Sixties British legends The Animals are currently in the country after a postponed tour due to the pandemic. They are bringing us their Greatest Hits Australian Tour and in doing so, promise to offer up a concert full of hit songs, plus the odd unexpected track from deep within their catalogue. The history of The Animals has been well documented and their music is instantly recognisable to many music fans, with numerous cover songs that has found their way into popular culture across film and radio. Drummer John Steel is the last original member in the line-up and at 81 years of age, it is simply astonishing that he is still actively touring and playing drums given others twenty years of more his junior have since retired. The band line up is of course rejuvenated with newer members but their dedication to playing the songs as fans expect to hear them is well intact. Loud Online (Paul Southwell) respects our elders so we grabbed the rare opportunity to chat to someone who was around Britain when the Beatles were changing the music world, and for the better.
It’s great that you’re finally able to return to Australia after the pandemic postponed your current tour.
Yeah, it is great to be back and we’re looking forward to it as well since it has been off and on since the horrible pandemic. There was no live music, no touring, and no playing with the band. I really missed that a lot. I am not a great one for practising what I am supposed to be doing, which is playing drums. When the pandemic really bit I thought, ‘This is going to last quite a while,’ so I bought myself a practice kit with pads and headphones. I was able to keep myself active there and I don’t want to lose my chops because that could be the end, you know. I kept myself in shape by practising on my electric kit.
That’s an excellent approach. I guess there were a lot of musicians, by comparison, who just stopped playing altogether.
Yeah, I think a lot of people from whatever world of life didn’t know what to do with that much time. There wasn’t much to do with it anyway because you couldn’t go anywhere. No restaurants, no bars, no shows. I think the whole world went into a weird kind of bad dream.
You’re bringing this tour as a greatest hits tour. Does that allow you to play with the set list much at all? Can you throw in the odd obscure song?
Ah, well it is actually difficult really because there are a lot of songs that are well established – all the hits and singles; things like that. They are obviously going to be played but yes, there is quite a decent back catalogue of more obscure songs, B-sides and album tracks that we try to shuffle around. We do try to introduce one or two songs that the set is never exactly the same for every gig. We also have the added bit of spark with our new keyboard player who just joined us in the past year. Mick Gallagher retired and he has been with us a good few years, and was the keyboard player when we were last in Australia. So Barney Williams has joined us and he is an old friend both of our brilliant guitarist and vocalist, Danny Handley, and of our bass player, Roberto Ruiz. They know him from playing gigs locally as they all come from within a few miles of each other. It is lovely to have a fresh kind of style as Mick was very good and dynamic in a lot of ways, but he stuck very tightly to the arrangements and that’s what you got whereas, Barney is much more fluid. He is a lot like how Alan Price [original keyboardist] used to be – just a sort of two handed boogie player, and able to go off on an improvisational trip which is great for us because we’ll be saying, ‘Whoa, where are we going?’ So it has got a different swing to it with this line-up and I am enjoying it very much.
How much wiggle room would you say these songs have for improvising?
Not so much with the obvious ones like The House of the Rising Sun, We’ve Gotta Get Out of this Place, It’s My Life and Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. Pretty much as they happen as we recorded them but there are little changes that happen naturally on the road, where you develop a few things. Somebody might play something different and we’ll think, ‘Ooh yeah, let’s keep that in,’ and so on. But with the rest of the repertoire, anything goes, you know, because it is blues, jazz and rock’n’roll kinds of things that you can kick around all over the place, and have fun with that. It does keep everything fresh.
As the last original member, you’ve been part of the rhythm section since the beginning. You’ve played alongside people like Chase Chandler and Andy Summers. Do you find that as a drummer, other players have different musical characteristics that you have to lock into to keep the rhythm working?
Oh yeah, sure, nothing is precisely the way you first recorded songs and even with the original Animals, I think that we used to record most of our songs before we ever took them on the road. Some of the singles did not get out on the road until after the record had been released by which time you had found slightly different ways of playing those songs. It is interesting how a song develops naturally on the road because you’ll always think, ‘I wish I had done it this way, or done it that way,’ but those singles still stand up well today, so they have got legs.
There’s only so much you can change hit songs after so many people are used to hearing them played a certain way.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I never believed in messing about, just for the sake of it. I think that is here Eric [Burdon – original vocalist] used to confuse people quite a bit with his versions of the songs later on in his career. I mean, the last time I saw him, he was playing Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood as a reggae song. You could see the bafflement on the audience members’ faces, you know. My wife and I have known Eric for all our lives and we were standing at the side of the stage some years ago, and he was playing some of the songs and my wife turned to me and said, ‘I can hardly recognise half of these songs. What is he doing?’ Ha-ha.
