THE ANIMALS - Growing Up Music
Words and banner by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Friday 21st October 2022
Front Row Seats to a Changing World
Think of all that has transpired throughout the course of your life … Hell, the last few years. (I feel a great swell of pity for future history students trying to keep up with everything that happened in 2020 alone.) Born in the midst of WW2, and a bona fide rock star by the 1960s, John Steel – drummer for THE ANIMALS – has been around the block a few times, and ahead of his Australian tour, he looked back over the second half of a truly staggering century.
Whereabouts are you at the moment mate?
I’m at my home in Northumberland, which is northeast England, about fifty kilometres north of Newcastle, where THE ANIMALS originally came from.
My father is about your age, and I’m currently helping him write his memoirs … You had a front row seat to the latter half of the 20th century. The sheer amount of things that you’ve seen and got to experience absolutely boggles me. How would you explain the modern world to your 20-year-old self?
Yeah, it’s been an extraordinary series of decades. It doesn’t let up, you know? Nobody foresaw this worldwide pandemic which shut everything down for two years [laughs] and robbed us all of two years of our lives! Yeah, stuff keeps happening. I was born in the middle of WW2, 1941. As a toddler, I can still remember air raid sirens. One of my earliest memories is when I was crawling around on the floor and my mother was doing some ironing, and the air raid sirens went off, and she said, “Get under the table.” [Laughs] I crawled under the table and she carried on ironing! That was the earliest memory I’ve got. And then, after that, it just goes on and on and on, you know? Mostly to do with conflict, generally – the Korean War and Vietnam and everything else that has gone on since then. But at the same time, I think one of the most exciting two decades, as far as I’m concerned, was the 50s and 60s, when my generation were teenagers in the 50s when rock ‘n’ roll was just born, and it was such an exciting time for young kids to have this fantastic music to listen and dance to. That inspired us all to pick up a guitar or whatever, and became the British Beat Boom of the 60s. Those were two very thrilling decades, I think. They’re the ones that stand out to me.
I was having this conversation with my wife recently. We were looking back on that great music of the 60s – you guys, THE BEATLES, all the great British Invasion bands. We were just thinking, would they have had as much of an impact had they been released [now]? Obviously, the climate is totally different now. Back then, it was only a handful of TV stations and radio stations, and that was how people consumed their media. Now, it is coming at people from all directions, and the music industry is a lot more democratised. Do you think these bands would have had the same kind of longevity or made the same kind of impact?
Yeah, you’ve got a good point there. There’s so much choice now, coming from every direction. I can’t even pretend to try and keep up with what’s going on, to be honest, whereas when we were coming up – I’m just talking about the U.K. here – but we had the BBC, and that was pretty much it. When rock ‘n’ roll first started to be heard in all those places, there was a bit of reluctance from the old establishment to it, you know? So we got the added cache of being rebels, you know? [Laughs] Kicking against convention. So that was pretty exciting, and then, as I said, when our time came, when we got into our late teens/early 20s, we suddenly found ourselves as the guys making records and getting onto the radio and the new TV shows that actually featured music for young people, you know? [Laughs]
I feel like it would be crazy for you too, because you were literally at the birth of a genre of music that then went on to mutate into all these different things. You saw it spear off into becoming heavy metal and punk rock and all of this, but it all came from that chrysalis, and you were at ground zero for that.
We were, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. It all sprang from that. You can trace all the ripples from that initial explosion … like you say, punk rock and metal and all those various things … folk rock. They all sprang from that generation who were fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds in the mid-50s who decided not just to be passive listeners. We decided that you could buy a cheap guitar, learn three chords, and suddenly you had a skiffle band. Skiffle was what started the British Beat Boom off. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Lonnie Donegan … Lonnie Donegan, in 1955-56, he was a guitarist in a Dixieland band called the Chris Barber Jazz Band. They used to have a kind of interval thing, and Chris Barber was a trombonist who played double bass, and Donny would play banjo or guitar in that, and he came up with all this kind of jug band music that he listened to – obscure stuff from the U.S. He came up with this song called Rock Island Line. It was really primitive stuff, but it just took off, you know? It became a number one hit. That was the trigger that made my generation go, “I could do that!” [Laughs] It’s just a three-chord shuffle! So that’s what everybody did. Ask anybody … any of the bands from those days, they’ll tell you that … John Lennon was in a skiffle band when he met Paul McCartney, you know? We all have that same starting point – learn three chords on a guitar, and you’re in a band! Great stuff.
