DVD.net : Eric Burdon and the Animals - Finally...

To be totally, uncompromingly dogmatic, there was one great decade of rock music. It started around 1963, and tailed off, as all good decades should, about ten years later.

And although rock was rooted in America, its greatest expression was found in Britain. Finally... Eric Burdon and The Animals is the story of one of the British rock groups which gave that decade its greatness.

There was a very strongly defined system of aristocracy among the rock groups of that time - quite appropriate really, this being Britain we're talking about.

There were really only three groups ever in contention right at the top. Anyone who was part of that scene knew that the aristocracy of rock - and pop, for that matter, for the boundary was always blurred - was made up of The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones, and pretty well in that order.

The Beatles were - well, they just were, and there'll be no other. The Who were regarded as the greatest performing rock band in the world. Nobody could beat The Who on stage. No-one would dare try. And The Rolling Stones were the masters of calculated insouciant attitude, and one of the best studio groups of that time, second only to The Beatles.

Then there was the second layer of disciples, raging under this Holy Trinity. There was Manfred Mann, The Kinks, The Faces, The Small Faces, The Hollies, T-Rex, The Zombies, Led Zeppelin, Cream - and there was... The Animals.

The Animals started out as a Newcastle-on-Tyne combo of unparalleled nitty-gritty lack of glamour; but with fantastic raw energy and uncompromising guts. This was a blues and rhythm band with Eric Burdon at its helm, one of the least-pretty lead singers in the UK, but with one of the greatest-ever voices. He took the Dave Van Zonk-arranged House of the Rising Sun from Bob Dylan's first-ever album, and gave it an authentic blues-in-the-gutter sound which made it, rightly, one of the seminal songs of that magic decade.

That initial Animals line-up also, unfortunately, included the immensely talented Alan Price. Unfortunately, because Eric was the group's leader, and Alan resented that. It was not a recipe for harmony, and just as sustainable fame beckoned, Alan split the group.

That was only the start of the transfigurations which saw The Animals evolve into the New Animals, and successive line-ups including the combo featured at the end of this DVD, which saw Eric Burdon teaming up with Brian Auger, a keyboard player who had been most notable in the past for his outings with Julie Driscoll. Auger and Driscoll achieved a degree of fame through their stand-out account of Bob Dylan's This Wheel's on Fire.

By the time Burdon teamed up with Auger, at the start of the 1990s, he had been through countless new band line-ups, as well as countless lines of white substances and LSD. But the Burdon on this biographical disc, made in 1991, is totally coherent and still in great voice. He is a survivor, where so many of his generation died as they followed the white-brick, mushroom-liined road.

He became along that road a great mate of Jimi Hendrix, sharing drugs and girlfriends with the guitar-great as he pursued his own road of excess to destruction. As well as some great footage of The Animals throughout their performance career, the disc is notable for Burdon's fascinating remembrances of these crazed times. It is a story of two continents, as he quits the UK and becomes a fixture on America's West Coast. It is a story still in the making. Although this documentary was made a dozen years ago, regular viewers of the ABC show The Fat would remember a great live appearance by Eric Burdon a few months back - the Newcastle-on-Tyne animal rages on.