To be fair, given Bob Dylan had a version of The House of the Rising Sun, if the mood strikes him when he plays live, it could sound like anything.
Yeah, and the original song was about a prostitute in a boarding house in New Orleans. That would never have got played on the air on the BBC in the early sixties. We completely re-wrote the lyrics having the main character as a gambler so, things like that you can change around. When those records, like We Gotta Get Out of This Place and Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, when you’ve recorded them and they become established hits in everybody’s memories, that is pretty much what they want to hear when they come to see you live. So you don’t want to mess around with the songs too much.
Those two big singles were on the US version of Animal Tracks but not on the UK release. What was the thinking there?
God knows! The record companies back then had a much freer hand with what they did with your material. It wasn’t until the supergroups of the late sixties got control of everything that the record companies had to back down and do what they were told. When we were coming up from 1963 onwards, the record companies…well, the US label had completely different albums to what was released in the UK, including different covers and different tracks. We didn’t get much of a say in that in those days and it is a bit confusing to collectors who think, ‘Well, what is all that about?’
It is amazing and complicates tracking down songs.
Yeah, try another release from Japan or somewhere.
It is also interesting how back then there were labels specialising in local artists doing cover versions of overseas artists. Did that have any impact on how The Animals initially got started?
Well, I think that was kind of the generation just before us. Before the Beatles turned the whole world upside down, the English charts were practically full of English cover versions of American popular music, you know, the hit songs of the day. You would have the American version in the charts and immediately after you’d have an English version of it in the charts, sometimes both at the same time. But I think that the Beatles changed all that because before that, it was very rare that artists actually wrote their own material. The Beatles turned everybody in a different direction when they became brilliant songwriters and showed everybody a different path.
How did you come across songs by Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker and Albert Collins? The list is substantial.
Yeah, and we were fans, you know. That is one of the strange things; the Animals never did manage to come up with a good song writing team, you know, in the way you had with Jagger and Richards or Lennon and McCartney. We never kind of managed to do that trick. All we did, basically, was to find songs that suited us, that we wanted to explore. Somehow, by either good luck or good judgement, we seemed to come up with definitive versions of [aforementioned] songs, even though we didn’t write them. People remember them as Animals songs.
That is the funny thing with covers in that there’s often many people unaware that a song is a cover, or even a reworked song.
Oh yeah, and that is a special talent. We did have a talent for working with other material and making it ours, in a way. It was the next best thing to being a writing team.
Is there a particular song, or batch of songs you recorded from that period that you enjoyed the most, both then and now?
Oh, all of them, really. I look back on all of those things and think back when I hear them, whether it is on the radio or from my own collection, and I often play them on my smart phone, like almost everybody these days. I just put them to a Bluetooth speaker and press shuffle. There’s maybe four thousand tracks on my phone and some of them are part of the Animals catalogue so every once in a while one of them will pop up. I might be just about to press fast forward and then I’ll think, ‘No, I’ll give it a listen again,’ and then I will think, ‘Bloody hell, that was pretty good.’ We were a good band so there’s nothing to be ashamed of there.
You’re still getting younger fans coming along to the shows too. Does it surprise you how that works?
Oh yeah but I think that it works because the songs are so strong. I mean, especially We Gotta Get Out of This Place, which has become a kind of worldwide anthem for many people. We get a lot of young people coming along because they have heard that song, or any one of them really. But that one stands out because it connects with anyone who could be say, leaving school, leaving a job, leaving whatever situation applies and that seems to be an anthem for those things and that is great, I love it. It is always the Animals version that everybody remembers and sings along to, you know.
For a lot of people today, it is probably difficult to understand what life was like before the Beatles hit. Similarly, you could argue that to an extent for say before the Animals and before Hendrix.
Yeah, it was different. Eric and first met when we were fifteen years old, around 1956. At that time, it was a really exciting time for us because that was when rock and roll was really taking hold of the world. Before that happened, the dance music of young people was jazz, swing music and Dixieland. All of a sudden we had Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard – some of the greatest rock and roll that has ever been recorded. I still love those songs today and that was the music of our youth and so that was exciting. When we became hit record makers and things, and flew off to America, that was really exciting for us because that was where the music that influenced us all as teenagers came from, at the time. Music and movies, whatever, and you know, for Geordie working class lads from an industrial city in the north, you didn’t get to go to America in those days, it was just too expensive and really, just another planet. It was thrilling for us to go to the source of all our inspiration.
