The story of The Animals

Tyneside beginnings

Eric Victor Burdon was born on the eleventh of May 1941 in Walker, a working class district of Newcastle upon Tyne. Even his middle name was a sign of the times. During the war, the Lord Mayor of Newcastle offered mothers twenty five pounds for giving their babies suitably patriotic names. The polluted, damp air by the river left young Eric with asthma attacks almost every day, and he later described his primary school, squeezed between a slaughterhouse and a shipyard, as a place of beatings and abuse. Records were his way out. His parents bought him a little Dansette record player, and Johnnie Ray's Cry taught him that a singer could have a style all his own. As a teenager he would wait at the stage door of Newcastle City Hall to meet visiting blues heroes like Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy.[1] [2] [3]

At fifteen, Burdon went to the Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design, where he met John Steel. They were soon playing college dances together, with Steel on trumpet. He only switched to drums later, and admitted he never felt good enough to match the jazz drummers he worshipped, like Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. By early 1959 they had a band called the Pagans. As Burdon remembers it, he heard a young guitarist named Alan Price tinkling on a piano during a break, decided he was a better pianist than guitarist, and signed him up. Price was born in Fatfield, County Durham, in 1942. He was self taught, and he had a steady job as a tax officer in the civil service. Burdon, meanwhile, pestered local jazz clubs until they let him sing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The other two pieces came from the shipyards and the coast. Bryan Chandler, known to everyone as Chas, was born in Heaton in 1938. He left school to work as a turner in the Tyneside shipyards, played a homemade guitar, then moved to bass. Hilton Valentine grew up in North Shields. His mother bought him a guitar in 1956, when he was thirteen, and he taught himself from a book called Teach Yourself a Thousand Chords after seeing Lonnie Donegan on television. His skiffle group, the Heppers, grew into a rock and roll band called the Wildcats. In 1963 Chandler heard about Valentine's wild playing and asked him to join what was then the Alan Price Combo. Burdon later said it was Hilton who made them a real rock band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their home turf belonged to Mike Jeffery, a former army intelligence man who ran the Downbeat jazz club and the Marimba coffee bar. After the Downbeat was shut over fire regulations, both places burned down, and Jeffery opened the Club A Go Go on Percy Street. It had black walls and a mural of the New York skyline that a young Bryan Ferry helped to paint, and it became the hippest room in the city, with the band as its residents. Between September and December 1963 they sometimes played two or three sets on a Saturday night. That September Jeffery paid for their first recordings, a one sided record of songs by Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley, pressed in small numbers and sold around Newcastle. By now they were the Animals.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1963 the Chicago harmonica great Sonny Boy Williamson came to the Club A Go Go, with the Animals as his backing band. The Yardbirds' manager Giorgio Gomelsky recorded the shows, seven songs by the Animals alone and eleven with Sonny Boy, though the tapes only came out years later. Burdon became the unofficial minder for visiting bluesmen, and he adored Sonny Boy's stories. He remembers Jeffery scolding the old man for offering a young kid a glass of whiskey. John Lee Hooker gave Burdon his address in Detroit, and on a later American tour Burdon tracked him down and stayed at his house for three days. That same month the Animals made a trip to London, where the mod crowd at the Scene club in Soho went wild for them.[1] [2]

London and the Rising Sun

In January 1964 the Animals moved to London for good. Alan Price later remembered a freezing flat on Fitzjames Avenue, where they lived on brown ale, crispbread and rusks. The only warm room was the bathroom, so one of them slept in the bath. They signed with the tough promoter Don Arden for live work, and with the independent producer Mickie Most, who got them a deal with EMI's Columbia label. Most picked their first single, Baby Let Me Take You Home, a rocked up rewrite of the folk song Baby Let Me Follow You Down, which Bob Dylan had sung on his first album. It opened with Hilton Valentine's guitar and reached number twenty one in Britain. Arden then booked them on a British tour supporting their hero, Chuck Berry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That Chuck Berry tour gave the Animals a problem. Every support act was trying to out rock Chuck, which could not be done. So they reached for something slower and darker, The House of the Rising Sun, an old American folk song about a life gone wrong in New Orleans, which Bob Dylan had put on his 1962 debut album. They worked out their arrangement over three days of rehearsal at the Club A Go Go in April 1964. Valentine came up with a rolling pattern of broken chords in A minor. According to John Steel, Price wanted a strummed guitar instead and stormed off when the band chose Hilton's idea. Burdon turned the song's fallen woman into a man, knowing the BBC would never play a song about a prostitute. When they closed their set with it, audiences left the theatres singing it.[1] [2] [3]

