|
I HAVE interviewed Herman in a deserted Birmingham TV studio at 6 am, on horseback in an Irish lane, in a rowing-boat on the Serpentine Lake! I have talked with him in hotels, dressing rooms, clubs and bars; at his home in Liverpool - and at mine in London. But last week I was stranded with the "No Milk Today" man in a little restaurant half-way up a Swiss mountain in the middle of a snow drift! Herman was on holiday - his first for more than two years - and to get away from it all had decided on the island of Jersey. But after three wet, windy days there, he travelled on to Switzerland. We left Jersey Airport at 5:30 pm to fly to Paris, where we should have changed to a plane for Zurich. At Orly Airport, however, Herman discovered that his suitcase was missing. It took the airline at least half an hour to discover that his suitcase had in fact gone astray. Another half-hour passed while phone calls were made to Jersey and forms were completed, by which time the last plane to Zurich had left Paris. However, there are worse places to be stranded in than Paris, but we decided to book sleepers on the midnight train from Paris to Interlaken, which gave us four hours in the French capital. We took a taxi from the airport to Paris Gare de Lyon, picked up our tickets and retired to a bar across the street. Herman has always liked Paris and the first thing he did was to buy a carton of his favourite "Disque Bleu" cigarettes. We ordered beers and settled at a pavement table. He seldom stops thinking about business, so naturally the conversation got round to records. He is genuinely thrilled that "No Milk Today" is doing so well and that "Dandy" is still climbing in the American charts. Very few people in Paris - apart from some British and Americans - recognised him and he has decided that he must release a single in France shortly, to remedy that! We finished our drinks and headed back to the station. The train was in and by the time it left Paris we were fast asleep. At nine in the morning we arrived in wet, misty Interlaken. Shops and hotels were closed and the town apparently deserted, but Herman insisted that we travel to the top of the Jungfrau, one of the highest mountains in the Alps. He had made the journey before with his family four years ago and assured me that it was a tremendous experience. As we walked through Interlaken he pointed out the places he knew. He spotted a club he had visited. "Chubby Checker was all the rage then," he recalled. "I can remember they used to play 'Let's Twist Again' all the time in there. And Dion's record 'The Wanderer' was another." The train journey up the Jungfrau was as he had so rightly pointed out, an experience. |
 Two-thirds of the way up we had to change trains at a little place called Kleine Scheidegg. |
HERMAN'S Hermits' follow-up to their current hit "No Milk Today has already been scheduled. Also issued shortly are singles by the Small Faces, Sandie Shaw, Wayne Fontana, and Jonathan King. |