79-Year-Old Peter Noone Explained Who Really Owns The Herman’s Hermits Name

November 5 is a double celebration for Peter Noone. The Manchester-born singer who fronted Herman’s Hermits turns 79 today, and he married his wife, Mireille Strasser, on his 21st birthday in 1968, according to Rave and Photoplay reports from the time cited by Wikipedia. That makes today their 58th anniversary, too, and he still spends more than 100 nights a year on the road singing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”

But the name on those concert posters has a complicated history. In Britain and Europe, the Herman’s Hermits name is controlled by the band’s original drummer, Barry Whitwam, and in America, Noone performs as “Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone.” How the boy who was Herman ended up sharing his own nickname is a story that took decades and more than one courtroom to sort out.

How Did Peter Noone Become “Herman”?

Noone was already a working actor as a child. Long before the hits, he played Stanley Fairclough, the son of Len Fairclough, on the British soap Coronation Street, leaving the part in 1961, according to his official biography and the show’s records. The nickname came from a cartoon. A pub owner told the teenage singer that he looked like Sherman, the bespectacled boy who traveled with Mr. Peabody on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and “Sherman” turned into “Herman.” “I look like Sherman, how great is that?” Noone recalled, as American Songwriter reported.

He was famous before he was old enough to drive. “I was 15, 16 and the other guys were much older,” he told music writer Gary James for Classic Bands. “School boys. Straight out of school.”

Within a few years, those schoolboys were giving the biggest band in the world a run for its money.

Did Herman’s Hermits Really Top The Beatles?

In one important way, they did. When Billboard tallied the year 1965 in its December 25 issue, it ranked Herman’s Hermits the Top Singles Artist of the year, with the Beatles in second place, according to the magazine’s year-end rankings. The Beatles still won the albums race, but on the singles chart that year, Herman’s Hermits were everywhere. “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” spent three weeks at No. 1 starting May 1, 1965, “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” reached No. 1 that summer, and the group spent 24 straight weeks in the Top 10.

Noone has never pretended they were bigger than the Fab Four. “John was very nice to me,” he said of John Lennon in a 2020 interview with The College Crowd Digs Me. “But The Beatles were number one.” For a few years, though, the boy from Manchester was one of the most famous faces in America. Then, at 23, he walked away from the band.

Why Did Peter Noone Leave Herman’s Hermits?

Noone played his last show with the Hermits at the London Palladium in December 1970 and announced his exit in early 1971, as Record Mirror reported at the time. He went solo, and he proved he could still surprise people. He starred as Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway and later in London, and American viewers got to know him all over again as the host of VH1’s My Generation, a nostalgia show about the music of his era. He even turned up on Laverne & Shirley in 1981, in the season 6 episode “I Do, I Do,” not long before the show lost one of its stars, as our story on why Cindy Williams left Laverne & Shirley explains.

The band he left behind carried on. Guitarist Derek “Lek” Leckenby died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma on June 4, 1994, at 51, according to the Los Angeles Times and Classic Bands, and he is the only member of the original lineup known to have died. But a few years after Noone left, his old bandmates took him to court.

Who Really Owns The Herman’s Hermits Name?

About four years after his departure, Leckenby, Green and Whitwam sued Noone in England’s High Court. The case settled, with Noone agreeing not to use the word “Hermits,” according to accounts of the dispute, including one in the Australian Financial Review. Whitwam later registered the name in Britain and Europe. “Peter got wired up and we went to battle, litigation and all that stuff,” the drummer told Classic Bands. A 2003 agreement finally split North America down the middle, with “Herman’s Hermits starring Barry Whitwam” for one band and “Herman’s Hermits starring Peter Noone” for the other. When a U.S. promoter billed Whitwam’s show as plain “Herman’s Hermits” in 2009, Noone sued again, and Whitwam stopped touring America.

Noone has made his feelings clear. The drummer “kind of hijacked the name somewhere along the game, took ownership of the name,” he told Best Classic Bands. Still, he has never stopped loving the character that made him famous. “I enjoy Herman and I enjoy Herman’s songs,” he told InsideHook in 2018. This year he even recorded a new single, “Remember When,” with Keith Hopwood, the first song the two have made together in 50 years. And when his agent calls with another booking, he told InsideHook, his answer is always the same: “Oh great, another date, only another ten more years!”