Mickie Most had been reluctant, but the reaction on tour won him over. On the eighteenth of May 1964, in the middle of the tour, the band came to De Lane Lea Studios on Kingsway in London. Burdon remembers taking an overnight milk train and pushing their gear through the empty early morning streets on a borrowed railway hand cart. The song was captured in a single take, with Price on a Vox Continental organ and Valentine on a Gretsch guitar. Then the engineer pointed out that it ran four and a half minutes, far too long for a pop single. Most brushed that aside, declaring that this was the age of the long playing groove, and released it at full length. He later admitted it took only about fifteen minutes to make, so he could hardly claim much credit.[1] [2]

The BBC balked at the length at first. Then the band played it on Ready Steady Go, record shops were swamped, and in July 1964 it went to number one in Britain. On the fifth of September it reached number one in America and stayed there for three weeks, the first British Invasion chart topper with no connection to the Beatles. In the United States, MGM chopped it to under three minutes, and the band only discovered this when they heard it on American radio. Valentine said they were furious. The single went on to sell close to five million copies worldwide and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. The critic Dave Marsh hailed it as the first folk rock hit, an old ballad suddenly plugged into the mains.[1] [2] [3]

There was a catch that would poison the band. Because the song was traditional, the record needed an arranger's name, and only one went on the label, Alan Price. That meant Price alone collected the writer's royalties. Burdon has said it was simply because five names would not fit and Alan's came first alphabetically. Valentine said manager Mike Jeffery told them the money would be split later, but nothing was ever put in writing. Reporting in 2016, the BBC said most of the royalties still went to Price. Burdon has complained that he has been stuck with the song for life without earning a penny from it. Price has declined to discuss the making of the record, and the bitterness has lasted for more than sixty years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Taking America

The hit carried the Animals to America. In October 1964 they arrived in New York for concerts and the Ed Sullivan Show, riding into Manhattan in a motorcade of open top sports cars with fashion models along for the ride. On the eighteenth of October they played The House of the Rising Sun and their new single, I'm Crying, for Sullivan's audience. Burdon later said every Sullivan appearance felt like a disaster, sitting through hours of jugglers to reach the one rock group. I'm Crying, written by Burdon and Price, was their first original song released as a single, and it became a top twenty hit in Britain, America and Canada. They also played New York's Paramount Theatre on a bill with Little Richard and Chuck Berry.[1] [2] [3]

That December the Animals appeared in a Hollywood film, Get Yourself a College Girl, alongside the Dave Clark Five, playing Chuck Berry's Around and Around. The New York Times was unimpressed, calling the movie idiocy fit for the birds, or maybe for the Animals. The records fared better. Their American debut album, simply called The Animals, reached number seven, and a British album of the same name, with quite different songs, reached number six. It opened with The Story of Bo Diddley, a made up tale of Bo visiting the Club A Go Go. Burdon later admitted Bo never came, though his percussionist Jerome Green did, and said he never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In America, John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom also became a single.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Early in 1965 came a song written for Nina Simone. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood had been a slow orchestral ballad on her 1964 album. Its co writer Horace Ott had dreamed it up after a quarrel with his girlfriend, and because of rules between songwriting organisations, he put her name on the credits instead of his own. The Animals recorded it in November 1964, driven by a stinging organ riff, and it reached number three in Britain and fifteen in America. Burdon said nobody thought of it as pop material, but they fell in love with it straight away. Then, after Sam Cooke was shot dead in December 1964, Mickie Most had the band record Cooke's Bring It On Home to Me as a tribute. It reached number seven in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their second British album, Animal Tracks, came out in May 1965 and reached number six, with a searing take on Ray Charles's I Believe to My Soul. But inside the band, things were fraying. Price later called the group a marriage made in hell, and said that once they made it, the others only wanted girls, sex and drugs, while he could not get them to rehearse. Burdon blamed Price for the lack of original songs, saying Alan never sat down to write with him. America was a shock in other ways too. John Steel remembered it as still very conservative, and said that after years as a tough rhythm and blues band playing to boys, they suddenly found themselves facing wave after wave of screaming girls.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Price walks out and the band burns out

