is a record we made? Well that one we did?
We didn't, haven't we we It was just flying. We
had no idea what we were doing. We just this
is how you make a record. We had no idea,
We had no knowledge of how he made a record.
We would completely naive. And he didn't like the record.

(55:01):
He took it home and he decided on the way
home that he was not going to release it even
and it was thinking of ways to tell us that.
He was sorry, lads, it just didn't work. But he
played it to Chris Most, his wife, Chris Most, and
she said it's a number one, and he was, you're joking,
I got a remix it. She just don't remix it,
leave it exactly like it is. It's a number one.

(55:22):
I'm telling you, Mickey, it's a number one. It's like
you know, when you play the House of the Rising Son,
you said it's too long. I told you that was
a number one. Just this is a number one. Put
it out and against his you know, because Mickey liked
Mickey loved to claim that he was the song picker
of the century, and he probably was, but but he didn't.

(55:45):
He didn't think I'm Into Something Good was a hit.
And when it was a hit, um, he claimed it like,
you know, I knew it was a hit, and my
dad could have sung it and it would have been
a hit. But I think it was. It was a
really good recording of a really good song, and it
capture and all that sort of energy of those sixteen
year old boys. Okay, so how long after you cut

(56:05):
it was it released? It came out August, the seven
before we probably made it July, so two weeks after
we made it, two weeks after was that the only
song you recorded that? And the B side, the b
side was what Your Hand in Mind, which was the
song that we'd failed the audition with the first time. Now,
worked it. The record comes out the UK instant here instant,

(56:28):
I mean quite instant. Interestingly, we're we're playing in the
club where the manager discovered us, discovered us in Bolton,
and it's opposite a sewing machine factory, out of business
machine factory, and we're changing in the kitchen and Jimmy
Saville has a radio show It got five thirty that

(56:51):
with this Jimmy saddle clown voice and this is Erman's
Ermits and he plays I mean something. You know, it
was the greatest. Still I can still be in that
kitchen to hear myself on the radio, and I remember thinking,
I'm with Del Shannon. Now those people who were on
the radio. I'm one of those people. Now I'm not

(57:12):
just a kid in a band anymore that's got a
bit of success. And we're up to thirty pounds at night.
This is like I'm with those the Beatles and the
delve Shafts always Del Shannon. Why but you know, I'm
within this new league. And we didn't even know that
it was going to be a hit, you know, just
the fact that we didn't know that you couldn't you

(57:34):
couldn't have a hit if it never got played on
the radio that we knew being on the radio was
a hit. Okay, at what point did you realize and
how long did it take for it really to be
a hit? It jumped out of the box. By the
next Thursday, we were on Top of the Pops and
we went to Top of which was in Manchester. You know,
if you got in the charts. I think he came
in at number thirty or something the first week. You know,

(57:57):
I think it started selling instantly because it got played
a very quickly. And I remember the songs that it
was the Kinks You Really Got Me and that one
a rag Doll and pretty Woman. There was some pretty
Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison. We're all in this heavy
rotation and we were now in the same league as

(58:17):
like the Four Season and Royal Orbison. Okay, the it
was always in Manchester at the beginning. Really yeah, So
we go on, we go on Top of the Pups
and and it was like Roy Orbison and the Beatles
and the Four Seasons and Supremes. And when when you

(58:37):
go on Top of the Pups, you go on the
first time and if the record goes up the next week,
you go back again. So for the next five or
six weeks every Thursday, we're at Dickinson Road in Manchester
doing Top of the Pups with our heroes and not
knowing how to deal with our heroes. Like this Royal orbicer.
That's Royal orbicon. We even look this George Kennedy, the

(58:59):
guy who played are you know, We're like in heaven.
This is the greatest thing that could ever happen to
a fan of music. We're now in the room with
the big guys, and did you think, okay, this is
the beginning and we're gonna sail through or this is
one and done. My I think we thought that we

(59:19):
just let raise the level of interest. It's interesting that
we were pretty well matt balanced. We thought we've just
raised our level of interest. Now we'll be able to
get three hundred pounds a night. So now that are
to something good? As it hit? How much roadwork are
you doing? We did? It's interesting. I saw an article.

(59:41):
Um uh, every night we've worked every night. Our managers
and agents sent us to work. There's a there's an
interview with Elvis Presley. I didn't. I interviewed Elvis Presley
and I met him in Hawaii, and the newspaper in Hawaii, said,
which I recently found because of the Internet, says, Peter
Noon meets his all time idol Elvis Presley, who is

(01:00:05):
on a film shoot Hawaiian Love Hawaiian Style in the
and Peter is one of Herman's Hermits and they're on
a three hundred and sixty day world tour. You know,
we were on a three hundred sixty but in we
did three hundred and sixty concerts and made records. Okay,

(01:00:28):
So when you did a show, how long was the
show different? We'd like to do longer, but you only
a lot of shows. You only got twenty minutes. Like
we did a tour in England with with Dusty Springfield
instantly like we had a number one record. We're on
tour with Dusty Springfield and I think we did we
closed the first half or something and did four songs. Okay,

(01:00:52):
how long after half do something good? Are you back
in the studio? Probably before Christmas? You know, we need,
we need another thing go So we go in and
we've got another Carol Kink song that Mickey also doesn't like,
but we think he's always wrong, and it's called show
Me Girl, and it turned it isn't a number one record,
and we go on that. We go on top of

