Colin Blunstone & Rod Argent's Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London

To-day I listened to Colin Blunstone & Rod Argent's Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, and I noticed a couple things.

"In My Mind a Miracle"

This is the first track on As Far As I Can See (which was the first album for which Blunstone and Argent used the Zombies moniker again).  I'd previously noticed the importance of sight in the lyrics, with lines like "No longer blind, I see because of you" and the hint at the classical blind seer, like Tiresias, (and the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle) with "In you I found my Odyssey and Oracle" (in the liner notes, they've finally fixed the spelling).  I'd noticed all of those visual things, but I'd neglected to notice the Latin root of "retrospect" in the line "The things that I've done in / Retrospect have caused me pain."  In Latin, spectare is the verb to look at.

"Hold Your Head Up"

This is something that should have been obvious, but in the "Hold your head up" chant after the organ solo, "Hold your head" is all sung to one note (a D), but the "up" is sung to a higher note (an F), so there's an ascent in the music and the lyrics.  This feature is also in Argent's original (from All Together Now).

Argent's "Tragedy"

This morning, I listened to Argent's Greatest: The Singles Collection.  I started paying a lot of attention to the Hammond organ in "Tragedy," and I realized that about halfway through the choruses (between "tragedy before your eyes" and "tragedy for every man"), Rod Argent turns his Leslie speaker from the slow rotation to the fast rotation.  At the same time, the chord progression moves up to include higher notes, which the increased oscillation of the Leslie helps to intensify.

The version of "Tragedy" on Greatest: The Singles Collection is the single version (as the title of the album would suggest), but the changing speed of the Leslie speaker is also included in the album version (on All Together Now).  I haven't listened to the two versions back-to-back, but I think the only difference is a few guitar lines that aren't included in the single version.