In May 1965 Alan Price walked out. The official reasons were personal and musical differences, and a fear of flying that made touring a misery. His bandmates saw it another way. Valentine said Price left without giving notice, and Chandler's dry verdict was that he must have received his first royalty cheque. The Newcastle keyboard player Mick Gallagher filled in for a Scandinavian tour, and then Dave Rowberry of the Mike Cotton Sound took the job, just in time for an American tour. Price quickly formed the Alan Price Set. He also turns up in Dont Look Back, D A Pennebaker's documentary about Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain, in a scene where his exit from the Animals is discussed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mickie Most had sent a call out to New York's Brill Building songwriters for material, and it paid off handsomely. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil had written We Gotta Get Out of This Place with the Righteous Brothers in mind, but it reached the Animals first. Chas Chandler's bass line opens it, and Burdon's raw vocal turned it into a cry of working class escape that fitted Newcastle perfectly. In August 1965 it reached number two in Britain, kept off the top only by the Beatles' Help. It became a favourite of American soldiers in Vietnam. A mix up at the record companies meant America got a different take from Britain, with a slightly different vocal, and fans still argue over which one is angrier.[1] [2]

The same call produced It's My Life, by Roger Atkins and Carl D'Errico, released in October 1965 and another big British hit. Chandler's bass and Valentine's twelve string guitar double the riff. Atkins later grumbled that Burdon had sung the wrong words in the chorus, and that everyone who covered it copied the mistake. Behind the hits, the band was being run into the ground. That August, both Burdon and Chandler collapsed while performing on Ready Steady Go. Chandler later said they toured non stop for three years, playing around three hundred shows a year, and hardly got a penny, while their manager took a quarter of the gross. By the end of 1965 they had fired Mickie Most, saying he pushed material on them that was too commercial.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At the end of 1965 the Animals moved to Decca in Britain, stayed with MGM in America, and started working with the producer Tom Wilson, known for his records with Bob Dylan. Wilson gave them more freedom. In one marathon session on the ninth of January 1966 they taped most of the album Animalisms, including the single Inside Looking Out, reworked from a Mississippi prison work chant collected by the folklorist Alan Lomax. It was John Steel's last single. Worn out, he quit in February 1966, and Barry Jenkins of the Nashville Teens took over the drums without even an audition, to Chandler's annoyance. Animalisms reached number four in Britain, and in America a collection called The Best of the Animals became their biggest selling album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Goffin and King's Don't Bring Me Down followed, and it remains Burdon's favourite Animals single. It was recorded in a hotel room in the Bahamas, and Burdon says Rowberry got its strange organ tone by wiring his Hammond through the speaker of an old record player in the room. It reached number six in Britain in 1966. But Burdon woke up one morning feeling they were no longer the Geordie band that had left Newcastle. The next hit, See See Rider, was already billed to Eric Burdon and the Animals. By September 1966 the original group was finished. Chandler called their business affairs a total shambles. Nobody in the band trusted Jeffery, suspecting that an offshore company in the Bahamas called Yameta had swallowed their earnings.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Chas finds Jimi, and the others scatter

On the Animals' last American tour, in the summer of 1966, Chas Chandler was already planning a new life as a manager. Linda Keith, then the girlfriend of Keith Richards, told him to see a guitarist calling himself Jimmy James at the Cafe Wha in Greenwich Village. The roadie Tappy Wright, who went along, remembered that the player seemed nothing special until he started playing with his teeth. Chandler had been looking for someone to record the song Hey Joe, and this was his man. He promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton, and on the twenty fourth of September 1966 he brought Jimi Hendrix to London, with Mike Jeffery as his business partner.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chandler built the Jimi Hendrix Experience around him. Hendrix met the bassist Noel Redding at an audition for Burdon's new Animals, and Chandler recruited Redding for Hendrix's band instead. He paid for the first single, Hey Joe, before there was any record deal, and let Hendrix live with him. Chandler stood six foot four and ran a strict studio. When the Experience needed a stunt to top the Who, the journalist Keith Altham joked that Hendrix ought to set fire to his guitar, and Chandler sent the roadie Gerry Stickells out for lighter fuel. It happened at the Finsbury Park Astoria in March 1967. Chandler produced the early hits and the first two albums, then quit in 1968, fed up with endless retakes and hangers on during Electric Ladyland.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The others went their own ways. Alan Price was thriving. The Alan Price Set's I Put a Spell on You reached number nine in 1966, and in 1967 both Randy Newman's Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear and Price's own The House That Jack Built reached number four. His album A Price on His Head championed Newman when almost nobody had heard of him. Hilton Valentine moved to California and made a solo album, All in Your Head, produced by Vic Briggs, but it flopped and he went back to Britain. John Steel returned to Newcastle, went into business, and worked for Chandler's management and publishing companies. Chandler, meanwhile, was about to find his next great act.[1] [2] [3]