(01:01:13):
the Pops for the first time as he gets in
the charts, and the guy who's announcing us say, do
you think Herman's Hermits are a one hit wonder? And
of course, me being having all the Irish energy, I
wanted to kill him. I still have a resentment I
wanted to go and I've got I'm going to prove
him wrong. So we go back to the studio and

(01:01:33):
Mickey goes, let's do let's do silhouettes. It's a shore
fire here. And next time you go on top of
the Pops, you play the piano. Don't be like Herman
standing in front of Bend. You'd be like one of
the band and it will be everyone will be impressed,
like Alan Price, right, it's good. You know all these

(01:01:57):
but you know it looks cool. You'll be cool. It's
a cool song. I'm gonna go, well, we we do it,
you know we don't do don't do it? And he no, no, no,
let's get it. Let's get fi Flick Thick got any
ideas going to do silhouss and Flick is a studio guitarist. Yeah,
Vick Flick is a famous guitar. He played the James

(01:02:18):
Bond theme and he played that boy Da Da Da
in Hard Days Night, so he's famous. Two people in
the music business in England. So it's Flick Flick and
he goes, yeah, how about this and he goes and
we're like, we're obvious a number. It's a bloody number one.
It doesn't need any fairy dust, you know, let's go.

(01:02:39):
And so we put that one out next and it is.
It's like a top two win England and hit in America.
And we've also done I Can't You Hear My Heartbeat thing,
which is also sitting around and we've somehow in early nine,
on one of those days off, we've been in the
studio and made our first album the record company. But
how long did it take to make the album? Three hours?

(01:03:01):
Everybody had three hours in the three hours to make
the whole album. Yeah, but remember I had I'm Into
something good already made and so two of the twelve
tracks were done. So the other ten tracks are all
whatever we had in our show that hadn't been recorded. Remember,
you had to go and look for songs. That's why
it's all good fun because we had to do songs

(01:03:22):
that people other people didn't do. You know, you couldn't
do Rollover Beethoven or any Chuck Berry song because they
somebody had already done them as well as they could
possibly be done. So we would we did. We cut
I'll Never Dance Again, which was from early Pete Novak,
and the Heart because we cut Heartbeat, which was early
Pete Novak, songs that we knew that we loved. We
wouldn't record anything that we didn't love. So strange in

(01:03:45):
the studio, how much did the b N play? Where
did studio musicians play? At the beginning, the band played
on everything, but bit by bit as we got busier
and busier, it was really a time to learn to
learn a new Mickey find as on and say learn this,
and they was nobody would be as quick as like
Jimmy Page would be there. You have any idea why

(01:04:07):
the albums came out in MGM in America. I think
what happened was we we had to deal with the
m I for the World and E M I didn't
pick up the option, and neither did and they didn't
for the Day Club five. Strangely enough, we were also
in the m I band who were dropped. So we
took advantage of that and we made a separate deal.

(01:04:27):
I think I think MGM signed the Animals first, and
then we were part of that deal. And I'm not
really sure about that because it's it doesn't really interest
me to know how it happened. I only want my
point of view, you know, because everybody starts talking about
the money and stuff like that. I don't care about that, Okay. Now.
On the first album was also Mrs Brown, You've Got

(01:04:47):
a Lovely Daughter? Yeah, how did that come together? Well? Well,
that was one of the songs that we used to
do at the Cavin to be different from nobody will
do My Boy Lollipop, So we'll do my Boy Lollipop,
nobody will do Mrs Brown. I used to dress up
in my school uniform with the short trousers and walk
out and do Mrs Brown you gotta leave a daughter,
as if I was that person in the song, which

(01:05:08):
I still do, by the way, but not the short trousers.
But it made sense to us too, and of course
we recorded it because I think when when Mickey heard it,
it's okay, okay, when it wasn't his idea when it
when it later when it became his great idea. But
at the time he said, we put it on side two,

(01:05:29):
track three. No one will ever get that far. I
mean he actually said, those are the exact words. One.
I've listened all the way through anyway, and it was
hidden there, and of course it became a smash. Well.
I just remember being in America. I bought the album
with a red cover and it said featuring arm into
something Good. And then Mrs Brown became a hit. They
put all sticker all the ones that featuring Mrs Brown,

(01:05:50):
which in America was even bigger hit into something So okay,
the train leaves the station of the Hermit's Hermit saw
the singles, Which ones are your favorites? I love, I Love,
I'm into something good, I like silhouettes, and I like
there's a kind of hush all over the world. It

(01:06:10):
just seems to buy by the time, by the time
we did, there's a kind of hush and all over
the world, which is there's the end of the run
of Hermit's Hermits. None of the Hermits are playing instruments
on those records. It's now John Paul Jones is playing
bass and is conducting the orchestra, and it's all the
greatest musicians in England who show up and play as

(01:06:31):
well as they can, as well as John Paul Jones
can make them. But Mickey mose is still the producer
and always Yeah, he made every Hermit term. It's okay.
So in this time you have this runoff hits. How
many You're on the road all the time? All the time,
we were NonStop. We even did a pantomime in the December,

(01:06:51):
you know, because you could do a Christmas show in
England and the Hermits played sailors and I was a
Laddin or Dick Whittington or something some crazy play Christmas pantomime.
I mean we even found time to do stuff like
that for no money. Let's you go back. Isn't it
true that when you were younger before the Herman's Hermit Sarah,

(01:07:12):
you should we did some television, Yeah, all of which
was you know, just when I was at the School
of Music, a television independent television station opened around the
corner from the School of Music in the downtown Manchester.
It's called Grenada Television and they were creating new It
was the other channel. There was a BBC and there

(01:07:33):
was this new channel, Independent television, and they were One
day some guy comes over to the to the School
of Music and he said, we're looking for a kid
who can play the piano in the background in a
Christmas Christmas E think, so I can play the Holly
and the Ivy, you know, the Holley and d I
v I could play. I play there better than anybody.

