BY DAVID HINCKLEY
Once upon a time, in the long-ago age of the British Invasion, there were two British duos, one called Peter and Gordon and the other called Chad and Jeremy.
And the years rolled by, and Gordon Waller passed away and Chad Stuart retired from public singing.
This left Peter Asher and Jeremy Clyde without singing partners. And they were sad because they loved to sing.
So they began to sing with each other. Fifty-six years after Peter and Gordon sang “World Without Love” and Chad and Jeremy scored with “Summer Song,” it’s time for Peter and Jeremy.
Peter and Jeremy will be playing on March 8 at My Father’s Place in Roslyn, singing familiar songs like “A World Without Love,” “Summer Song,” “Yesterday’s Gone,” “Lady Godiva” and Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways.”
Says Asher with a laugh, “We even sound vaguely like we used to.”
Back in the 1960s, Peter and Gordon and Chad and Jeremy “were mistaken for each other all the time anyway,” Asher adds. “So in a sense this was probably inevitable.”
While there were more than a few rivalries among the British Invasion groups, Asher says Chad and Jeremy and Peter and Gordon coexisted in harmony.
“We were friends forever,” he says. “We bonded because we were quite different from the other British Invasion bands, even beyond there only being two of us.
“We weren’t from Liverpool. We didn’t play the same rock ‘n roll style. Both of us had one tall handsome guy and one shorter nerdy-looking guy. And something people don’t always remember, in both cases, the lead singer was the second name.”
The two groups even shared a stage for one show.
“I think just one,” says Asher. “Probably to show people we both actually existed.”
Both groups also stopped playing together in the late ‘60s. “Gordon and I didn’t actually break up,” says Asher. “We just wanted to do other things, so we went on hiatus. And then 30 years passed.”
Asher managed to keep busy. He became head of A&R for the Beatles’ Apple label, where he recorded James Taylor. While Taylor’s Apple album tanked, Asher was so convinced Taylor would become a star that he quit Apple and moved to America to become Taylor’s manager.
Good gamble. Asher then went on to produce almost all of Linda Ronstadt’s albums, for which he won two Grammys, as well as Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Ringo Starr, Morrissey, Cher, 10,000 Maniacs and numerous others.
While he sometimes pitched in with background singing, he admits that “there were times when I never thought I’d play the [Peter and Gordon] songs again.”
Then he and Waller were asked to do a benefit, and after some hesitation, they agreed.
“We were asking ourselves, is it really cool to play these ancient songs?” Asher says. “Does anyone want to hear them? So we did it and we found the answer is they absolutely do. These songs are part of their memory of another time – good or bad. We had people crying in the audience.”
They kept the reunion going until Waller died in 2008, at which point Asher again contemplated leaving the songs behind.
“But then Chad retired in 2018 and Jeremy had a similar decision to make,” says Asher. “We looked at each other and said, ‘What the hell?’ “
It helps, Asher says, that he and Clyde – who had a long acting career that took him to shows like Downton Abbey – already knew each other’s songs.
It also helps that their songs were durable. “World Without Love,” for instance, was written by Paul McCartney, who at the time was dating Asher’s sister Jane.
“I love ‘World Without Love’,” says Asher, which is a good thing when no audience will let him leave the stage without singing it.
“Everyone who’s ever had a hit knows that feeling,” he says. “It’s like James Taylor and ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’ You record it without realizing you’ll have to sing it every day for the rest of your life.
“When we do ‘World Without Love,’ there’s a sense of yeah, I’ve done this before. But it’s never exactly the same. Over the years I’ve done it acoustic, electric, solo, with a band. Every live performance is a little different.”
In fact, he suggests, songs themselves are constantly changing – even songs he recorded or produced decades ago.
“When you listen again to the old records, you always notice little things you’d change or improve,” he says. “Nothing ever feels entirely finished. You could go on tweaking endlessly. At some point, you just have to close the door.”
That could be slightly less of an issue if he had today’s production technology back in the day.
“I definitely would have used it,” he says. “In the old days, you had to settle for your best take, even if the drum and bass were slightly out of synch. Today, you can fix that.”
But when it comes to the music itself, he likes the fact there are endless nuances – and that also applies to duet singing.
“Some duets are back and forth, like ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’,” he says. “Others, like ours, are harmony, combining two voices into one thing.
“For singing harmony, everyone looks to the Everly Brothers. They’re the archetype and nobody ever did it better.“
As this suggests, Asher says that for all the famous artists he has produced, he also remains a fan.
“The first time I worked with Diana Ross, I was in awe,” he says. “When she stepped up to the microphone, it sounded exactly like those Supremes records that I played 20 million times in my youth.”
He likes new artists, too.
“I love Brandy Carlile,” he says. “I’m a big fan of Billie Eilish. I would enjoy producing her. But she doesn’t need me, because she’s doing fantastic work already. The records she and her brother make are totally brilliant.”
So Asher keeps busy tuning up for another round of “World Without Love” and “Yesterday’s Gone.”
“As you would expect, most of the people in our audiences are our age,” he says. “But there are a surprising number of younger people. They seem to like this music they probably first heard while looking through their father’s or, God help us, their grandfather’s record collection.”
(Peter and Jeremy, a/k/a Asher and Clyde, at My Father’s Place, 1221 Old Northern Blvd., Roslyn, March 8 at 3 p.m. Tickets $40. Call 516-413-3535 or go to www.myfathersplace.com.)