That act was Slade, from Wolverhampton. Chandler took them on in 1969 and gave them a cropped skinhead look to grab attention. According to his obituary in The Independent, he paid off their previous management with just a hundred pounds. Success took two years. Then Chandler pushed Noddy Holder and Jim Lea to write their own songs, and Coz I Luv You went to number one in 1971. With Chandler as manager and producer, Slade scored six British number ones, and Holder said the band worshipped him. The partnership lasted until 1981, when they split after a single flopped. Chandler also bought a London studio at Portland Place and ran his own labels, including Barn Records.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Burdon and the Animals

Burdon was not finished with the name. With Barry Jenkins as the only other survivor, he recorded Eric Is Here with orchestras led by Benny Golson and Horace Ott, and its single Help Me Girl reached number fourteen in Britain late in 1966. Then he built a new band. The bassist Danny McCulloch was the first hired, and he introduced the guitarist and violinist John Weider, who in turn recommended the guitarist Vic Briggs. Briggs could read and write music, so he became the arranger. Burdon, meanwhile, had discovered LSD. He said later that he took acid everywhere on the planet, genuinely believing they could change the world. The new music would be psychedelic, a very long way from Newcastle rhythm and blues.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The first single, When I Was Young, was recorded in London in December 1966 with Tom Wilson producing. It looks back on Burdon's childhood over an Indian flavoured riff played on guitar and electric violin, and it reached number fifteen in America. Its B side, A Girl Named Sandoz, was named after the Swiss drug company that first made LSD. In June 1967 the band played the Monterey International Pop Festival, introduced as the New Animals, with a wild version of the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black featuring Weider's violin. Burdon called those the three most perfect days of his life, and wrote the song Monterey about them, naming the Byrds, the Who, Ravi Shankar, Hugh Masekela and Jimi Hendrix.[1] [2] [3] [4]

San Franciscan Nights became the new band's biggest hit, reaching number seven in Britain, nine in America and number one in Canada. It opens with a spoof of the Dragnet theme and a spoken dedication urging Europeans to fly to San Francisco. Locals laughed at the idea of warm San Francisco nights, but the band had visited during a rare spring heatwave. Burdon also took criticism that the song was luring runaway kids to the city. It appeared on Winds of Change, released in October 1967, an album full of spoken word pieces, sitar and violin. One track, Yes I Am Experienced, was an answer to Jimi Hendrix, recorded before Hendrix's own song had even come out. Critics were split, and Uncut later ranked it among the weirdest albums ever made.[1] [2] [3]

The 1968 album The Twain Shall Meet held their boldest statement, Sky Pilot. A sky pilot is a military chaplain, and the song follows one who blesses young soldiers before a night raid, then sets his words against the horror they come back from. In the middle, a guitar solo is swallowed by dive bombers, gunfire and bagpipes. At more than seven minutes, the single had to be split across both sides of the record, yet it reached number fourteen in America, their last top forty hit there. Burdon's personal life was just as turbulent. In 1967 he married Angie King, a model connected to the London music scene, but she left him the following year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By mid 1968 the band was falling apart. Briggs and McCulloch were fired that summer, and Zoot Money on keyboards and Andy Summers on guitar arrived from the psychedelic group Dantalian's Chariot. Summers, later of the Police, played a solo of more than four minutes on their cover of Traffic's Coloured Rain for the double album Love Is. The end came in Japan. According to the band's account, promoters they did not know were yakuza held their manager at gunpoint over losses from a delayed tour, and forced him to sign an IOU for twenty five thousand dollars. He slipped in a note saying he signed under duress, which his captors could not read. Warned to leave or die, the band fled, abandoning their equipment. By December 1968 it was over.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

War, a lost friend, and a first reunion

In December 1968 the five original Animals came back together for a single benefit concert in Newcastle. Burdon then stepped away from music and spent a year at the Actors Studio in Los Angeles, until some street musicians told him to stop wasting his time and front a black band instead. In 1969 the producer Jerry Goldstein spotted a Long Beach club band called the Nightshift, and with the Danish harmonica player Lee Oskar they became Eric Burdon and War. Their 1970 album Eric Burdon Declares War went gold, and its single Spill the Wine, inspired by the keyboard player Lonnie Jordan spilling wine on a mixing desk, reached number three in America. Jordan later called Burdon the first Latin rapper in pop.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the sixteenth of September 1970, Jimi Hendrix joined Burdon and War on stage at Ronnie Scott's club in London. It was the last public performance of his life. Less than two days later he was dead at twenty seven. Burdon had earlier turned Hendrix away from that same club because he was in such a bad state, and he said the people calling themselves Jimi's friends kept bringing him poison in the form of bad drugs. He called the death the end of the parade. Soon after, a very stoned Burdon went on British television and suggested Hendrix had taken his own life, based on a poem Jimi had written. He was reportedly warned by Warner Brothers to keep quiet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

