The biggest load of rubbish I've heard in my life

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

28/02/65 : The Animals - The Animals


Our second visit with them Animals this year - last time, it was fine if not exactly essential. Wikipedia makes it clear I have to be careful which album called The Animals by The Animals we want to listen to because the US and UK versions are very different - whilst they were both released in '64 and have twelve tracks, only four tracks appear on both albums. "The House Of The Rising Sun" doesn't appear on the UK version (apparently hit singles often didn't appear on albums in the UK around this time), so ironically we miss out on a fourth version of it this year (after Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull and Bob Dylan).

It opens with a very odd track, "The Story Of Bo Diddley", which is a trip through the history of rock and roll which ends with Bo himself coming to see The Animals play and announcing "that's the biggest load of rubbish I've heard in my life" - it's not a terrible track, but it's very peculiar. Apart from that it's all pretty normal blues/R&B covers including "Boom Boom" and "Memphis, Tennessee", which I knew we'd heard before this year but had to use Google to remind myself it was from Tom Jones. There's nothing wrong with any of the tracks but they don't sound exactly essential - I guess the context was just a bit different back then.

We're at #12 in the charts this week on their seventeenth week of a surprisingly successful nineteen week run with it having peaked at #6 in its fourth and thirteenth weeks . The top five this week were The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Val Doonican, Jim Reeves and Cilla Black and we have a new entry for Sandie Shaw (#10).

Wikipedia has a whole three sentences on the album - it came out in October '64 and it charted, and that's your lot. The entry for the US version is slightly longer, but offers no information as to why they were so different. Their entry tells me I do know a couple of their other tracks, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" and "Don't Bring Me Down" - but I'm not sure I knew that either of them were by The Animals. They were a lot more successful than I knew, having eight top ten singles between '64 and '67 - but nothing did as well for them as "The House Of The Rising Sun" which got to #1 both here and in the US. Three of the original members, Eric Burdon, Alan Price and John Steel are still with us and in their mid 80s and one of the other original members was Chas Chandler who went on to greater success managing Jimi Hendrix and Slade.

Given how successful they were, this is a strangely average album - there's nothing particularly wrong with it but I just struggle to imagine it sounded particularly original even back then. But I guess a lot of people heard something about it they liked and the people couldn't have been wrong, could they?

21/02/65 - A very fine album indeed
07/03/65 - Some dreadful cover versions

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