‘My death was reported in Rolling Stone’: how the Zombies made Time of the Season

‘A year after we broke up, we heard that two bands had started touring the US as the Zombies. One group said they were the originals but with a new singer – because I’d been killed in a car crash’

Rod Argent, writer, Hammond L100 organ and backing vocals

Our first single, She’s Not There, was one of the first songs I wrote, when I was 18. It remained our only hit in the UK by the time we recorded our second album, Odessey and Oracle, in 1967 – this was only three years later but it felt like a lifetime. We’d recently signed to CBS and had been given £1,000, which even then was not a huge amount of money. We recorded pretty quickly in a few sessions spread over six months, producing ourselves for the first time.

Time of the Season was the last song I wrote for the album. I was sharing a flat with our bass player Chris White, and we were going to each other’s rooms and playing the different things we had. I said: “I think I’ve just written a song that could be a hit.”

The lyrics reflected the mood of the time. In 1967 there were pictures of war on TV, and people were seeing what a devastating thing it was and saying: “I’m not going to be part of this.” The “Who’s your daddy?” line was, in a way, going back to Gershwin’s Summertime, one of the first songs we performed together, but “Is he rich like me?” had kind of a double meaning: “rich” in the sense of understanding how to live.