War and Burdon did not last much longer. He collapsed on stage from an asthma attack during a European tour, and the band finished the dates without him. They then signed a new deal with United Artists, and Burdon found he was not part of it. He moved on to an album with the blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, and played San Quentin prison with him. Mike Jeffery, meanwhile, never escaped the shadows. On the fifth of March 1973, flying home from Majorca, he was killed when his Iberia airliner collided with another plane over Nantes in France. He was eight days short of his fortieth birthday. Jeffery had been terrified of flying, and used to book several flights at once to dodge fate.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In late 1975 the original five reunited to record again, though Burdon later said nobody understood why they had agreed. Chas Chandler produced the sessions with his Barn Records team, and the album was called Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted, borrowing a famous line from a Daily Mirror columnist's first column after the Second World War. It came out in 1977, and the critic Dave Marsh called it a surprisingly successful one shot. But the timing was terrible, with disco and punk ruling the charts, and promotion was weak. It reached only number seventy in America and missed the British chart completely. That year Burdon moved to Germany and made the album Survivor, again produced by Chandler.[1] [2] [3]

Ark, the last tour, and losing Chas

In 1983 all five original Animals tried one last time. The album Ark came out on I R S Records with a new wave sound, and its single The Night reached number forty eight in America. A world tour followed, with Zoot Money added on keyboards. It was not a happy time. The group spent much of it arguing, and Chandler was once seen grabbing Burdon by the scruff of the neck. Rod Weinberg, the manager behind the reunion, even brought in their old roadie Tappy Wright specifically to keep Eric and Chas apart. At one meeting, Chandler proposed that the Rising Sun royalties be shared among the original members from then on. According to Burdon, Price refused and walked out.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On New Year's Eve 1983 the Animals played Wembley Arena in London as support to the Police, the band that now featured their own former guitarist, Andy Summers. The show came out as the live album Rip It to Shreds in 1984, by which time the Animals had split for good. A film about the reunion tour was shot but never released. Chandler, who had sold his business interests to play again, settled back in the North East and threw himself into a big local project. With the musician and architect Nigel Stanger he helped develop the Newcastle Arena, a ten thousand seat venue. David Bowie was the first major act to play there, in December 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1994 the original five were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, praised as a key link between black rhythm and blues and punk rock. Burdon did not attend, and the band did not perform. Fans campaigned in vain for Dave Rowberry and Barry Jenkins to be included too. Two years later, on the seventeenth of July 1996, Chas Chandler died of an aortic aneurysm at Newcastle General Hospital, aged fifty seven, after earlier heart surgery. With him went any chance of a full original reunion. Burdon admitted they had had their differences, but called them the best of friends in the best of times, and regretted never making it over for one last drink.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Slade reunited for his funeral. Newcastle later put a blue plaque on the house in Heaton where Chandler grew up, calling him a founder of the Animals, manager of Jimi Hendrix and Slade, and co founder of the Newcastle Arena. His widow Madeleine, a former beauty queen he proposed to a week after they met, said the arena was his last major achievement, and that some people never manage even one. The Tyneside music writer Elaine Cusack put his legacy more boldly. Without one very tall Geordie, she said, the world might never have heard of Jimi Hendrix. In 2001 Chandler was posthumously added to Hollywood's Rock Walk of Fame along with the rest of the band.[1] [2] [3]

Rival Animals and the long goodbye

From the 1990s the name splintered. In 1992 Vic Briggs registered the Animals as a trademark in the United States, to Burdon's dismay, and a line up with Briggs, Danny McCulloch and Barry Jenkins played the first rock concert in Moscow's Red Square, a benefit for victims of the Chernobyl disaster. McCulloch went on to release albums of Animals songs with other singers, and some buyers felt misled into thinking Burdon was on them. He was later caught up in a scandal over recordings sold to K Tel as a Mott the Hoople reunion, which were in fact made by sound alikes. Ian Hunter flatly denied any involvement, and in 1998 K Tel admitted two charges under the Trade Descriptions Act and was fined.[1] [2] [3]