Once there, did you have an affinity with other bands that were kicking around at the time?
Yes, all over the world in fact. The whole British beat boom meant we all hung out together in London and then also on the road. We would meet each other here and there. Every once in a while you would play on the same bill with American bands. I distinctly remember one day that we were at a carpark or filling station somewhere on the road and this bus pulled up, and all these guys come running out saying, ‘Hey, you’re the Animals!’ and that was in about 1964. So yeah, it was fun on the road and I always found that everybody kind of had a respect for each other’s work. I’ve never come across any serious kind of diva stuff, you know.
I’m curious how Frank Zappa became involved in the Animalism release [as opposed to Animalisms from the same year]?
Ah there is some confusion that might be seen as one the bands that happened after the original Animals broke up, and then it was Eric Burdon and the New Animals. But I do remember that Eric was blown away with Frank Zappa’s first album and I think that he could to play a couple of numbers as a result of that. I once met Frank Zappa when I was slightly on the business side in the 70’s and Chas Chandler was the manager at the time, after Jimi Hendrix, and I took Fat Mattress over to him to a festival in Belgium. Fat Mattress was Noel Redding’s band after the Hendrix Experience, and ah, the Noel’s guitar was damaged as some baggage handler had banged it in. Noel said, ‘He, go and ask Frank Zappa if I can borrow his guitar,’ and I thought, ‘Ah, that is Frank Zappa, man,’ you know, and he said, ‘Go on, it’ll be alright.’ So I went up to him and said, ‘Hello, I’m John Steel and I was with the Animals. I am with Noel Redding here and he has got a damaged guitar, would you mind if we borrowed your guitar?’ He said, ‘Sure, no problem, man, yes.’
The seventies had big rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple but their drummers were very into and able to play the swing and jazz beats.
Oh yeah, and that is one of the things that I would say gave the Animals their distinctive sound. It was the same thing for Charlie Watts [Chaz] in the Stones. He was into jazz bands and I remember when I quit the Animals a few months before the band had broken up because I could see it coming down the road, and another guy, Barry Jenkins, took over. I remember reading an interview that Chaz had done and he said, ‘You know, when John Steel left the Animals, the swing went out of it,’ and we just became another sort of rock band. I thought it was nice of Chaz to say that.
Music moves and you cannot be strict with timing as a result.
No, you cannot, and there is a lot of good rock players who just cannot do swing, it is something they just do not have in their bones. If you haven’t got it, you haven’t got it. I was fortunate, like Chaz, that we both came from a jazz influenced background.
Do any of the rock drummers with big kits, including double bass drums and cymbals galore hold your interest?
Ah, I’m am always impressed by people who can handle all that stuff – you know, with nine cymbals, two bass drums and 17 floor tom-toms. I mean, bloody hell, it is not my style, I am impressed that they can handle all that stuff but it doesn’t do it for me. I am old school for drumming. I remember being in New Orleans with my daughter in 2020, just before the lockdown swept through and there is a band over there led by a guy called Jon Cleary who is great and has been living in New Orleans for twenty years or more. He is on keyboards and has sort of taken over after Dr. John died, and it is a lovely band, with great music. We went to see them again when they were at Ronnie Scott’s club in London just this year, and he was great. But their drummer, AJ Hall, just plays one floor tom, one rack tom, a couple of crash cymbals and a ride cymbal but, bloody hell, what a drummer. That is my kind of drumming and I wish I could play like that.
You had reunions for the Animals over the years. What are your thoughts on reunions?
Reunions, they were kind of a mixed thing. We had a one-off charity show reunion in 1968 Newcastle City Hall which was full of friction because Eric wanted to do things his way but Chas, who had just finished making Jimi Hendrix a superstar, would rather do things some other way. Ha-ha, there was a quite a bit of friction that went on there. The other tour was in 1983 which was a bit of a whirlwind where we played mostly in North America and two albums came out of that, and that was an interesting experience. But, again, on one side it was practically Alan Price and Chas, on the other it was Eric. Yeah, that Eric trying to have everything his way but Alan and Chas were saying, ‘Well no, it is not all your way,’ and I was thinking, ‘Oh no, not this again.’ So there was a bit of that going on but I just thought, ‘To hell with this, I’m just going along for the ride,’ and by doing that, I enjoyed it. It was then a lot of fun.
Finally, what would you say has been your career highlight?
I have to say that it goes back to those early days when we came from nowhere and just being a local band in Newcastle to suddenly being number one all over the world. You know, that takes some beating.