Herman's Hermits touch down to a high-pitched welcome: "We thought it was fabulous at first. We didn't realise we were paying for it."

Heeeeeeeerman!!!
Judged purely on the Stateside screamomenter Herman's Hermits were as big as The Beatles. When 17-year-old Peter Noone and his clean-cut chums left a stage there wasn't a dry seat in the house - nor a way back to the hotel. "We were completely lost," he confides to Dawn Eden.

IN BRITAIN, HERMAN'S HERMITS WERE STARS. BUT in America, they were a sensation equalled only by The Beatles. They sold millions and millions of records. Somebody bought them.
    Today, American Beatles fans can watch their group's films on commercially released videotapes. Hermits fans have to stay up until 2 a.m. to catch the film Hold On! on one of Ted Turner's networks. Beatles fans can see group members speak at the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Hermits fans must content themselves with seeing singer Peter Noone cut the ribbon at a McDonald's opening.
    Today, even sceptics would agree that singles like No Milk Today and A Must To Avoid could be mistaken for the music of a 'real' Beat group. But back in 1964, when the Hermits first cracked US charts, listeners cared less for veracity. "For a couple of years," observes Noone, "America wanted anything from England. We used to meet English bands on the road who we didn't even know. We'd be on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour and there would be a band called The Hullabaloos, "direct from England". A lot of those bands were English guys who were put together in Philadelphia or somewhere. But anything to do with England went over, even country and western songs like Roger Miller's England Swings."
    Drummer Barry 'Bean' Whitwam believes that the group's youth (members' ages ranged from 16 to 18) attracted American fans. "We slotted into an area that no one had covered. We had a younger image than The Beatles, and the kids that were too young to appreciate The Beatles latched onto us. We were the boys next door."

THE GROUP HAD FORMED IN MANCHESTER ONLY THE YEAR before, when child actor Noone (Coronation Street) linked with bass player Karl Green, rhythm guitarist Keith Hopwood, lead guitarist Derek 'Lek' Leckenby, and Whitwam. They were quickly signed up by eager young businessman Harvey Lisberg and his partner Charlie Silverman. Legend has it that Mickie Most signed the group to a production deal after seeing a photo of Noone that bore a resemblance to a certain US president. Lisberg claims the credit himself: "I thought, clean-cut, good-looking, blue eyes, Catholic image - same as John Kennedy. And that's very popular in America. Still works today." In late '64, a few weeks before the Hermits were scheduled to make their US debut, Noone made a promotional trip to New York. He was still only 17.
    "Our press person had already done The Dave Clark Five and other British acts. When she met me, I was very young. When you're very young you're sort of smart, and I wasn't prepared to pretend to be anything that I wasn't. We had Andrew Oldham doing our press in England, and he'd invented this thing about the Stones being the bad boys of rock. They were actually more grammar-school than Herman's Hermits, but they were coerced into being bad guys, being surly and peeing on petrol pumps. And I decided that I just wanted to be real. Gloria Stavers, the head of 16 Magazine, was very impressed that we were not being pushed into anything except what we were. That really worked well for Herman's Hermits. We were actually very nice guys. So when we did do a press conference, we didn't have to think for an answer. We just said exactly what we thought and that was usually the right answer."
    "During that first promotional trip, those 10 days in January '65, we went from New York to LA and did thousands of interviews with radio and TV shows," says Whitwam. "You'd just run in and do a TV show in five minutes, lip-synching a song. There were no drums there; you'd have to hit a pedestal or the back of a chair.
    "We didn't realise that we were paying for it, though. We thought it was fabulous at first; limousines here, limousines there. The agent says, 'If you need a limousine, whatever time of night, just call this number and you'll have one.' When we got our first royalty check it was minus all these deductions. At the first press conference - I think it was at the Peppermint Lounge - there was a great big spread, with food and drinks. By the time we'd finished talking to all the press, there were three sandwiches left. We got the bill about six months later. It was about $5,000.

