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Hermits' Peter Noone comes to the Stranahan
Time travel is on tap for this Saturday's KeyBank Pops Concert when Peter Noone takes over the Stranahan Theater, backed by the Toledo Symphony and his own band.
It will be the second night of the 2012 Whirled Tour for Noone, the original Herman of Herman's Hermits, and he's as enthusiastic as ever. With his brash, toothy smile, rumpled mop of blonde hair, and friendly, tuneful voice, Noone seems to have stopped time.
"When I'm on the stage, I think I'm 17 years old again," he said breezily during a phone interview from his car, sailing over Santa Barbara, Calif., highways last week.
The 8 p.m. program will feature now-timeless faves such as "There's a Kind of Hush," "I'm Henry the Eighth," and "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter."
"Our music never went away. The songs are as relevant today as they were in the '60s," said Noone.
How relevant such songs were in the sharp social consciousness and drug-enhanced awareness emerging in the mid to late 1960s depends on your point of view. After all, Britain's edgier musical proponents of sex, drugs, and rock and roll -- the Rolling Stones, Animals, Byrds, Beatles, and Troggs among them -- had taken American pop culture by storm.
In the wake of Elvis Presley and his native cohorts, the British Invasion helped rip open every tightly sealed moral envelope left over from the 1950s.
But in Herman's Hermits, created in 1963 by producer Mickie Most in Manchester, with the sunny, musically trained Noone as front man, England and the United States welcomed a lighter counterpoint to music's darker side.
Touring the United States, Herman's Hermits exuded a clean, sentimental image that actually reflected their own lifestyles, said Noone last week.
"Everybody else was doing drugs," he recalled. "It could be very embarrassing because people thought we were naive. And we thought everyone was nice."
Noone, then 16, and his bandmates -- drummer Barry Whitwam, 17; guitarists Keith Hopwood, 17, and Derek Leckenby, 17, and bassist Karl Green, 17 -- were plucked from school and other careers for this second wave of Midlands boy bands.
In 1964, Noone told the British magazine, Beat: "All this has happened so fast we don't know whether we appreciate the full importance of it all. Certainly, we were seen, signed, delivered to the record company, and the first disc released -- all in about three weeks."
Today, Noone says the speed of their creation and rise allowed the Hermits to function in a world of their own and their managers' creation. "Everything goes well when you don't have a plan," he said with a quick laugh.
Then and now, Noone and his fellow musicians were about entertainment for the masses, especially music with a big beat and a positive message. "We didn't have any pretentions," he said.
"I didn't think it was cool to write songs in a haze of smoke. In retrospect, we were on the right path."
Herman's Hermits in its original incarnation thrived until the early 1970s, claiming many hit songs and drawing crowds. By then, Noone had chosen a path which only crossed those of his bandmates in performances. He stuck to his original intention to become a more diversified entertainer.
He continued writing songs, singing, and acting, spending more than three years touring in a 1980s production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, H.M.S. Pinafore, on Broadway, in London, and New Zealand.
At 64, the original Noone apparently has aged little -- especially compared to the tracked faces of surviving hard-rockers. He does admit that acting 17 on stage today can backfire if he overreaches.
"I have this Panglossian thing," Noone quipped last week, referring to the pivotal character in Moliere's classic satire, Candide, who is a strong proponent of overwhelming optimism, at least most of the time. "None of us are taking ourselves too seriously."
Although Noone says his current musicians have been with him for decades, none are from the original Hermits. That group, however, has reformed and also tours in a separate production.
He counts on fans from age 5 to 65 showing up for his revival and concludes, "I hope you will enjoy the concert as much as I will."
Remaining single tickets for the concert are $22-$46 at 419-246-8000 or www.toledosymphony.com.
Contact Sally Vallongo at: svallongo@theblade.com.
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