(01:07:56):
And so I got the job as kid playing a thing.
And because I got that job, then I was the
kid to go to we know a kid who was
at the School of music who can't do this? And
eventually I found myself on Coronation Street, which is the
number one biggest, biggest TV show in England and still
running even though I'm not in it. It's still running.

(01:08:18):
Were you in it? Very little? But I got paid
good money and I used all that money to finance
the band. You know, but you had no dream of
being an actor. Now I wasn't very good at it,
to tell you the truth. I never fancied myself as
an actor. I think it takes a lot more memory
skills and I have it spent me all. I'd spend
all day learning my one line. Okay, so you're on

(01:08:38):
the road with the band. Yeah, you knew each other
in uh from me and Chester. Did everybody still get
along if you're working that much? We didn't know anybody.
We didn't know each other, but the guys in the
band didn't know each other before we were But you
know that's right history when you're okay, but you knew
each other before you were biggest I met, Yeah, you

(01:09:00):
have that relationship now you're big, you're on the road.
Is everybody still getting them all? Well? I think I
think probably my biggest failing was not realizing that I
could very easily be hurting somebody's feelings without having the
knowledge that was even doing it. Like, for example, would
do the Royal Command performance and the Queen would only

(01:09:23):
meet one person, but she met all the Beatles. So
if you were Carl Green's mom watching the Royal Command
performance and you've seen the Beatles all ship, Hello, Ringo
a lot, Paul, Hello Georgia, you you say to your son,
how come you didn't meet the queen? How come he
gets to meet all the queens? And how come he
gets to be in the dressing room with Andy Williams?

(01:09:44):
Do you know what I mean? And I didn't know
any of that was going on. I thought we were
all mates and that it was the natural thing, you know,
you and I'm the youngest member, and I'm now the
spokesman because you know what the lead singer. What I
didn't know to tell them was, you know, the lead
singer is usually the person that the cameras on all
the time because he's singing, and during the guitar solo,
they'll show the guitar, not the player. And I didn't

(01:10:06):
know to tell them that. I thought that they would
just magically understand everything that goes on in the world
like I didn't, and it was very naive of me,
and I really regret it, and I'm still friends with
a couple of them, but I can understand why they
probably very quickly grew to hate me. Hey it's a

(01:10:26):
bad word, you know, not be very fond of my activities.
And what happened was we were all from Manchester. I
was living with my grandmother, and we became famous and
I immediately moved to London. I got a little muse flat,
you know, for fifteen pounds a week, which was easy.
I could afford that. I didn't need anybody to sign
the credit agreement or anything. And I bought a posh

(01:10:48):
car and I got a driver and I was off
and they were in. They were still living with their
moms and dads. Who does he think he is? And
I didn't know any of that was going on. I
didn't know. I just was so full of myself that
I didn't ever think of other people's feelings. So i've
that's probably a lot of the tension in the band
was because I didn't know that there was any tension.

(01:11:10):
But you moved to London. They theoretically could have moved
to London themselves. They had the same amount of money
that you were making, right, Yeah, we were all we
sharing everything equally. Yeah, everything, every cent was shared equally,
and that theoretically, you know, if you want of the boys,
you can't step out. It's like when Paul McCartney starts
dating the doctor's daughter, the posh doctor's daughter, he's kind

(01:11:33):
of out of the thing. You know, it's not in
the van anymore with the lads. They're all getting in
the van going back to to Manchester to their moms
and dads or whatever was going on. I don't really know.
And I'm catching the lift off the Stones Where are
you guys going tonight? Are we're going back to London?
Can I come with you? Because I'm so naive that

(01:11:54):
I don't know that that isn't appropriate. Constantly I do
it and I'm looking back and I go, how embarrassed.
And So the Beatles are doing a TV show in Manchester.
I'm not on the TV show, but I'm there because
it's in the studio where the people at the gate
know me from being in Coronation Street. So the Beatles
are there. I drive in with my driver waved to

(01:12:15):
the guy at the gate, Arry whatever his name is.
He waves me in. The Beatles are in the in
the dressing rooms. I sit in the cafeteria and they
come and sit down at the table. I start talking
to them as if I know them. Ah, because I'm
sixteen and they think I'm some kid from Coronation Street.

