Month: December 1977

Photo of The Animals by Richard William Laws, CC BY-SA 3.0

I started avidly listening to contemporary (late 20th century) music towards the end of 1977. Until then, apart from an early burst of enthusiasm for it in the late 1960s, when I was a very wee nipper, I had listened almost exclusively to classical and middle-brow music.

Friends, neighbours and family helped me out by lending me records and cassettes. As did the Streatham Library. I would scrape the recording onto reel-to-reel tape and then listen to it a great deal.

I shall document some more of my “discoveries” over time, but I have recently (December 2021 as I write) rediscovered one of those recordings that I thought was lost.

All I had written on the reel was “Animals Live 1963” and/but that spool was completely unplayable when I tried to digitise it in the late 2000s. I searched on line, at that time, but to no avail.

While researching something completely different the other day, I discovered the following upload, made in 2018, which is it.

If you like that sort of music, it really is rather good and captures the vibe of live blues-infused pop/rock of that era. If you don’t like that sort of music, it should nevertheless sound quaint and might be interesting for you.

I especially like the bit, at c15’50”, when Eric Burdon explains that he is going to remove his helmet so he can shake his head “like The Rolling Stones”

The sound quality of the above link is much better than my scrape from a Streatham Library recording (which I think was in cassette rather than record format).

The other thing to say is that the recording I had was only the first six tracks, which are The Animals without guest. The above recording has 10 additional tracks with Sonny Boy Williamson as guest artist.

Anyway, I couldn’t allow the inadvertent finding of this recording pass without noting it and embedding it as a link in Ogblog. Enjoy.