Peter Noone Reviews & Such

This Site Swings Both Ways

By Charles Bermant Special to The Seattle Times

Older fans remember The Who opening for Herman’s Hermits and literally blowing them off of the stage. On the Web, it’s now reversed. As leader of Herman’s Hermits, 17-year-old Peter Noone was responsible for some of the most endearing pop of the British Invasion.

Trouble was, the one-two punch of "Sgt. Pepper" and the Summer of Love made them pretty much irrelevant. Things have settled down, and Noone - while he decidedly did not contribute the best music of our favorite decade - now, at 52, has one of the best Web pages.

The trick is he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He knows his music, which he continues to perform, is still pretty good, but it’s not rocket science. He claims to log on at least once a day, to interact with fans and leave his own posts, which are somewhere between autonoonography and cockeyed revisionist history.

"I’m a closet writer, and this page has given me the opportunity to explore this," he said. As a writer, he’s a pretty good writer. His eye for detail (he wrote a whole treatise on cabbage) gives fans new insight to the person who made their childhood a little brighter.

If Noone has done nothing else, he has remade the idea of a fan club. "When I was touring back in the ’60s, fans would send letters to my management or record company and it would take months to get to me, if I would read them at all," he said. "Today I get them right away, and if someone wants to hear a particular song at a particular concert I can fill their request."

He recalls ironic advice once offered to him by John Lennon: "Fans are great, if you don’t let them breathe on you." And Noone is still taking online compliments for his old records. "If we knew people would still listen to them in 30 years we would have cleaned them up," he now says.

Peter Noone Reviews & Such

This Site Swings Both Ways

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