Second Invasion looms

By Joe Brown

Thursday, July 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Nobody really planned it this way — nobody really planned the first one — but Las Vegas is on the verge of a micromini British Invasion this weekend, with a slight but significant return of U.K. pop groups.

The Zombies take the stage at the Cannery on Friday, and long-ago rivals Peter and Gordon play on the same bill with Chad and Jeremy for the first time Saturday.

For those who know about the early ’60s only from its campy sendup in the “Austin Powers” moves, the British Invasion began with the Beatles and brought bands and singers sweeping in waves from England to America, including the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Hollies, the Dave Clark Five, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and (frequent Vegas visitors) Herman’s Hermits.

You can get a glimpse of those golden days in an exhibit called “Pop: Images of the British Invasion, ’62-’65,” 25 photographs by author-photographer Ian Wright, at the Symbolic Gallery through July.

The Zombies

Friday night is the Night of the Living Zombies. You know them best for their hits “She’s Not There” and “Time of the Season” (which got a boost in sales when “American Idol’s” Blake Lewis covered it last year). Choirboy lead singer Colin Blunstone and keyboard player Rod Argent brought the band back from the dead in 2006, and last year’s tour inspired one reviewer to call the revived Zombies “the finest British-invasion-era band still touring that doesn’t have Mick Jagger as a frontman.” Their softly psychedelic 1968 masterpiece “Odessey & Oracle” was unjustly overshadowed by that year’s classmates, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” but still makes “best album ever” lists in rock magazines. To mark the 40th anniversary of “Odessey,” the four surviving original members of the Zombies (including drummer Chris White and bass player Hugh Grundy) played a three-night series of concerts at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre in March. Argent went on to give his next band his last name, and you can expect to hear the classic rock staples “Hold Your Head Up” and “God Gave Rock ’n’ Roll to You” at Friday’s show.

Peter & Gordon

At the vanguard of the British Invasion in 1964 with “A World Without Love,” Peter & Gordon became the first British pop act after the Beatles to hit No. 1 on the American charts. They kept up their softly melodic attack on U.S. airwaves with such hits as “I Go to Pieces” and “Lady Godiva.” And then the invasion ended.

“We didn’t play together at all for a very long time,” says Peter Asher on the phone from London. “We were still pals, but I was busy doing a lot of stuff and it didn’t really come up.”

By “a lot of stuff,” Asher means discovering James Taylor and producing albums for the golden age of ’70s soft rockers, most notably Linda Ronstadt. He even produced the single “Love Hurts” for Cher.

The duo reunited in 2005, after Asher got a call from David Letterman bandleader Paul Schaeffer, who was putting together a British Invasion-themed benefit for Mike Smith, the lead singer and keyboard player for the Dave Clark Five, who had suffered a paralyzing accident and died in February of this year. “He asked what would it take to get Peter and Gordon together for one gig,” Asher says. “As he’s asking, I realized this was going to be a hard one to say no to, because Mike Smith was a friend. In the interim between saying yes and the actual event of the benefit, it dawned on me that we actually had to do it. Gordon had been singing the songs — which I had not — and had adapted them to a solo style. So it took, on both of our parts, quite a lot of rehearsal and work.”

At 64, Asher still sounds boyish and energetic. (He is said to have been Mike Myers’ visual inspiration for the Austin Powers character.) And he’s keeping current: In his management role, he recently took on frequent Vegas presence Pamela Anderson, arranging an unscripted reality show that he says “has a great visual thing to it — it looks like a ’60s movie” (it begins airing Aug. 3 on the E! network). Asher is also managing and producing an acoustic duo called the Webb Sisters, who are on the road with Leonard Cohen. He’s finishing tracks for Nickelodeon TV’s tween favorites, the Naked Brothers Band. “They’re both really smart, they play really well, and they’re both big fans of ’60s music. They knew more about my career than I did.”

