When people remember British music of the 1960s, attention often falls first on The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and later Led Zeppelin. Yet another band helped shape the sound of the decade with something altogether rougher, bluesier and more haunted.
The Animals came out of Newcastle upon Tyne carrying the sound of American blues, rhythm and blues and soul into a rapidly changing British music scene. Fronted by Eric Burdon, whose voice seemed far older than the young man producing it, the group became one of the most distinctive British bands of the 1960s.
Their music was not polished pop. It could sound desperate, smoky and working-class. That gave The Animals an identity all their own.
The House of the Rising Sun
Nothing demonstrates their importance more clearly than their 1964 recording of House of the Rising Sun.
The song itself was already old, with roots in the American folk tradition, and had been recorded in various forms before The Animals touched it. What the Newcastle group did was transform it.
Hilton Valentine opened the record with the now-famous descending guitar arpeggio. Alan Price’s organ gradually filled the background like something emerging from a church at midnight, while Eric Burdon delivered the lyric with an extraordinary mixture of anger, regret and resignation.
The recording sounded unlike almost anything else in the charts.
It was dramatic without requiring an orchestra, emotional without becoming sentimental and ominous without relying on studio gimmicks. The arrangement demonstrated that a traditional folk song could be transformed into modern electric rock.
House of the Rising Sun reached number one in Britain and the United States and became one of the defining recordings of the British Invasion.
Its influence stretched far beyond The Animals themselves. The combination of electric guitar, organ, blues singing and dramatic storytelling helped open doors that British rock musicians would continue walking through for the remainder of the decade.
A Different Kind of British Invasion
The British Invasion of America is often remembered as a parade of smiling young groups with matching suits and catchy songs.
The Animals complicated that picture.
They sounded less like clean-cut pop stars and more like a band discovered playing at two in the morning in the back room of a Newcastle pub.
Eric Burdon was central to that identity. His voice drew heavily on African-American blues and soul singers, but he never sounded like a mere impersonator. There was an unmistakably northern English toughness underneath it.
Songs including Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, It’s My Life and Don’t Bring Me Down carried themes of frustration, escape and defiance.
That mattered enormously during the 1960s.
British popular music was beginning to move away from harmless teenage romance towards songs about dissatisfaction, social pressure, identity and rebellion. The Animals were among the groups helping to push it there.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place, in particular, became something larger than a pop record. Its story of wanting to escape a bleak existence resonated with young people far beyond Newcastle and later became strongly associated with American soldiers serving in Vietnam.
Blues Comes Home Through Britain
One of the great ironies of British rock is that many young British musicians introduced American audiences to music that had originally been created in America.
The Animals were deeply influenced by American blues, R&B and soul performers. Alongside groups such as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, they helped create a British blues culture that would eventually feed into hard rock, psychedelic rock and heavy metal.
You can draw musical family trees from that movement towards Cream, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and countless later bands.
The Animals were therefore part of a bridge.
They took American blues traditions, filtered them through post-war British working-class experience and sent the resulting music back across the Atlantic.
Eric Burdon Moves Into the Psychedelic Era
By the second half of the 1960s, popular music was changing at astonishing speed.
The original Animals lineup fragmented, but Eric Burdon continued under the name Eric Burdon and the Animals, embracing the increasingly psychedelic atmosphere of the period.
Songs such as San Franciscan Nights, Monterey and Sky Pilot belonged to a very different musical world from the stark blues of House of the Rising Sun.
Burdon had moved from Newcastle rhythm and blues into the counterculture.
That transition mirrored what was happening across British music. Groups that had begun the decade playing blues and rock and roll were experimenting with longer compositions, unusual instrumentation, political themes and psychedelic imagery.
The Animals therefore occupied both sides of the great musical divide of the 1960s: the early British blues explosion and the later psychedelic revolution.
Burdon and War
Eric Burdon’s musical journey continued into the 1970s when he worked with the American funk band War.
Their collaboration produced Spill the Wine, a record that sounded worlds away from House of the Rising Sun while still carrying Burdon’s unmistakable voice.
This period demonstrated something important about him as an artist. Burdon was never trapped entirely by nostalgia for The Animals.
He moved between blues, psychedelic rock, funk and soul, helping connect different musical cultures during an era when popular music was constantly reinventing itself.
The Revivals
The Animals themselves would reunite in different forms over subsequent decades.
Members of the original group reunited during the 1970s and again in the 1980s, while various combinations of former members continued performing the music in later years.
These revivals demonstrated the durability of the material.
Unlike many groups whose records remain tightly attached to the period in which they were made, the best Animals recordings still sound remarkably immediate.
Part of that is because their music was never excessively decorated.
Listen again to House of the Rising Sun. There are no enormous production tricks hiding underneath it. There is guitar, organ, bass, drums and Burdon’s voice.
The emotional architecture does the rest.
Later generations have continually rediscovered the band through films, television, radio, compilation albums, streaming services and cover versions.
Young guitarists still learn Hilton Valentine’s famous opening pattern. Organ players study Alan Price’s accompaniment. Singers attempt, usually with some trepidation, to reproduce Eric Burdon’s extraordinary vocal delivery.
That is perhaps the clearest evidence of influence.
The music is still being learned.
Their Place in British Music
The Animals may never have possessed the enormous songwriting catalogue of Lennon and McCartney or the decades-long cultural machinery surrounding The Rolling Stones.
But British rock would sound different without them.
They helped prove that British musicians could successfully interpret American blues without losing their own identity. They introduced darkness and social frustration into mainstream pop. They helped establish the organ as a powerful rock instrument. And Eric Burdon demonstrated that a British vocalist could stand alongside the great blues and soul singers with extraordinary intensity.
Above everything stands House of the Rising Sun.
More than sixty years after its release, those first guitar notes still announce themselves instantly.
Then the organ enters.
Then comes Burdon’s voice.
And suddenly a centuries-old folk tradition, industrial Newcastle, American blues and the exploding youth culture of the 1960s all seem to meet inside four extraordinary minutes of music.
That is why The Animals remain important.
They were not merely another British Invasion group.
They helped give British rock its growl.
