Peter Noone, set to perform Herman’s Hermits classics March 31 at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe, knew early that music was his joy.

Born in Manchester, England, Noone studied at the Manchester School of Music and Drama. A drama course, however, was an exercise in futility.

“I did not like the people,” said Noone, who appeared as a child in “Coronation Street,” the long-running British soap. “I didn’t really learn anything. In the next room was a music class, guys teaching each other to play a Chuck Berry song. I went in there, said ‘how do you do that?’ That was the end of my acting classes.”

Music, Noone said, “is much more fun than acting. I was 13 years old. I had a stamp book, a record collection. Everything had to be fun.”

Early on, Noone’s idols included American acts Buddy Holly and The Crickets, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Bobby Vee. As a youth, Noone sang lead in a family band and played with the Cyclones, an instrumental guitar group.

Noone’s next musical endeavor, a band called The Heartbeats, brought the singer his famed moniker. Told he resembled Sherman from the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons, Noone embraced that name, albeit minus the “S.”

Eventually, the Heartbeats became Herman’s Hermits, whose members were unacquainted until in the band.

Before the start of the Beatles-led British Invasion, Noone, in August 1963, saw the band whose shadow Herman’s Hermits often stood. “We didn’t know how good everybody was, how competitive it was going to be, until we saw the Beatles.”

Noone’s accompanying bandmate, feeling intimidated, quit on the spot. Noone, though, was inspired to work harder.

“It was the joy of playing together, having fun with the audience. Before then, it had been a crooner world. We had this new thing called enthusiasm. I left my stamp book forever.”

With Mickie Most producing, Herman’s Hermits released seven studio albums. The first two, Noone said, included songs the band played, “to nonchalance from the audience,” at the junior cavern, an after-school social-gathering outlet.

From 1964 to 1968, Herman’s Hermits scored 18 top 40 singles on Billboard’s pop chart, with 11 cracking the Top 10. “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” hit No. 1.

“All we ever dreamed about as kids was being on the radio,” said Noone, whose other Herman’s hits included “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat,” “Wonderful World” and “There’s a Kind of Hush.”

The group, he added, was “lucky we could get other people to write much better songs than we could write.” Notably, Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote the act’s debut chart hit “I’m Into Something Good,” released when Noone was 16.

During his time with Herman’s Hermits - who starred in three 1960s MGM musicals - Noone “would get offers to do things I really wanted to do, apart from being Herman.”

Furthermore, Noone said, group members harbored some resentment about the then-teen heartthrob’s level of fame. The band also drifted apart: Noone moved to London, while his bandmates stayed in Manchester, opting, Noone said, “to be big fish in a small pond.”

Noone also attributes his “misbehaving” to some of the resentment. For instance, after performing for royals, “I was chosen to meet the queen. No Hermits. I wasn’t old enough, smart enough to know what was happening. You don’t do that to friends.”

Another time, Noone and Most, needing a record quickly, used Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in the studio. “It’s not that they were better, they were quicker,“ Noone said. “That doesn’t go down well with any guitarist.”

Herman‘s Hermits, Noone insisted, “didn’t break up. We made a decision to do things we wanted to do. One day, we’d reform and take on the world. We did one tour in 1973. It just didn’t feel good.”

In 1971, Noone released his debut solo single, a cover of David Bowie’s “Oh! You Pretty Things.” He recorded one album with the Tremblers, 1980s “Twice Nightly,” and a solo set, 1982’s “One of the Glory Boys.” Also in the early 1980s, Noone played hero Frederic in a new Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance.”

Noone, who continued as Frederic during runs in London and with touring companies, found that “people who do Broadway never have hit records. It’s not gonna work.”

While another solo album never materialized, Noone has released occasional singles, including 2015’s “I Can’t Imagine.” The song paid tribute to John Lennon, the Beatle who, Noone observed, “had the most acidic wit.”

For the past few years, Noone, living in Santa Barbara, California, with longtime wife Mireille, has hosted “Something Good” on Sirius XM’s 60s Gold channel on Saturdays.