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HERMAN kicked a cobbled stone as he walked along the deserted London mews, squinting his eyes against the hot sun belting against the bright walls of the tiny houses. A fat cat looked up at him and then closed its green, sleepy eyes.
"Gawd," he said, suddenly breaking the clean-cut Herman image like an old 78. "It's 'ot, innit?" Then, he stuck a Yale key into the blue door and bounded up the narrow stairs to the cool gloom of his flat.
He kept aplogising for the scruffiness: "I had to rush out, you see. And I'm lazy . . . 'Sleepy Joe' isn't the half of it.
"I'll tell you my trouble . . . I've never been able to concentrate on any one thing.
"If I had been, I could have done a lot more with my career, and achieved a lot more. As it is, I don't think I've achieved any of the really big things in life I'd like to do.
"What happens with me is, I can start work on writing something, and then I get a call about, say, being in New York on Tuesday. Then I start arranging everything for that, and it probably takes me like until half an hour before the plane to get my visa.
"You see, I always take the easy way out.
"I can't definitely set my mind to something and do it. I might be meaning to make a phone call, then I go into the bathroom for a moment, then I think of something else, then the phone call is forgotten about.

Clear mind
"Or I might switch on something electric, go away, and come back three days later and find it's still switched on.
"I'm going to have to learn to clear my mind. Otherwise, I'm just going to drift along - and that's what I've been doing for four years. I waste so much time when I could be doing important and rewarding things.
"I tell you," added Peter. "I've really got to get myself together. I mean, at the moment I can't even look after myself because I've never had to.
"Through four years of stayin' in hotels, I've become accustomed to room service, and just pressing a button and getting something. I've been used to getting my laundry done. I've been used to having my meals cooked, and finding soap and clean towels in the bathroom, and having my letters answered.
"I suppose some people would say I'm lucky, but I just don't want to GET that way.
"I mean, I could easily just carry on like that, couldn't I? But it would only make me more and more lazy, and I could just get to the point where I might as well give up.
"There are too many things I want to do in life

that I haven't done yet. I'd like to one day get a really good acting role. I'd like to direct one day, when I've learned a bit about it and I know what I'm doing."
Suddenly the intense look drifted away and I got a flash of that big Herman grin of old.
"You know what I'm doing to learn more about film making? I've spent Ł750 on my own portable TV camera and video recorder, and I'm going about just shooting things and seeing how they come out. I've already filmed the Who on stage . . . it came out good.
"It's a good laugh, this video recorder, 'cos you can also feed what you've televised through your own TV set. Maybe I'll make my own shows."
The smile faded, the intense look came back.
"But about my faults," he said, inflicting some moody self-analysis upon himself. "I've been too slack in the past, and that's why I'm now trying to get a good acting role with the BBC.
"I went down there with my manager to see the head of casting, although I've got to be honest about it - I don't think they were too excited at the prospect of having Herman the singer in one of their Wednesday night plays.
"I'm sure they think I don't know anything about acting, just because I'm in the pop business. But I started out as an actor, and that's what I really want to do in the end."
I asked him how important fame was to him.
"I like it," said Peter, "because I suppose in a way I'm a bit of a show-off. For instance, I love doing a live show. I love singing with the Hermits and just being there on the stage in front of the audience. I can build myself up all day to that. It's just the feeling.
"the only thing I don't like about being on the stage is, I don't know what to do with my body. Yeah, my body. I feel embarrassed and clumsy with it. I keep feeling I'm not moving right.
"Still, I honestly wouldn't worry if everything fell through tomorrow. I honestly wouldn't. I'd always find something else to do. If it was necessary I could work in a pub or doing some other ordinary job, and it wouldn't upset me.
"Providing I could eat and have somewhere to sleep. It'd be O.K. by me.

Luxury
"You see, I've always had the same attitude about money and luxury. They're nice. But I can do without them."
Right now, though - when he can afford luxury, and there's no need to do without it - Peter doesn't see ay reason why he shouldn't make the best of it.
In his lounge I watched him playing with an expensive new electric organ on which he plans to work out arrangements for new numbers, and in a corner there stood a Ł450 colour TV set which he rarely gets the time to watch.
"In fact," said Peter, "I'm hardly ever here in the flat at all. I'm all over the place. It's turning into a place just to play records."
He also gave me a spin of the demo version of "Sunshine Girl," the new Herman and the Hermits single which comes out in a week or two. It's a Geoff Stephens-John Carter composition - and, like 99.9 per cent of their stuff, it simply can't fail!
"We've done it in a kind of Honolulu style," said Peter, pressing down the bass notes of the electric organ for a moment to give a nice churchy sound (and interrupting himself with a few lines of a hymn). "I think it's O.K."
It was, too - it was the nicest hymn I've ever heard him sing.

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