(01:12:37):
But they're the Beatles. And now I'm so stupid, stupidity really,
but it's kind of comedy stupid that I see Paul
McCartney sitting talking to George Martin in the dressing room
with the door slightly open, and I walk in and
join in the conversation. Hello, what's what's up, you know

(01:12:58):
what you do, and and and Paul, who is the kindest,
you know, because I'm just this kid herman and I
I say, I say, and he goes, well, are we're
talking about compression? Do you know anything about compression? I
know what what's compression? And Paul starts up, well, you know,
and this is exactly how it went. You havent heard of,

(01:13:19):
you know, Fats Domino. How when he sings the track go,
it gets it loses some of that, and then we
start singing again. You lose the track and then the
track comes louder in between the first Oh yeah, I
know exactly what he talks about. Well that's compression. And
we're discussing how to defeat the compression. Ah yeah, and
I'm going to and they're they're doing people who have

(01:13:39):
recorded the Beatles songs. And George Martin says, looks at
me like like I'm a an adult and says, which
Beatles song have you recorded? Which means get out and
record any Beatles song I haven't. Just just you know, okay,
thank you? Like but you didn't realize you were big?

(01:14:04):
No I didn't. I didn't. He was so Paul McCartney
was so kind and well mannered and included me in
the conversation as it cares what I think about compression.
But he's just a gentleman, you know. And so was George.
You could have said please get out, but he didn't.
He said, well, which which beatles songs have you recorded? Non? Okay?

(01:14:27):
Leave kind of just okay. So and lots of that
happened to me all my all my time in herme
and Sermis, I would always get myself into situations that
I didn't really realize made me look stupid until years
later I look back and I go you asked the
Stones what they're doing after the show and they to

(01:14:51):
get rid of you. They said, oh, we're going back
to London, and you said the words can I come
with you? They said all right, And and they had
this big American car and there was there wasn't a
seat for me. And even though it's a big car,
so they're the driver called REDGI King who had a hammer.
There was a left hand drive and they sat me

(01:15:13):
in the middle next to this crazy redg King in
the middle with Brian who was also a little guy.
He was a little guy like Brian Jodge was a
little guy. Like me. So we could sit in the
front seat of that big American car with the seat
the middle thing up, and this Ridge king as we
drove past cars on the free on the motorway, he
would lean out of the window and bash their rear

(01:15:36):
view mirror off right, And this is like this kid
from Mentis to his life, been a Catholic school and
everything I got. This is the greatest thing I've never been.
This is incredible, this is these are the greatest people
I've ever met in my life. This is this is.
I wish Herman's Hermits were more like this, you know,
not so nice and staying with their mom's. I wish

(01:15:58):
they would get a hammer bash old people's rear view
mirrors off as they drove past. And that was my
new liago. I live in London. Now I'm going to
live in London and be like them. So when did
you find out that there was resembling from the guys
in the band? You know in the seventies, you know,

(01:16:20):
in the early set when we when we all decided
to what happened was we did a Royal command performance
and we decided that we were going to be a
cabaret band. The American record thing. It was a disaster,
you know, because we would run into a situation where
are being teenagers, we didn't know how to deal with
it because we've never had to deal with so somebody said,

(01:16:42):
you didn't get the check, so we'd say, well, if
they're not going to give us the money, we're not
going to give them the record, which is what they want.
But we didn't know that we wanted we we want.
We didn't know that they didn't want our records enough
to give us the money. Say so is the money
thing came and and then what happened was that that

(01:17:02):
I was kind of nonchalant about the financial part of it,
but the grudge part I wasn't going to let let
go of and we're not going to give them any
more music until until we get all the money and
we want it nothing. So meanwhile, what happened was we
started to make really good records for the rest of

(01:17:22):
the world, like we had My Sentimental Friend and Sunshine
Girl and Something's Happening. They were all big, big records
all around the world, not in America because they were
not released, and we thought that that would tease them
into putting it out. Look at that number one in Australia.
They put it out in a minute. That's they'll give
us the money just to get their hands on that.
They didn't care. They just wore onto the next we

(01:17:43):
you know, the monkeys had come along or something and
we were just like over there and all these were
good exact so, and I realized at the time that
we that we'd stepped into this cabaret world, which was
really good for me because I'm kind of a cabaret person,
do you know what I mean? I can tap did
did he? Did he? And I can you know, and
I can play with the audience. And I talked them

(01:18:06):
into we've got a choreographer, and we ended up doing
a royal command performance for the Queen and doing song
Broadway hits, you know, like name, you Don't Do, Don't
Do Do Do do It do Name, and the hermits
had to not have guitars and had to become male dancers.
Think about it, Oh, I am thinking about but I

(01:18:29):
saw it as I finally saw it about a year ago,
so resentments. So at the end of that, we all
decided that we've done the best that we could possibly
do with that idea. Let's let's all, let's take some
time away from each other and see what happens, see
what happens with the label and everything, and you know,

(01:18:49):
everyone who was recently married and stuff like that. And
at the end of this run, they took the suits off.
We always wore suits, and they ripped them up and
tore them up and jumped through ound on the stage.
I'm never going to wear a suit again, you know
what I mean. And then that's when I realized, Oh,
they didn't. They didn't enjoy. It's not about how much
money they make. It's about how much fun they're having

(01:19:11):
playing as a band, you know, Like we used to
have this fun and laugh at each other and and
someone they made a mistake, we would all laugh at
each other and yeah, and all that was gone and
we were being we were like the Bachelor's or the Shadows.
We were like those bands that we didn't want to be, like,
going through the motions, you know, dance steps and everything.

