Colin Blunstone

Colin Edward Michael Blunstone (born 24 June 1945) is an English singer and songwriter. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Blunstone came to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the rock band the Zombies, which released four singles that entered the Top 75 charts in the United States during the 1960s: "She's Not There", "Tell Her No", "She's Coming Home" and "Time of the Season". Blunstone began his solo career in 1969, releasing three singles under a pseudonym of Neil MacArthur. Since then, he has released ten studio albums under his real name. He was also a recurring guest vocalist with the Alan Parsons Project, appearing on four of their albums between 1978 and 1985.

In 2019, Blunstone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Zombies.

Colin Edward Michael Blunstone was born on 24 June 1945, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire and raised as the only son of Arthur and Dorothy Blunstone (née Mahn). "I was adopted", Blunstone has said, "and my mother was the sister of my birth mother". After Blunstone's birth mother became pregnant, she went to live with Arthur and Dorothy in order to conceal the pregnancy from her family. She stayed with the couple for several months until she gave birth and then returned to her family. At an early age, Blunstone was told he had been adopted, but the identity of his birth mother was not revealed until he was nearly 30 years old, when his 'aunt' — who was in actuality his birth mother — revealed that she had had a brief affair with an American serviceman during the Second World War, which led to the pregnancy. Blunstone’s birth father was injured in France and sent back to the United States.

Arthur was an aeronautical engineer at the De Havilland factory at Hatfield who later ran a hairdressing business before returning to work for De Havilland. Dorothy was a former dancer who also worked for De Havilland. Notwithstanding postwar privations, Blunstone recalled that although his family were not well-off, his parents never owning a car, they had a pleasant lifestyle in rural Hertfordshire. He noted that "as a band we gave off that aura of being middle-class… maybe a couple of the guys' families were comfortable, but the others' weren't. Because of where we came from we talk in a particular way. That… sounded a bit like BBC accents… My parents weren't wealthy at all. We may have been middle-class by aspiration, but not by income." He attended St Albans County Grammar School for Boys.

When he was ten, Blunstone acquired a radio, which he would frequently use to listen to Radio Luxembourg. The first record he ever bought was "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis Presley. Other favourite artists included Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Ricky Nelson.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.