An interview with Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits

By Henry Garfield

"Second verse: same as the first."

There'll be a kind of hush all over Bangor on Friday night, when Peter Blair Denis Bernard Noone -- known even to his mother as "Herman" of Herman's Hermits -- comes to Hollywood Slots for a show of songs you only think you've forgotten.

"We’ve got 20 records that were hits in America, and we do all of those," Noone said, when I spoke with him by phone a week before the Bangor show. "Then we do some parodies of ourselves and things like that; we’ll do some Johnny Cash, and the Monkees, maybe some Tom Jones. We know about 300 songs. We don’t really have a set list, so we don’t know exactly what we’re going to do."

Noone was in Schenectady, New York, on a bill with the Grass Roots and Davey Jones, and spoke to me between the sound check and the show.

"We call it the 'Who’s still alive?' tour," Noone quipped, in the same Manchester accent heard on the vinyl records you can still find in the dollar bin at Wild Rufus or Bull Moose. "We don't get underwear thrown at us any more; now they're throwing hip replacements at us."

Few people realize how young Herman's Hermits were when they hit it big in the early 1960s with goofy, happy songs like "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat?" and "I'm Henry VIII, I Am." By 1965 they had already toured the U.S. and released an American "Best Of" album. When I showed the cover to a younger colleague in the office, she exclaimed, "My God! They're twelve years old."

Close. Noone was 16 when the Hermits had their first hit. By 18 he was a star. "It was fun. The people in all the other bands were about seven or eight years older than us. They were friendly and nice to us, and gentlemanly, and gave us plenty of nudging. You know, the Hermits used to go home to their mum and dad’s houses. I was living with my grandparents back then. It was easier to sneak girls into my room with my grandparents. They were always asleep by eight o’clock, you know what I mean?"

Noone said the group's appeal stemmed from its traditional approach. "All the other bands in England were trying to sing in American accents. We used our own accents, like they did in the old British music halls."

The original Hermits disbanded in the early 1970s, and Noone went on to other ventures, including acting in the Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance that starred the great Linda Ronstadt. He's done television, theater and film, and currently performs upwards of 150 shows a year in the United States, east Asia and England. Between the shows in Schenectady and Bangor, he'll be in Munich, Germany for a series of appearances.
His audience today is between the ages of 20 and 60. "It's quite amazing. We do have quite a big following of people who realize that it’s 50% comedy and 50% music. We’re not out there singing 'Come and get it, baby.' We don’t have any songs like that. Our songs are romance and comedy."

Herman's Hermits played Bangor on that first American tour in 1965, part of the British Invasion that followed hard on the heels of the Beatles. Noone doesn't recall the venue. "It was 45 years ago," he said, as though the thought surprised him.

"And you were very young," I said.

"I'm still very young," he replied.

Catch the show at Hollywood Slots on Friday, April 2, at 9 pm.