Hilton Valentine formed Animals Two in 1993, and John Steel joined a year later. With Dave Rowberry aboard from 1999 they toured simply as the Animals, and after Valentine left in 2001, Steel and Rowberry carried on as Animals and Friends. Rowberry died in London on the sixth of June 2003, aged sixty two. A week earlier, on the thirtieth of May, Mickie Most had died at home of cancer, possibly a mesothelioma linked to asbestos. Mick Gallagher, who had stood in for Price back in 1965 and later played with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, took the keyboard seat and held it until 2022. As of 2026, Animals and Friends still tour with Steel on drums and Danny Handley singing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Burdon, meanwhile, led his own bands, billed from 2003 as Eric Burdon and the Animals, and Valentine rejoined him for tours in 2007 and 2008. Then came a legal fight with an old friend. John Steel had registered the Animals as a trademark in Britain, and Burdon objected, arguing that he personally embodied the band's goodwill. In 2008 an adjudicator sided with Steel, pointing out that Burdon had billed himself as Eric Burdon and the Animals since 1967, separating his own name from the band's. On the ninth of September 2013 Burdon won his appeal and was allowed to use the name in Britain again. As of 2026, both men lead bands under the Animals name.[1] [2] [3]

An old fan gave the story a new chapter. In a keynote speech at South by Southwest in March 2012, Bruce Springsteen called the Animals a revelation, the first records with full class consciousness he had ever heard. Playing We Gotta Get Out of This Place, he said it was every song he had ever written. Then he showed how the riff of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood had become his own Badlands, joking that this was how successful theft was done. In July 2013 Burdon joined him on stage in Cardiff to sing it. That year Burdon also released Til Your River Runs Dry. In 2020, when Donald Trump's campaign played Rising Sun, Burdon said a tale of sin and misery set in a brothel suited him perfectly.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The losses mounted. Danny McCulloch died of heart failure in 2015. Hilton Valentine died on the twenty ninth of January 2021, aged seventy seven, and Burdon wrote that the opening of Rising Sun would never sound the same. That November a blue plaque went up on Valentine's boyhood home in North Shields. Vic Briggs, who had become a Sikh musician known as Vikram and later as Antion, died of cancer in June 2021. Barry Jenkins died in Ramsgate in January 2024, and Zoot Money that September. Burdon moved to Athens with his Greek wife and manager, Marianna Proestou, during the pandemic, and kept performing into his eighties. As of 2026, Burdon, Alan Price and John Steel are the surviving original Animals.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

The people around The Animals

Eric Burdon and Alan Price. They were the creative core of the early Animals, and together wrote I'm Crying. But Price called the band a marriage made in hell, and Burdon blames him both for the lack of original songs and for keeping the Rising Sun royalties. Price left without notice in 1965. They reunited in 1977 and 1983, yet the 1983 royalty meeting ended with Price walking out. Burdon once said Price had a head made of granite.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Burdon and Chas Chandler. The singer and the towering bassist were close friends and regular sparring partners. Chandler sang backing vocals, sometimes wrote with Burdon, and later produced his 1977 album Survivor. On the 1983 reunion tour they fought so much that a roadie was hired to keep them apart, and Chandler was seen grabbing Burdon by the neck. When Chandler died in 1996, Burdon called them the best of friends in the best of times.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Chas Chandler and Jimi Hendrix. Chandler found Hendrix at the Cafe Wha in 1966, brought him to London, formed the Experience around him, paid for Hey Joe and produced his first two albums. For a while the two couples shared a flat owned by Ringo Starr in Montagu Square. They split in 1968 over the chaotic Electric Ladyland sessions, which Chandler found self indulgent. Just before Hendrix died, he reportedly turned to his old manager again for guidance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Burdon and Jimi Hendrix. Burdon and Hendrix became close friends in the mid sixties, and Burdon's Yes I Am Experienced was an answer to Hendrix's own song. Hendrix's final public performance was a jam with Burdon and War at Ronnie Scott's in September 1970. Burdon had earlier turned him away from that club because of his condition, and he later said the death felt like the end of the parade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Animals and Mike Jeffery. Jeffery ran the Newcastle clubs where the Animals made their name, paid for their first recordings and became their manager. The band came to believe he worked them into the ground and took most of their earnings, with Chandler complaining that Jeffery took a quarter of the gross while they got almost nothing. A lawyer who ran his offshore company insisted the Animals would have been nothing without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Animals and Mickie Most. Most produced their first single and The House of the Rising Sun, and brought them Brill Building songs like We Gotta Get Out of This Place and It's My Life. The band came to feel his choices were too commercial and fired him in 1965. Burdon later said Most's real talent was finding songs rather than producing them. Most went on to huge success with his RAK label.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Burdon and John Steel. They met as art students in Newcastle and played in their first band together, with Steel on trumpet. Steel drummed on the early hits and joined both reunions. Decades later they became legal opponents. Steel registered the Animals trademark in Britain, won the first ruling in 2008, and lost to Burdon on appeal in 2013. As of 2026, each leads his own band using the name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alan Price and Georgie Fame. Fame came to see the Animals at the Scene club in London in 1963 and treated Price as the leader. They became drinking friends and later partners, scoring a hit with Rosetta in 1971, making a BBC series scripted by Terry Jones, and appearing on The Two Ronnies. They stopped working together in 1973, but Price said people still thought of them as a pair.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Burdon and John Lennon. Burdon counted Lennon as a good friend in the London of the sixties. He says Lennon turned one of his wilder stories into the eggman line of I Am the Walrus. Burdon later dedicated the album Winds of Change partly to another Beatle, George Harrison, whose interest in Hindu philosophy had inspired him.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Burdon and War. Burdon fronted War from 1969, scoring the hit Spill the Wine and two albums in 1970. The keyboard player Lonnie Jordan later praised him as a pioneer of rapping in pop. It ended badly. Burdon collapsed on tour, the band finished without him, then signed a new deal that left him out. They reunited for one night at the Royal Albert Hall in 2008.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Burdon and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen grew up on the Animals and said their records were the first with real class consciousness he ever heard. In his 2012 South by Southwest speech he said We Gotta Get Out of This Place was every song he had written. In 2013 he brought Burdon on stage in Cardiff to sing it, and the attention helped revive Burdon's career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Burdon and Marianna Proestou. Burdon married Marianna Proestou, a Greek lawyer, in 1999, and she also became his manager. He credits her with finally giving him good management, saying he did not have that for his first forty years in music. During the pandemic in 2021 the couple relocated to Athens. It is his third marriage, after Angie King in 1967 and Rose Marks in 1972.[1] [2]