(01:19:32):
And that's when I realized. And that was also about
the time that I didn't realize that me sharing the
dresser room with Tom Jones and Andy Williams and then
being on the third floor with the Czechoslovakian choir was
not appropriate. It was bad management of their feelings by me.
So whenever we decided to call break, did you think

(01:19:55):
there was a future for you and show business? You know,
I had a TV series, so part of the I
had a British TV shot series that was running at
the same time as we broke up. And I thought
that as soon as I was finished with the TV series,
because I'm thoughtless bastard, heartless bastard, that they would come

(01:20:16):
back into the fold. You know, we can start up again.
We'll go do an Australian tour and we'll do a
little American oldies but goodies to own. That's exactly what
we did. We came over and I think Naida had
one of those things and he put together a British
and I thought, I saw that in your blog. Yeah,
and we thought that was it, and we thought, well,
we can do this now and then. But they wanted

(01:20:38):
to work. See the idea that they wanted to work
and they would be prepared to pretend to be something
other than who they were. And it never occurred to
me that they wanted to work, that they enjoyed working
and singing Herman's Hermits songs and that we're prepared to
do it without me, and I thought that they wouldn't
be able to. I thought they won't be able to

(01:20:58):
do it, you know, like Peter Gabriel thought that Gis
would go on and everybody from everybody? What was the
TV series you have? It was cool? It was it
was Mike Yarwood. It was on every week. It was
a weekly show, and I was doing comedy and singing
a song every week. I was three people in the show,
Mike Yarwood, Averan Post and me, and we did scenes

(01:21:19):
together and it was kind of a fun show to do.
And you would rehearsal week and you shoot it like
it would go out live on Thursdays with an orchestra
and girls singers and all those things. And I choose
the song that I would do every week, and it
was very I mean, it went for three years. It
was supposed to be thirteen weeks, but it went for
three years because it was successful. Like everything that you

(01:21:41):
think you can just have a little flip with, they
turned into being big deals. And that turned into being
a big deal. I'm sure you must have done certain
things had failed. Lots of things fail. I like fails.
I sometimes like failing in a during the song because
then I can recover. You know, I enjoy failure because
as you learned something. It's like I say, too, I

(01:22:03):
went to see a band and they go, do why
do you want to say that? I'd like to see
what I shouldn't do. You know, some ballences you they
do things. Once I saw this band and the the
singer some girl offered him a bouquet of flowers and
he threw it behind him over his head, and every
money in the audience went, oh, so you know you
learn I go. I go to see loads of bands.

(01:22:24):
I'm still a fan of music, which is what bizarre.
People think, Wow, what are you doing here? I'd like
to see what is going on? Okay, So how do
you decide to go on this oldies tour British Invasion tour?
I think Richard Nader offered loads of money. He made
one deal with the Hermits and he made one deal
with me, and that was it. We we got together,

(01:22:46):
we rehearsed. I remember we did simple Men. We did
a Graham Nash song, which is so bizarre, and I
got back on the piano like Alan Price I played
that show, and remember I played the piano in that show. Okay,
well I did, But so we were looking for that
sort of mystery. Oh, they're much more that are musicians,

(01:23:06):
you know, because we decided, like when we were after
we've seen the Beatles, we said, we have to be
careful that we never want to try to be those
those kind of musicians who want to impress other musicians
because they never make it. Okay, so when you go
back out on the road, how many original Hermits go
back out with you? Everybody went? I think on that
one every everybody. I think there might have been a

(01:23:28):
guy called I think Keith Hopwood didn't come back, so
there was maybe one replacement. But Derek let can be
the original guitarist, Barry when the drummer and Carl Green
the base pay. We all went out, but they got
paid less than apparently. Yeah, that was that was also
cause of some concern. So how long did that did
working with that band last? Just that one tour? We

(01:23:52):
thought to do other stuff, but it just all fell
apart during that tour, I think, you know, because we
just we just didn't. We were never an arena act,
you know. Herman Summons never could have played arenas, and
that tour put us in bed. You know, we were
at Madison Square Garden. We could never play that. I
still couldn't play it. I don't think the music doesn't

(01:24:12):
transcend the cabaret kind of atmosphere theater. I think so.
So when you go that's that would be called a fail.
I think that would tour that that come back to
the British invasion much too soon. Okay, but how did
you feel about being an oldies act? Nothing? I thought
everybody that I admired was an oldies act. When you

(01:24:35):
said oldies but goodies, I remembered the word goodie, right,
you know Del Shannon. The first time I saw that,
think about it. The Beatles opened for Chris Montez and
Tommy Row. That was an oldiest talk. They were in
the charts, but they were already it was an oldies show,
and the Beatles were opening for Del Shannon and those
those great artists and Royal Orbison they were they weren't newcomers.

(01:24:58):
So after that, to or what do you do? I
think that's probably when I did a load of solo
stuff in England because I'd had that TV series. So
now Peter Noon was more and more financially viable than
herme and firm. It's anyway. I was now able to
go and do cabaret, which was a big thing in
England at the time. That was where all the money

(01:25:18):
was to go into cabaret and people dinner theater, I
think is what it's called. And there was lots of
that and I ate that up. And then sometime I uh,
I started to really not like being in England. It changed,
the vibe in England have changed, and I didn't want
to be there anymore. And we had a big, big
my wife and I had a big country house with

(01:25:40):
loads of people working for us, and I decided it
was time to downsize. And some guy came over and
saw the house and he said, how much you want
for it? And I said, I want lots of money.
He said, put a number, tell me a number. I
thought of the biggest number I could think of. My
wife still says it was only ten percent of what
I should have asked for, you know, because wives always do.
But and he gave me the money and he said,
I want to move in on Thursday. So we rented

(01:26:02):
of a truck and a truck and Evolvo and we
drove to We rented a house in the south of
France and moved to the south of France. Everything with
the dogs. We had six dogs, and we had to
remove a big truck, you know, like people do in America,
and they move. And I stayed there and we stayed.