CAN'T YOU HEAR MY HEARTBEAT BECAME THEIR BREAKTHROUGH smash, reaching Number 2 in March, 1965. The following month they began a 34-date tour on Dick Clark's Caravan Of Stars, with

  a new song picking up lots of radio play - Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter. "Halfway through the tour," recalls Whitwam, "we did three shows on our own in Texas. when we got to Houston, our managers brought us into a hotel room and read the riot act to us. They said, 'You can't leave the hotel, you can't do this, you can't go anywhere without letting somebody know where you're going, at all times be indoors, no swimming in the pool - your record's just gotten into the charts.' At the shows that we did that night, the fans were everywhere, screaming, chasing the limousine. And it stayed like that for a few years. It was great fun."
    And the rules were only just being written. "That was the most exciting part," says Noone, "because you could say and do anything you wanted and it would always be right, because no one could prove you wrong. I had no point of reference because I was 16. The managers would come to us and say, 'We've been offered $100,000 to do a 30-second commercial for a cola company.' And I would say, 'Have The Beatles done it?' 'No.' 'Has Elvis done it?' 'No.' 'Then we're not doing it ...' That was always my point of reference. We don't need to have all the reasons why we're not doing it: if they haven't done it, it must be the wrong decision.
    "The whole thing was a gag. We all were just completely lost. Which was why we made it. Everybody involved with the group was a partner; the record company made lots of money, the managers made lots of money ... The band with the deals is always a favourite, because everybody's going to profit from them."
    Cash-in-quick production values kept the bottom line healthy, even if posterity suffered. For example, their 1965 star vehicle movie, Hold On! (originally titled There's No Place Like Space, until someone remembered that the Fab's Help! was a hit well worth emulating). "It was made in the Presley genre - 'Let's try and make a movie in 10 days.'," remembers Noone. "Well, we only shot nine days, and that's why there's no ending!"
    "I think MGM was hard-up on scenery and clothes," Whitwam notes. "In the dream sequence, where the other band members are spacemen and I'm an angel, the sandals I had on were the ones Charlton Heston wore in Ben-Hur."
    Hermitmania peaked in August '65, when the group's version of Harry Champion's I'm Henry VIII, I Am (released only for the American market, unsurprisingly enough) knocked Satisfaction off Billboard's top spot. By then, Whitwam recalls, things had got pretty crazy: "Once, after a show, I wound up running down a Montreal street in freezing rain, with about 60 girls running 50 yards behind me. I sprinted down an alley and saw a car passing down the opposite street. I knocked on the window and said, 'Can you let me in? I'm wet through. I'm one of Herman's Hermits, and there's a mob of fans behind me.' So he said, 'All right. Get in the car.' I got into the back seat and threw a blanket over me so that the girls couldn't see me. They were very suspicious of the car, but we managed to get away. I came out from under the blanket and the driver said, 'Where are you staying?' And I haven't got a clue! I've got no money and don't know the name of my hotel or where it is. I just flew into town, checked into the hotel, and played the show. And now I'm in a strange car in a strange town ... We drove around for an hour and a half looking for the hotel. I finally found the place, only to get into trouble with the security people: 'Where the hell have you been? Who gave you permission to go the wrong way?'"
    Things started to falter in 1967. The Monkees had cornered the teen market, and the Hermits' original fans had moved on to other sounds. Desperate attempts to leap aboard such passing bandwagons as psychedelia were unconvincing. That year The Who supported them on tour in America. The two bands got on fine but the writing was on the wall: moptoppery was on the way out, and heaviosity on the way in.
    "The Who blew me up on the last night of our tour, in Hawaii," Whitwam recalls. "After they finished their set, they had a lot of gun powder and other explosives left over. Our last number was Henry VIII, and I was on a great big rostrum. The roadie crept up at the back and put a pile of loose powder and an electric charge under my drum stool. And when we finished Henry VIII, the last drum hit set off the explosion. I was the prototype of Spinal Tap's exploding drummer! The audience went wild ..."


Peter Noone serenades the teenyboppers; Barry Whitwam keeps the
beat: "I was the prototype of Spinal Tap's exploding drummer!"

Previous | Music Magazine Index