Credit: Far Out / Alex Lake
Sat 22 August 2026 6:00, UK
With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sending everyone Homer-mad at the moment, it feels like the perfect time to revisit another famous odyssey, one that ended with The Zombies landing a number one hit in America.
From its opening bars of looping drums, rising bassline, reverberated offbeat claps and that unmistakable sigh of “Aah”, The Zombies’ 1968 hit ‘Time of the Season’ is instantly recognisable.
Today, it’s a staple of classic rock radio around the world, and an easy go-to for film and advert makers whenever someone wants to conjure the spirit of 1967 and the Summer of Love. Yet despite being recorded that very summer at Abbey Road, the song wouldn’t become a hit until almost two years later.
The song was recorded as part of Odessey & Oracle, an album that was already beginning to feel like a farewell by the time The Zombies entered Abbey Road in June 1967. While The Beatles (who had recorded Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band there just months before) were at the height of their creative powers, The Zombies were working with a budget of around just £1,000, meaning they had to make every minute in the studio count, marking the absolute antithesis of psychedelic indulgence.
Their UK hits had dried up, and with live fees in those days heavily dependent on a band’s most recent chart success, The Zombies were finding it increasingly difficult to make a living. Argent and bassist Chris White, the band’s principal songwriters, were still earning money from publishing, but the same couldn’t be said for everyone; guitarist Paul Atkinson had just got married and had no money, and he knew he was going to have to quit soon.
Even the album title felt like part of a cosmic joke, the Greek gods laughing at them as their career petered out. The cover was painted by Terry Quirk, an art‑school friend of Chris White, who had shown the band an early mock‑up before they headed off on tour. They loved it and gave him the go‑ahead, only to return and discover that the finished artwork contained a rather unfortunate mistake: ‘Odyssey’ had been spelt ‘Odessey’. By that point, the album had already gone to print, and so Odessey & Oracle it remained.
However, when it came to the America, since the first single, ‘Care of Cell 44’ didn’t chart, CBS boss Clive Davis decided against releasing the album there, which only happened because Al Kooper (the guitarist, producer and, most famously, the organ player on Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’) had discovered the record while on a trip to the UK and was blown away by it. He returned to the US and to label boss Davis and insisted that CBS acquire the record, only to be told that they already had it and had passed on it.
Further reading: From The Vault
Eventually, on Kooper’s recommendation, the CBS subsidiary Date Records put the album out in America, but even then, the label seemed to have little idea which song might actually connect with listeners. The next Zombies single released in the States was Chris White’s elaborate anti‑war composition ‘Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)’, a song the label presumably hoped would chime with a young audience increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, but it flopped too, and even though Argent and Kooper both loved the track, neither could understand why the label had chosen it as a single.
With the album going nowhere and The Zombies already on their way out, ‘Time of the Season’ was released as something of a final throw of the dice. Initially, it looked destined to disappear just as quietly as the singles that had preceded it, until a DJ in Boise, Idaho, started playing it and the song began to gather a following, with the response spreading gradually from one radio market to another.
It was a very different kind of hit-making process from the one we know today, with no overnight streaming numbers or social media explosion to propel a record around the world. Instead, the track simply kept being played, kept finding listeners and slowly gathering momentum until, by March 1969, that slow burn had turned into a number one on Cash Box and number three on Billboard. It was The Zombies’ biggest American hit, but the only problem was that, by then, The Zombies had already been shot in the head.
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