The Zombies - Whenever You're Ready - Non-Album Tracks (1965)

Here's the next in my series of stray tracks albums from the Zombies.

During the 1960s, the Zombies were surprisingly unsuccessful commercially. They had one big hit in Britain - "She's Not There" - and three big hits in the US - "She's Not There" plus "Tell Her No" and "Time of the Season." "She's Not There" and "Tell Her No" came early on for the group, and "Time of the Season" wasn't a hit until 1968, after the group broke up. In between, they had a long series of singles that barely hit the charts or didn't chart at all.

This album covers part of that era of commercial failure. But in retrospect, it's clear that the band should have done much better and there was a failure of promotion as well as poor decision making. After all, Zombies are getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than just three songs.

The failure of promotion can be obviously seen by the fact that their record company thought so little of them that they only let them release one album between 1964 and 1967. Mind you, this was at a time when tons of no-hit acts were able to release albums. Here's a clear act of poor decision making as well: the single "Whenever You're Ready" should have been a hit in my opinion. But the B-side, "I Love You," had even more potential. Even though it was only a B-side, it became so popular in the Philippines that the band was able to sell out big arenas there when they couldn't get arrested anywhere else. Then, in early 1968, an obscure group called "People!" did a nearly identical cover version and had a hit with it all over the world, including a number one hit in Japan.

So imagine this album comes from an alternate universe where the Zombies were better managed and promoted, and continued to have hits. Remarkably, only four of the 15 songs on this album were released in the 1960s. Four others were performed by the band at the BBC, and the rest would only come out in the archival box set "Zombie Heaven."

01 Whenever You're Ready (Zombies)
02 Nothing's Changed (Zombies)
03 Come On Time (Zombies)
04 You Must Believe Me (Zombies)
05 Don't Go Away (Zombies)
06 I'll Keep Trying (Zombies)
07 You'll Go from Me [Don't Go Away] [Demo] (Zombies)
08 I Love You (Zombies)
09 How We Were Before (Zombies)
10 I Know She Will (Zombies)
11 Don't Cry for Me (Zombies)
12 If It Don't Work Out (Zombies)
13 When the Lovelight Starts Shining through Her Eyes (Zombies)
14 It's All Right (Zombies)
15 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Zombies)

https://www.imagenetz.de/fovgt

For the album cover, I used the cover art for the "Whenever You're Ready" single. However, I had some problems with that cover, so I made some tweaks. One tweak was that I thought the font used was boring. So I erased the text and replaced, enlarged, and repositioned it.