(01:26:23):
I loved it in France. I love to get up
in the morning and they go to a little cafe
and people would drink white wine and breakfast and play
the tears, you know, betting on horses. Nothing. I knew
nothing about it, but I would play with them, you know,
and I could speak French, so I was kind of
I felt very comfortable in France when the Stones lived
just down the street. So it's like I followed the

(01:26:44):
Stones to their right. But you weren't on the heroin,
so you're how did you feel from going from Top
of the Pops to playing dinner theater. I just enjoyed
the work. You know, they're all pretty challenging things to
I'm always worried about how how the promoters doing. That's
my only fear that you know, everyone's making money, That's

(01:27:07):
just my nature. So everyone was being paid. I had
a musical director and he was happy to have the work,
and we'd use local bands and stuff like that was
very very hard on my throat because you'd have to
rehearsal a lot. And Okay, so you say you had
some records in France, so you continued to work. You
never really stopped working. No, I con'stant work. And then

(01:27:28):
you put the Tremblers together. When is that probably about?
And what was that experience? Like? It was a fantastic
experience because you know what happened. I became friends, you know,
in l A. There's so the heart Breakers were here
and I became friends with stan Lynch. She was the
drama and I said, I'm gonna have this. And I

(01:27:48):
was also friends with D from d Murray from the
Out and John Bann. There was this little click of
people and I said, I think I'm good. I want
to because I was jealous that they were in a
band and they were in this joyous experience of a band.
They were enjoying being in this band. You know, D
was loving playing gigs with Elton and they were they

(01:28:10):
were it was growing every day, and the Heartbreakers were
you know, they were all still living in the valley.
But you know, they were just ready to make it,
you know, just ready to break it. And I have
to sit there with Stan. I said, you know what,
I think I'm going to start a band and decent.
He said, what would you call it? Herman? I said, no, no,
I think I'd call it Watkins and the Dominators because

(01:28:31):
it was an amplifier, a triangular amplifier in the sixties
thing and called the Watkins Dominator. And he said, I
don't call it that because the people last which once Watkins,
which is memorable stuff with a nice guy d So
we started about putting this band together. Hell and Stand

(01:28:52):
new this drama, really great drama, a big guy. I
wanted a big guy like Stan, you know, but it
could get over the kit like ring. And we started
putting this band together and Standard I wrote a couple
of songs and we well it was all you know,
like starting. It was like really fresh and starting. And
and and Bruce Johnston from the Beach Boys, um, he

(01:29:14):
had a label and I played him a couple of
the things at me and Standard they said, beyond my label,
it's an epic epic portrait associated and I'm associated. So
I got, yeah, let's go. They'll give you money, they'll
give us money to make the record. Yeah, we'll get
the money, will split the money. Then, so we just
suddenly we're in Conway studios and we're making a record

(01:29:34):
with one known you know. I got Phil Phil Solom
who's in a band, and he's playing the guitar, and
I got Stal on the drums, and he brings in
some of the heartbreakers down there to play things, and
we just we're having a blast. That's like Abbey Road again,
you know. It's that where everybody's in a room having
fun and everything's joyous and and it was just a
great experience. And then we put the record out and

(01:29:56):
then of course it all then you find out that
the only people who really really love the music the
people in the band. Okay, and at what point do
you decide to go back on tour as Herman's Hermits.
That phone call from from Lulu LULUs, they started me
out as Peter Noon. I went Peter Noon formerly Home

(01:30:19):
and of Herman's Hermits, and then go down. That's okay,
it's very complicated. You've never been a player casino with
all that. They're not just not too many words. So
then I signed with Paradise in in O Hi and yeah,
excuse yeah, Paradise Agency and they say, you know, we've

(01:30:40):
got a problem because there's another band called Herman's Hermits
going out and we're going to have trouble selling you
us with this Herman Sermits, which is Barry whit when
the druma with his new version of Herman Sermits and
we've got to stop them. I don't think, you know,
British Laurie is unusual. I don't think we can stuff.
I tried to stop and doing it once before, I

(01:31:02):
want in New York, but I failed in Britain. I
mean I won the first case to stopping them using
the name. And we decide to let him make him
call his band Herman's Hermits starring Barry whitwam a new
Herman's Hermits starring Peter Nooner let the audience choose which
one they want to pay the money to see, and

(01:31:23):
that was an agreement and I guess night sometime in
the nineties maybe, Okay, So where's everybody in the original
ban today? Keith Hotwood is in Manchester. He's doing really well.
I just had lunch with him last week. He's a
nice boy. And his son is a fan of Herman's Hermits.
And so what does he do for a living. He's
a He is a producer. He does a lot of

(01:31:45):
television and movie commercial work, like sound tracks. Carl Green,
what it left the bass player? He left Herman's Hermit
starring Barry when about five years ago? And I think
he he does equipment, rents equipment or runs a soundboard

(01:32:05):
and Barry wait, we I'm still out with playing Herman's
Hermit songs. And Derek let him be passed away? When
did he pass in the night? A long time ago?
He was a young man, He was very young man,
but he had Hudgkin slim foma. Yeah, that's not good. Okay.
So I saw you about a month ago and it
was astounding. I mean, I've seen a lot of acts.

