“The Story Of Bo Diddley” remains one of the best things they’ve ever done, taking its bare skeleton from the Chess original and reconfiguring it into a personal history, just as they’d creatively substituted ‘Georgia’ for a tough area of Newcastle for “Gonna Send You Back To Walker”, their debut ‘B’-side. “Roadrunner” – from second album ‘Animal Tracks’ (1965), rips from speaker to speaker around the dance-floor carried on Hilton Valentine’s scratchily descending slide. Albums are more a group concern, running through the kind of personalised R&B covers that first drew attention at the Newcastle ‘Club A-Go-Go’. They were artfully selected Sam Cooke or Brill Building Mann-&-Weil songs (“We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” and “Bring It On Home To Me” respectively), restyled by Mickie Most for maximum concentrated impact. For the Animals, singles were always a different continuum. Making every second a desperate primal joy… ‘cos Monday sharp you’re back on the line. With no trace of flouncey home counties decadence, theirs is the urban blues of factories that whiff of grit, lube-oil and sweat which you scrub away and mask with Old Spice and your finest threads for the Saturday Night & Sunday Morning night out binge respite from it all. They’re as northern and working class as me. I’ve got the black-label Columbia singles. I catch the coast-train from Cottingham station to Bridlington, after first arranging to stay over with my Aunt and travel home the following morning. But now, following a second year of hits, they’re launching a new line-up, after the first resented personnel change, working keyboardist Dave Rowberry in with this brief regional tour. Post-Price’s departure they will part-replicate the ‘Rising Sun’ formula with the chain-gang work-song “Inside, Looking Out”, and almost make it work a second time. By this bleak season, the first fissures are splitting the group solidarity. Establishing our contradictory stances, indicating generation-defining status around a sixties single as vitally essential as “Satisfaction”, “My Generation”, “Waterloo Sunset” or “She Loves You”, a raw roots template transfigured by Alan Price’s innovative arrangement, tensioned through a tightly delineated series of escalating hard-driving emphasis and controlled screwed-down energies that might have borrowed from Dylan, yet also shocked Dylan around to the sheer potential of pure electricity. ‘It’s not a Pop song, it’s Folk-Blues’ I counter. ![]() ‘They shouldn’t make Pop music about that sort of thing’ she blusters. ‘No, a brothel,’ deliberately provocative. ‘What’s the song about, a gambling den?’ queries my mother warily as we watch the TV-clip. The year before had taken the group from nowhere, to a debut hit up to no.21 in May – “Baby Let Me Take You Home”, to the global smash that was “House Of The Rising Sun” hotter in July, taking them triumphantly into New York where it was also number one. The Animals know exactly how to structure tension, building it to spikes of wild intensity. Instead, everything focuses down onto the dynamics of the sound. Eric Burdon slaps out rhythm with the palm of his hand on his thigh, Hilton Valentine sways a little drunkenly.
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