At the height of the British Invasion (1964-1965), the most serious challenger to the Beatles was not the Rolling Stones. They really wouldn’t hit their stride until the latter half of the 1960s. The Who scored only one minor hit in the U.S. before 1967.
No, the band that scored the highest was Herman’s Hermits, a bubblegum group before the invention of that term. A boy band decades before boy bands became a thing. Herman’s Hermits were five nice-looking young lads from Manchester. Leader singer, Peter Noone, was nicknamed Herman. He was cute in a way that appealed to the little girls, but didn’t frighten their parents (the way Mick Jagger and occasionally the Beatles did).
In those early years, Herman’s Hermits placed 11 songs in the American Top 10, with another 6 charting inside the Top 40. Between March and August of 1965, they logged twenty-four consecutive weeks in the Top Ten of Billboard's Hot 100. They also starred in two movies, more than any other band of that era outside of the Fab Four.
Here are 5 things about these early rock icons you might not know:
1.) For a brief time, they actually outsold the Beatles. In 1965, Billboard named them the top-selling singles act of the year, selling more 45s than John, Paul, George & Ringo. The Beatles, of course, kept chugging along and remain the best-selling group in rock history.
2.) Peter Noone’s nickname was inspired by a cartoon show. His bandmates all thought that Noone resembled a cartoon character from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series, Sherman, the little boy who hung around with the brainy, time-traveling dog, Mr. Peabody. To tease him, they started calling him “Herman” like he was related to Sherman. The Hermits’ name was given to the other four members by a pub owner in Manchester when they adopted the scruffier hairstyles made famous by the Beatles.
3.) Instead of drawing on early American rock ‘n’ roll songs, the band’s biggest hits were covers of very old English music hall songs. While the Stones, Beatles, and other British bands were reintroducing American audiences to the songs of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and others, Herman’s Hermits pulled their two biggest hits from the catalog of English music hall standards of any earlier, pre-rock era. Those, of course, were “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” (which also became the title of their first film) and “I’m Henry the Eighth.”
4.) Unlike most of the British Invasion bands, Herman’s Hermits had no songwriters in the group. Instead, they had to rely on covering those old music hall songs along with a small handful of American pop hits from the 1950s (“Silhouettes” and “Wonderful World”) and songs from emerging British & American songwriters like Steve Bari, P.F. Sloan, and Graham Gouldman (who later became a member of 10cc).
5.) Before turning to rock, Peter Noone had been the child star on a British soap opera. Noone had started out to be an actor. At the age of 14, he was cast as a regular character on the long-running British soap opera, Coronation Street. Two years later, he would give that up when he became a founding member of Herman’s Hermits.
While the hits dried up in 1967, the band did achieve an enduring popularity. So much so that there has been some confusion and a legal battle over who has the right to the name. Noone left the group in 1971 to pursue a solo career. The rest of the band continued on, simply as Herman, until just the original drummer, Barry Whitwam, was left. Whitwam hired other musicians and kept performing, eventually resuming the full name “Herman’s Hermits.”
Peter Noone, by far the most recognizable member of the original group and the guy who had sung all their hits, ultimately took him to court. They settled the lawsuit by agreeing that Whitwam must bill his group as Herman’s Hermits starring Barry Whitwam and Noone can bill his group as Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone, although he often performs simply under his own name with no group mention.