(01:32:27):
What the reason the way I described today is I
didn't want to look at my phone. I was afraid
I would miss something. And there were First of all,
the songs are so great. You have not lost your
voice like so many other people at this stage of
the game. And you're so funny. Okay. If I went
to see you the next night at the Canyan Club,

(01:32:51):
would you have been doing the same jokes. No, no,
it's it's it's all run it's it's all runs off
the audience. The whole show has to run off the audience.
That's what cabaret is. You know, you can't what I have.
It is a show. You know, Oklahoma is a show.
When you go and see Oklahoma, you know they're going
to start there's are bright, golden you know that that's

(01:33:13):
what it's going to be. I start with him into
something good, and the rest of it is all sort
of expected. It's expected that I would do a Mick
Jagger dick. It was very funny thing. I'm not sure
that I expected, and it was certainly funny. But if
you've seen the show, you go back and you expect
all the bits to be there, but they'll all be different.
We won't do the same Johnny Cash song every night.

(01:33:36):
I have a three hundred songs to choose from. We
always do the hits. We always start with him into
something good, and we always end with there's a kind
of hush. The rest is all to me. And those
guys behind me that look that looks like a enthusiasm
is actually consternation, Like what is he gonna do. Does
he even know what he's going to do? And I
sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wander around and I do

(01:33:58):
a Richard Harris story. I sometimes tell a story that's
got nothing to do with the show. And so do
you enjoy it? Absolutely? I lived for him and I
always did, you know, I've always liked that bit of
that fear factor of jumping up there. Now you describe
yourself as the luckiest man in the world. Any regrets.

(01:34:18):
I regret that I wasn't kinder to the people on
the way up, and I regret that I wasn't. I
never realized how proud my parents were of me. I didn't.
I didn't think of that. You know, until you get
your own children, you don't know how proud you are
of the smallest things. I didn't realize that they would
be proud. And the only compliment my father ever gave

(01:34:41):
to me was he came to see me in Pirates
of Penzance on the West End and at the end
of the show he said, that was pretty good. Do
you know what I mean? It's this is kind of weird.
I mean, British tend to be reserved, but my parents
have not been supportive of any endeavors I have. Remember
once I got an email from Quincy Jones and I

(01:35:02):
know Quincy at this but first email, I get it
and I forward it to my mother. This is like
twenty years ago, and I'll get a response and I'm
on the phone and I go, hey, mom, uh and
I sent you an email from Quincy Jones. She said, yeah, yeah,
I read it. Your mom. You know it's Quincy Jones. Yeah.
I got a question, oh, v Quincy Jones, how would

(01:35:24):
you know him? And it's like, whoa that was looking
for my don't look for it from my family? So
what have you do? But no, But I'm not like that.
I mean I wish that when when I've been on
top of the pops and the record was number one,
that I'd gone home and say, hey, you know, well

(01:35:45):
they think your parents were proud. Whatever. I haven't had
the success you've had, But my parents are not proud.
I think I think you aldience understands, which acknowledged them. Yeah,
so what have you learned in this career? You know,
all the good guys to finish first. I've found that
a lot of people that I respect and have had
long careers, like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger and people

(01:36:06):
like that. They're very nice people there, you know, there's
the night. I can't find a better word than nice.
They're they're they're really cautious with their kindness, you know,
they're they're kind people. Do you believe they were kind
on the way up? And one never knows how people
were there were always kind to me and and you know,

(01:36:27):
I would say that somebody like Mick Jagger has this
fascinating arrogance, which is which I feed off, because he's
a man who is one of the top five biggest
star in stars in the world, but he's completely under
the radar. You don't know where he is. Like me,
he's never set foot on a red carpet because we

(01:36:47):
don't want any of that. We don't want that. That's
not what we're looking for. Red carpets and people flashing
bulbs in you know, we've got a song because it
now it's all about the songs, isn't it. And he's
got that thing. And Paul mc cartney as well, he
lives under he's under the radar. When he was married
to Linda and making all those great records like ram,
they lived in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere.

(01:37:09):
They lived a personal, fabulous little life in love. Now
all the people, all those British invasion acts, do you
personally know all those people? Probably? I think I know
all the British and uh and you keep up with
any of these people you see about other road, Yes, see,
almost everybody. Like I mean, I was just on a

(01:37:30):
tour in England with Brian Pool from Brian Pool on
the Tramler's Probably he's at the end of his career,
but I saw him the first time with the Beatles
opening for the Beatles in Ermston and the middle of
a field and I've I've known him for that long.
So of six sixty three to now is this is
a classic question. But you mentioned so many gigs. What's
the best gig that you've ever been into that you

(01:37:51):
you were not the performer? Oh, probably Gino Washington and
the Ram Jam band that the you know what I mean,
just one inspirational gig, where as a guy who's just
sweating and and and also Roy Head. I saw Roy
Head in Houston once. Did you even know Ray Head

(01:38:12):
had this record? Like and he was like he did
Jackie Wilson, I like Jackie Wilson as well, but he
could do Jackie Wilson better than Jackie Wilson. And he
sound great, had a phenomenal band, and I saw I
saw the Supremes once and they were pretty good too.
So there's there's about five or six really fascinating giggs.
And every time I saw Roy Orbison he always killed me.