Rare facts about The Animals

• Alan Price once worked in a tax office, at the same desk Sting would later occupy. Before music, Price was a tax officer in the civil service. By an odd coincidence, the same desk in the same office was later used by another Tyneside musician, the young man who became Sting.[1]
• Eric Burdon's middle name, Victor, came with a twenty five pound wartime reward. During the Second World War, the Lord Mayor of Newcastle offered twenty five pounds to mothers who gave their newborns suitably patriotic names. Burdon's mother chose Victor.[1]
• Hilton Valentine learned guitar from a book called Teach Yourself a Thousand Chords. His mother bought him his first guitar in 1956, when he was thirteen. Inspired by Lonnie Donegan on television, he taught himself the chords from that book before forming a skiffle group called the Heppers.[1] [2]
• A young Bryan Ferry helped paint the mural at the Animals' home club in Newcastle. The Club A Go Go had black walls with a New York skyline mural, painted by the artist David Sweetman with help from his friend Bryan Ferry, years before Roxy Music.[1]
• Bryan Ferry was the DJ the night Jimi Hendrix played the Club A Go Go. That night Hendrix shocked the crowd by ramming his guitar into the ceiling above the stage and leaving it hanging there.[1]
• The Animals' song about their home club was later sampled by Girls Aloud. The Animals wrote a song about the Club A Go Go in Newcastle. Decades later, Girls Aloud sampled it for their 2005 hit Biology.[1]
• The Animals first played The House of the Rising Sun at Bellingham Town Hall in Northumberland. Before the famous Chuck Berry tour made it their closing number, the band debuted the song at a town hall show in rural Northumberland.[1]
• The Animals played Rising Sun in six eight time, unlike most earlier versions. Most earlier versions, including Dave Van Ronk's, were in four four time. The Animals' rolling six eight feel is part of what makes their recording so distinctive.[1]
• The Rising Sun single charted in Britain again in 1972 and 1982. Though it never appeared on their British albums, the single was reissued twice, reaching number twenty five in 1972 and number eleven in 1982.[1]
• Jimi Hendrix met his bassist Noel Redding at an audition for Burdon's new Animals. Redding had come to try out for Eric Burdon's new band in 1966. Hendrix liked his blues knowledge, and his hairstyle, and Chandler offered him the bass job in the Experience instead.[1]
• Chas Chandler once lived with Jimi Hendrix in a flat owned by Ringo Starr. Chandler and his partner Lotta shared a flat in London's Montagu Square with Hendrix and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham. The flat belonged to the Beatles' drummer.[1]
• Chas Chandler discovered the future singer of Cutting Crew working as a hospital porter. Chandler found Nick Van Eede working in a hospital burns unit and signed him to Barn Records. The singles flopped, but Van Eede later scored a worldwide hit with Cutting Crew's I Just Died in Your Arms.[1]
• A 1967 Animals B side was named after the Swiss company that first made LSD. A Girl Named Sandoz, the flip side of When I Was Young, was recorded in New York in early 1967 and named after the drug company Sandoz.[1]
• Zoot Money counted to bar one hundred and eighty nine to cue Andy Summers out of a guitar solo. On the Animals' cover of Traffic's Coloured Rain, Summers played a solo lasting over four minutes. To make sure he stopped in the right place, Zoot Money kept count and gave him the cue.[1] [2]
• Sky Pilot was so long that the single was split across both sides of the record. The full song ran over seven minutes, so the single appeared as parts one and two. The original American stereo mix, with extra echo and trailing bagpipes, is not on current compilations.[1]
• Don't Bring Me Down was recorded in a hotel room in the Bahamas. The band shipped equipment from New York. Burdon says Dave Rowberry connected his Hammond organ to the thin speaker of an old record player in the room, creating the song's odd organ tone.[1]
