DOWAGIAC — Peter Noone was hosting VH1’s half-hour music series “My Generation” when the show’s 20-something faithful began stopping him on the street.

“They’d meet me and say, ‘You’re really good on that show. You know, you should make a record,’” Noone says by telephone en route to a tour stop in Canada. “They had no idea. They had never even heard of Herman’s Hermits. So I started listening to oldies stations, and we weren’t even mentioned. I realized we had basically disappeared. We had become faceless.”

That’s when Noone, who was unmistakably the face of the British pop band during its 10-year run from 1962-72, decided to resurrect his Herman persona, playing forgotten hits such as “I’m Into Something Good,” “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII” at any venue he could book.

“I started to get aggressive and started to tour just like a teenager again,” Noone says. “Every date I got I would do because I wanted people to remember we were good. I wanted there to be a legacy. A lot of guys don’t want to be in an oldies band, but I consider us a contemporary oldies band because at the end of the day we are going to end up with more people who were dragged to the show by their mom discovering that we made good music.”

Noone will prove that once again Saturday when Herman’s Hermits performs at the Dowagiac Middle School Performing Arts Center to close out the annual Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.

In many ways, Noone has had a storybook career. He was born in Manchester, England, where he studied voice and acting at St. Bede’s College and the Manchester School of Music and Drama. As a child, he played Stanley Fairclough in the long-running British soap opera “Coronation Street.”

And at age 15, he found pop idol success when his band Herman’s Hermits made Carole King’s “I’m Into Something Good” a hit in 1964.

“All the bands who were coming up in the Liverpool and Manchester area had to be different, otherwise you couldn’t exist,” Noone says.

“We couldn’t do ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ as good as The Beatles or the rhythm and blues stuff that was happening, so we chose to be completely different and do songs like ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter.’ It was really a conscious choice.”

Because of that choice, Herman’s Hermits are often dismissed as a lightweight pop act compared to heavier British Invasion bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Yardbirds, but the group did have 14 singles and seven albums certified gold in a decade, ultimately selling more than 60 million records.

“We were sort of terminally uncool,” Noone says. “In the long term that might have worked for us, but at the time we suffered a little bit. But the plan was only to be ourselves, and the other big bands in that era knew that. The Beatles liked us. The Kinks liked us. The Who liked us.”

By 1972, a dispute with infamous ABKCO Records president Allen Klein had taken its toll on the band’s record sales in the U.S.

“We had a label who were intent on destroying the band from the beginning,” Noone says. “First of all they stopped paying us. Then the music somehow became the property of Allen Klein. He also had The Beatles, and you notice they broke up, and he had Donovan, who also stopped recording.”

Both The Rolling Stones and Noone have long claimed Klein allegedly ripped off their respective bands. In Noone’s case, the dispute is still be sorted out in court.

“As far as the band members were concerned, in some ways, it was a beautiful ending,” Noone says. “We spent 10 years getting to know each other, and we decided it was a nice engagement but we didn’t want to get married. So we did our final show at Madison Square Garden, and that was it. I figured I’d wander around and one day we’d all get back together and do the reunion. But of course that never really happens because we all make different decisions as we go along.”

Throughout the ’70s, Noone performed, composed songs and produced recordings with artists such as David Bowie, Debby Boone and Graham Gouldman. His album with the Tremblers, “Twice Nightly,” and his solo effort “One of The Glory Boys” were both critically and commercially successful. Noone also returned to acting, starring on Broadway in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance.”

From 1989 to 1993, Noone hosted “My Generation” on VH1, and after realizing that the music of his youth had been forgotten, created the websites peternoone.com and hermanshermits.com, which have become so popular that he now sells more of his music off the Internet than his label.

“If I hadn’t had built the websites, Herman’s Hermits would have ceased to exist,” Noone says.

To get around the legal wranglings with Klein, Noone says he imports his own music from England, where he still owns the rights. Noone also assembled a new version of the Hermits, playing about two or three dates a week.

When asked if he would ever consider putting out new material, Noone dismisses the idea as ludicrous.

“I don’t think I could come up with anything as good,” Noone says. “I’ve said this before, but I think everybody does their best work by their third record – except for the Stones – and then you start to impersonate yourself. We built this thing into a touring act because I want people to remember what we did.”

It seems to be working. After Noone was a guest mentor on the Fox singing competition “American Idol,” where he also sang

“There’s A Kind of Hush,” 70,000 copies of that song were purchased off of iTunes alone.

“That song was recorded in 1967, and because it was seen on TV people bought it,” Noone says.

So, “There’s A Kind of Hush” will be on Saturday’s set list, Noone adds. As will “I’m Into Something Good,” “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter,” “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” and “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat.”

It’s clear from his enthusiasm that Noone wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.

“Do you know there are more people in the fan club this year than there were last year?” he says. “We also sold more records this year than last year. To me that’s exhilarating.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com