(01:38:34):
And and of course every time every time I saw
the Beatles and Jerry and the Pacemakers, they were brilliant.
Jerry and the Pacemakers were on that tour with you, Yeah,
but then it wasn't the original Jerry. I'm talking Jerry
and the Pacemakers at the Cavern and at the Liverpool Locarno.
And you know, Jerry was very kind to my first
Pete Novak on the Harbis. He took us on a
tour with him and he was the headliner and it

(01:38:56):
was Billy Ja Kramer under the coatas with a second act,
and we were the opening act. And Jerry very kindly
showed us to our dressing who which had gentlemen written
on it. It's a joke. Thanks for calling on at all.
Let me show you to your addressing room. So when
you're doing a gig. Now do you know whether it's
a good gig or a bad gig. You never do

(01:39:18):
a bad one because you're so experienced. But there are
certain gigs that are better than other. Do you suddenly
feel it when you're doing it? But I never quit
on it, you know the guy the guys in my
bend says, wow, we thought we'd lost one air. But
you never quit, you know, because I've I know, I've
always got Henry the eighth. You know, you back up, okay,
so that Henry the eighth is your trick. That's how

(01:39:39):
that you know you rely on that or you'll play
that sooner to wake everybody up. Yeah, but there's a
few that can do that. You know. It's sometimes it's
listen people, you know, it can change my my, my my.
I can read an audience pretty well because I've been
doing it for a long time and I've never done
anything else, you know, I've never had a success of
anything else, ex from being on a stage and reading

(01:40:01):
an audience. And now, with the time you have left,
which you could be a day or thirty years, what
would you like to do with accomplisher? You having accomplished
yet I think I want to do this for I've
got ten more years. I keep saying every every day,
I say, ten more years of this would be great,
you know, and then I'd probably I've got to keep
my chops. You know. It's a lot of musicians like
Mick Jagger and Paul mcco are actually athletes who can

(01:40:24):
sing and dance and and create music. So you have
to think that, you know, when you lose the ability
to do it, you have to be able to stop.
You know, if you can't hit home runs anymore, you've
gotta quit. You don't want to go into the mind leagues.
And while he is still hitting home runs, when you
see Peter Noone's name in the paper, you go to

(01:40:44):
his website. You should definitely go. If you know his records,
you will have a fantastic time and you'll smile and
glow for the next Peter so great to have you here,
that you could go on for so much or so
many other questions like I have, but I will do
it again, and at all period of all those specific songs.
I have memories. I remember, as I say, you know,

(01:41:08):
being in a bus being tired from skiing, and listen
people coming out of the radio and the bus and
it being dark. You have all these memories of these songs,
but as long as they're good memories, I I have
make it. Most used to say, it's only about the songs. Remember,
it's about the songs. And it always and my show
still is only about the songs. It doesn't matter how
they presented. You know, people can go out and sing

(01:41:28):
those songs in a karaoke bar and people get the
buzz because it's only about the songs. Okay um, I
present them really well, I do say so. Yes, let's
go back to what part of the renaissance was I'm
into something good was in The Naked Gun in eight
I think it was, But that wasn't the original version.
That was a recut by you. Yeah. We had to

(01:41:49):
recut it because they were and we re cut it
so well that they said, we have to change the
solo because Alan Klein that a code. People will think
it's the original and they'll want the licensing feast. We
just went and we've rechanged the guitar solom and put
like some little little do. I think the theater that
I saw that and that's one of the that's the
best part of the movie. I thought it was the

(01:42:11):
original track. We tried, We tried very hard to sing.
You know I can still do that herm and guy
really well. You know I take a lot of pay
a lot of attention to to try to be that
guy that sang those records. Do you mean with your
voice or your appearance, every every part of it. It's
standis Levski kets it's um. You know, if you if

(01:42:32):
you can become the person and you can believe it,
then all the music makes sense. If you can believe it,
just for a few minutes that you're in the studio
in in in London making the record with sixteen year
old boys. If you can get into that suit, then
it will work. Can you get into that suit every night,
five nights a week. I can do it. I needed,
I do need a day off now and then. But
I truly you know, when I did Pirates of Penzance,

(01:42:54):
I did a thousand consecutive shows, and that I was.
I was in New Zealand and I think was the
Prime Minister long He said to me, how do you
do a thousand shows? Us? I'm still trying to get
it right for Wow And when you live, I mean,
I know you, but you when you go through we
airports or you're on the street, to people recognize you.
So yeah, that's the people. Do you know certain people do.

(01:43:19):
I wish it was the twenty three year old girls,
but it's it's usually the sixty two year old men
and their and their moms, you know what I mean. Okay,
it's okay, but that's recognition. I love being under the radar.
I like being able to walk around right star Box
and that have this following that is a magical following.
I have a massive, magical following who trust me to
keep delivering Once again, I think we're finally done here.

(01:43:41):
Thanks so much, Peter, Thanks Abo,

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Bob Lefsetz

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