• America and Britain heard different takes of We Gotta Get Out of This Place. EMI mistakenly sent MGM an unused take. Years later, the rights owner Allen Klein ordered the British version used everywhere, and American fans wrote in complaining that the vocal they grew up with was angrier.[1]
• It's My Life premiered on TV with young women poking their heads through the wall like trophies. On the American show Hullabaloo in 1965, the Animals sang on a den set where women stuck their heads through holes in the wall, where mounted animal heads would normally hang.[1]
• Burdon turned down roles in Blowup, Zabriskie Point and Performance. Michelangelo Antonioni wanted him as a musician in Blowup, but Burdon was tired of films where he only sang. He later passed on major roles in Zabriskie Point and Performance.[1]
• Burdon's version of Sixteen Tons opens the 1990 film Joe Versus the Volcano. The song had meant a lot to him as a boy, when he heard miners humming it on buses in Newcastle. His cover plays over the opening of the film.[1] [2]
• Alan Price won a BAFTA for the music of the film O Lucky Man. Director Lindsay Anderson had Price write the score and appear on screen as a kind of Greek chorus. The music won the BAFTA for best film music.[1] [2]
• Alan Price is a Sunderland supporter, yet Newcastle United often played his Blaydon Races. Price backs Sunderland, but his recording of the Tyneside song Blaydon Races was a regular at the matches of their fierce local rivals.[1]
• Genesis keyboard player Tony Banks said Alan Price first made him notice the organ in rock. Banks credited Price as the first person who made him aware of what an organ could do in a rock band.[1]
• Dave Rowberry played on the Kinks' Celluloid Heroes. After the Animals, Rowberry worked as a session player. His former Mike Cotton Sound bandmates backed the Kinks on Everybody's in Show Biz, and Rowberry played on the single Celluloid Heroes.[1]
• Drummer Barry Jenkins spent his later years running a guitar shop in Ramsgate. After leaving music behind, Jenkins owned Lukes Guitars in Ramsgate, Kent, selling new and used instruments. He died in the town in January 2024.[1]
• Vic Briggs was the first non Indian to perform kirtan at the Golden Temple of Amritsar. The former Animals guitarist converted to Sikhism in 1971. In 1979 he sang Sikh devotional music at the Golden Temple, a moment he called deeply powerful.[1]
• Vic Briggs never met his father, an American army captain killed in France in 1944. Briggs was born in February 1945 and named after his father, who died in action months earlier. His British mother made sure he held American citizenship.[1]
• Animals bassist Danny McCulloch worked as a psychiatric nurse in the 1980s. McCulloch nursed at Rauceby Hospital in Lincolnshire. In a 2012 memoir he described joining the Animals as the biggest mistake of his life.[1]
• The Animals' 1964 recording of Boom Boom turns up in the James Bond film Skyfall. Their version of John Lee Hooker's song was used in the 2012 film, nearly fifty years after they recorded it.[1]
• Burdon wrote an article for Ebony magazine in December 1966, with Linda Eastman as the band's guide. Ebony asked Burdon to write about how an Animal viewed America, pictured with John Lee Hooker. The photographer Linda Eastman, later Linda McCartney, showed them around New York.[1]
• Frank Zappa gave Burdon two songs after dropping in on an Animals session. Zappa was recording Freak Out next door with the same producer, Tom Wilson. Burdon recorded two of his songs and later lived a few doors from him in Laurel Canyon.[1]
• Animals and Friends often play aboard a ferry between Scandinavia and Germany. John Steel's band has frequently performed on a Color Line ship that sails between Scandinavia and Germany.[1]
• The Animals were added to Hollywood's Rock Walk of Fame on Burdon's sixtieth birthday. The ceremony took place on the eleventh of May 2001. Valentine, Steel and Rowberry played a reunion show with Burdon that night.[1] [2]
• Rolling Stone ranked Eric Burdon among the hundred greatest singers of all time. In 2008 the magazine placed him fifty seventh on its list of the greatest singers, putting the Geordie blues shouter among the finest voices in rock history.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.