When were you first made aware that We Gotta Get Out of This Place had become popular with the troops in Vietnam? And how did this affect you?
It wasn’t until after THE ANIMALS had broken up, and the Vietnam War was dragging on into the early 70s. When we recorded that it was 1964, and the American input into Vietnam wasn’t that significant. So it was quite a few years after THE ANIMALS had broken up that we were told that We Gotta Get Out of This Place had been number one in the American forces radio network over there for three consecutive years … We thought, “Wow!” Since then, of course, it’s become an anthem for all kinds of things – all sorts of occasions. People all over the world sing We Gotta Get Out of This Place when they’re leaving school or leaving university, or leaving a job they can’t stand. [Laughs]
I feel like people romanticise the 60s a lot, and indeed there was a lot to love, but what do you think are maybe some misconceptions that people have about that time period?
Well, it was an exciting time, that’s for sure, you know? It was an exciting time when people of an age that had previously been ignored or overlooked by the establishment were suddenly a force to be reckoned with. And it wasn’t just music, it was fashion, it was movies. All kinds of things. The whole world seemed to be full of people … Cassius Clay, then Muhammad Ali, was a star and prizefighting boxer, and David Bailey was suddenly the hottest photographer in the world for fashion and things like that, you know? We were all part of a kind of youth-driven movement of talent. It was a very exciting time. But, like all things, there was an awful lot of rubbish going around at the same time! [Laughs] Look at some of the top 20s from the early 60s, and you think, “My God, what was all that about?” [Laughs]
Well I suppose we only remember the good stuff, don’t we?
Yeah, that’s right. That’s the stuff that, [to use] the old cliché, stands the test of time, you know? Fortunately for us, THE ANIMALS repertoire is really, really strong. That’s why people come out and see my band nowadays, because of the strength of the songs. Everybody can identify with It’s My Life or We Gotta Get Out of This Place. Everybody of a certain age can say, “I remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard The House of the Rising Sun,” you know? So it’s the strength of those recordings. I’ve always called it, “growing up music,” because there was a kind of a slight edginess about THE ANIMALS. That’s what keeps them alive, you know? They’ve really got legs.
Who have been some surprising fans? Have you ever been surprised to find out that a famous person or a politician had come up to you and said, “I was a huge fan.”
Oh yeah. One of our prime ministers of fairly recent years was Tony Blair, and he turned out to be a big ANIMALS fan. I met him once. Here I am shaking hands with the prime minister, and he seemed to be in awe of me because I had been in THE ANIMALS. [Laughs] Yeah, every once in a while something like that pops up, and you think, “Wow, I didn’t realise we’d spread so well!”
Now, the flip side of this is, how did you react when Trump used The House of the Rising Sun in his campaign?
Ah … [Laughs] What can you do? It’s one of those things. Trump, you just have to go, “Yeah, okay.” You can’t put him in a box, can you? He’s going to do what he’s going to do, whether anybody likes it or not, you know? The worrying sign is that it looks like he’s going to run again! [Laughs] I don’t want to tread on anybody’s political toes about this, but he scares me.
You’re bringing THE ANIMALS to Australia. What’s your relationship been like with this country over the years? How have the shows been?
I love it. Strangely enough, the original ANIMALS never got to Australia. It wasn’t until the original band broke up that Eric Burdon became ERIC BURDON AND THE ANIMALS … I think Eric broke Australia back in the late 60s, but I never got to Australia until the 90s. I came over with my band then, and loved it. I absolutely loved the vibe of the whole country. I don’t know. There’s just something about it. It’s got something going for it … so friendly and hospitable, the food’s great, the drink’s great … what’s not to like, you know? [Laughs]
THE ANIMALS are touring Australia throughout October and November. Get tickets here.