Asher’s musical other half, Gordon Waller, has lived in Las Vegas for 18 months, but he’s trying to sell his house near Sunrise Mountain and move to Mystic, Conn. “It’s very hot here,” says Waller, 63, adding a laugh to his understatement. “This time of year, I just sit around doing nothing.” At least he’ll be able to drive to the gig at the Cannery.

Oddly, though Peter and Gordon and Chad and Jeremy got their starts at London’s Pickwick Club more than 40 years ago, they have never performed on the same bill in all this time.

“This is our first gig with them,” Asher says. “We’ve known them, of course, forever. And people would actually confuse us: You had these two English duos singing kind of soft pop. There’s the tall, handsome one who sings the low part, and the short one with glasses who sings the high part. It’s a pretty bizarre set of coincidences, if you think about it. People would congratulate us on our appearance on ‘The Patty Duke Show,’ them on their appearance on ‘Ed Sullivan,’ or something neither of us had actually done.”

Waller says the former rivals are planning to sing something together for the encore, either “All I Have to Do Is Dream” or “Bye Bye Love.”

Chad & Jeremy

Many, many “Chads” and “Jeremys” were born in the late ’60s, inspired by the popularity of another pair of very English names. The whispery vocals and delicate acoustic arrangements of the pop duo Chad and Jeremy also helped inspire many sensitive folk-pop artists to come, from Nick Drake to Belle & Sebastian. The classic Chad and Jeremy albums “Of Cabbages and Kings” and “The Ark” became underground cult albums and still fetch a good price on the vintage market, and though their songs still are not available as legal downloads, their tunes have appeared in “The Princess Diaries” and on ESPN (“Summer Song”). Chad (the short one with glasses) and Jeremy (the tall, handsome one) reached a cultural apex of sorts when they guest-starred on the ’60s “Batman” TV series, and their voices were stolen by Catwoman, played by Julie Newmar.

“Yes, and the British government refused to pay the ransom,” says Chad Stuart, laughing on the phone from his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he has lived for 20 years. Stuart, 66, has spent the post-Invasion decades scoring films and arranging musicals, while his partner, Jeremy Clyde, 67, has had a career as a film and TV actor. “He’s gotten to the point by his own admission, that he’s not Mr. Scrumptious anymore,” says Stuart. “He laughs about it and says, ‘Instead of playing the hero, now I’m playing the hero’s lawyer.’ ”

The duo reunited in 2003, when PBS tapped them to do a special with “some of the old heroes, like Tommy James, the Grass Roots, the Buckinghams,” Stuart says. “It was sort of ‘Why not? Let’s see what happens.’ We were quite unprepared for that teary-eyed standing ovation.”

They went on the road, but got mired in doing what Stuart calls “dinosaur fests.” They dropped their management in 2005 and struck out on their own. Now, Stuart say Clyde is “back seriously, as opposed to just sort of dipping his toe in the water, which is great because when you team up with an actor, it’s not the most secure feeling in the world. ‘Sorry, Chad, I’ve got this great part ...’ ”

They have been working on a new 18-track CD called “Ark-aeology,” a play on the title of their past album, 1968’s “The Ark,” which Clyde describes as “an oblique protest against the Vietnam insanity, so it seemed sadly appropriate that we would bring back an anthology of not just the hit, but our favorite songs from every album going back to the year dot.” The new material, Stuart says, is “very acoustic, because that’s where we come from.” And because of the download snafu, they are rerecording their hits. “We’re not doing radically different arrangements,” Stuart says, “but let’s be fair: If you recorded these hits in ’63 and ’64 and now it’s 2008, things have improved somewhat in terms of sound, in terms of everything. That was the Dark Ages then — you know, the clock on the wall, ‘Come on kids, we want three tunes out of you, get to it.’ ”

Stuart says of the new millennium Chad and Jeremy: “I think we sound very much improved. As an actor, Jeremy has had to keep his pipes in order. And I’ve been a music teacher for a long time now, so I’ve kept singing. If you keep doing it, you’ve got to get better. It’s quite ironic, really: When you’re a kid and you suddenly get famous, you’re not ready. And now we’re ready, and now, of course, it’s a hard row to hoe.”