Fossilized Fud Music: Herman's Hermits

All you have to see is Ed Sullivan. All you have to hear are the word "Manchester" and all the high-pitched girlie shrieking from the audience and you know Herman and the Hermits are part of the '60s British Invasion:

In my brain, they're classified in two ways:

1) The one-hit wonders that wrote and sang the song "Henry the Eighth," as you've just heard, and,
2) Oh. They wrote and performed other songs?

Like this one:

And this one:

Somehow, they look really, really weird in color. And in modern clothing. Not as endearing. Not nearly as goofy, particularly if you pay attention to the marionette-style dancing in the first video (of course, their marionette dancing is much better than Ed Sullivan's typical marionette-like delivery, but only moderately so).

In this color video, and with their aged, hippie fans in the audience, they look more like they're directing exercises at an old folks' home rather than performing at a concert. But then again, these are my kind of people: Mellow. Kinda boring. Not likely to raise a fuss and not really likely to scream their heads off so much at a concert I go home not being able to hear.

But back to the one-hit wonder thing. Perhaps it's because I simply don't pay attention, or that all these British invasion bands sound, well, so much alike. It's easy to think that they're one-hit wonders because their one hit song gets played and played and played so much on the radio that you forget they recorded anything else.

Ew. That musical finale at the end of that third video reminds me why I don't like to go to concerts. I'm much happier with the studio version of most songs, since they typically -- and I know it's not true for every song -- don't get overblown like that.