How Cult Favorites The Zombies Won Back Their Masters After Decades

The Zombies, the British invasion rock band behind classics like “Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There,” announced this week they’ve obtained their master recordings after decades of outside control.

“It’s another stage of us not worrying about what’s going to happen in the future,” says keyboardist Rod Argent, one of the band’s founders and songwriters. “We’ve got more overseeing of everything that’s going on.” 

The baroque pop originators signed with Marquis Enterprises in 1964 when they were still teenagers and almost immediately scored a No. 2 hit on the Hot 100 with their Argent-penned debut single, “She’s Not There,” which Marquis had licensed to Decca. They followed that up with another Argent original, “Tell Her No,” which peaked at No. 6. Their signature and most enduring hit — Argent’s “Time of the Season” — didn’t gain traction until after they’d broken up prior to the 1968 release of their sophomore album Odessey and Oracle on CBS. The era-defining song, with its breathy call-and-response vocals from Colin Blunstone and psychedelic keyboard runs by Argent, eventually reached No. 3 on the Hot 100.

Carole Broughton, a Marquis employee at the time, wound up controlling the band’s masters and publishing over several decades, recently placing synchs including Odessey and Oracle album cut “This Will Be Our Year” in the Schitt’s Creek finale and “She’s Not There” in a Chanel ad campaign starring Keira Knightley.

“I’d always promised [the masters] to them,” says Broughton, owner of Marquis and Bocu Group, a publisher that oversees 700 song copyrights. “We’re all in our 70s now and it just felt right. I certainly didn’t want the masters to go back to anybody else other than The Zombies.”

Deal terms were undisclosed, but discussions were “three years in the making,” according to Chris Tuthill, the band’s co-manager. “My partner Cindy [da Silva] and I have been working long and hard to have it controlled and under one roof,” he says. “Although Marquis always kept a sympathetic and active role in the catalog, they didn’t necessarily do things to actively promote the catalog, particularly on DSPs.” When Marquis placed The Zombies’ “A Rose for Emily” in the hit 2017 podcast S-Town, he adds, “It would have been brilliant, had we known this was coming out, having people pitch this for playlisting and promoting the story of this song.”

Still, Broughton and Marquis were unusually fair to The Zombies during a long period when classic-rock stars lost control of their publishing and master recordings to music executives they considered unscrupulous.

“When it was fairly unfashionable, she did the most wonderful job, because she was so dedicated to us,” Argent recalls. “She continually worked it in the early days. She never let it die. That did us a huge favor.” Tuthill adds: “The guys have told me it was always very straightforward, unlike the highway-robbery stories I’ve heard from people who came up in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Everything got paid through that was supposed to be paid through.”

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Broughton sold The Zombies’ publishing, which includes tracks by songwriters Argent, Blunstone and Chris White, to Robert Wise‘s Wise Music Group. “I’d known Bobby since I was young — he used to put out our sheet music,” says Broughton, who began her music-business career in 1961, at 14, with U.K. publisher Mills Music. “It made sense at the time. I knew they were going to be very proactive with it.”

The Zombies, who are on tour this fall and recently released a new album, Different Game, are directing their managers to dig through boxes of files and scouring original four-track tapes for potential catalog reissues. “The gem in all of this is The Zombies don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do anything with respect to their masters,” says Monika Tashman, the band’s attorney. “This is about them claiming something that seemed impossible at the early stage of their career.”