01. HOW THE PICTURES FOR THE 12 SONGS FROM ‘ODESSEY & ORACLE’ CAME ABOUT
Updated: Jan 2, 2019
I have been singing backing vocals for the special ‘Odessey & Oracle’ live shows by The Zombies for a while now.
In 2015, on my return from a 2 month tour of the USA doing exactly this, I wanted to make a visual statement about the entire amazing experience, ups and downs, of singing and being on stage, being on the road and travelling thousands of miles with the band and crew.
I started working on a huge collage but after 6 months, realised it was never going to work!
I lamented this fact to Chris (White) who suggested that I had made my remit far too wide and that I should focus in on the songs of ‘Odessey & Oracle’ rather than trying to interpret my entire Zombies Tour experience!
It is quite hard turning your back on 6 months of work but from then on I decided to treat each of the 12 tracks as ‘singles’. I remembered the 7” vinyl singles I used to love buying and embarked on a series of twelve 7”x7” collages.
I asked Chris White and Rod Argent to write out phrases I had chosen from their songs and used them in the images. With Terry Quirk’s permission (he did the original ‘Odessey & Oracle’ album artwork), I used details from his design.
The pictures were spotted by Cindy Da Silva of The Zombies management when she was in the UK and she immediately knew she wanted to have them in a book.
She and Scott B. Bomar of BMG made this happen and the images can now be found in the coffee table book ‘The “Odessey”‘ alongside visual interpretations of a further 11 songs by the Zombies – songs from the 1960’s through to the current day.
The book has old and new photos of The Zombies, handwritten lyrics from the songwriters and testimonials of their music from world class musicians such as Tom Petty, Carlos Santana, Brian Wilson, Paul Weller and Graham Nash. There is also new artwork and song chapter illustrations by Terry Quirk. The 1960’s photos are by a variety of photographers & new photos courtesy of Hayley Grundy.
The pictures were animated to be used as a visual backdrop behind the band for the ‘O&O” shows. More about this next month.