Fact #191518

Giorgio Gomelsky (London-based agent/manager) : Their manager Mike Jeffery had come down to see me in London with a demo of the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo [later to become The Animals] and, although I didn't take to Jeffery - he seemed a slippery, worm-like character - I did like the sound of the band. So I told him I was looking for bands to play with Sonny Boy Williamson II.

In those days, there were no agencies or bookers interested in promoting this sort of music, so we had to learn to do everything ourselves. I had been organising the American Folk Blues festival and when it was over, I kept a few of the performers in the UK, and took them around the country, teaming them up with young, emerging white blues bands.

Sonny Boy Williamson II was the first to stay and I took him out on the road to sit in with the Spencer Davis Group in Birmingham, Roadrunners in Liverpoool, and the Alan Price Combo in Newcastle.

The first time I saw them must have been in early December and when I got back to London after that, I was raving about The Animals to lots of people, and the next thing I did was to arrange a swap. I sent The Yardbirds, who I was looking after, up to Newcastle to play at Jeffrey's clubs, and brought The Animals down to London to play in The Yardbirds' regular places.

One of the people I put onto The Animals was Ronan O'Rahilly, a young man from a well-to-do family, who was going up to Newcastle anyway to check out a boat he was thinking of buying for his new venture, a pirate radio station called Radio Caroline.

When The Animals arrived in London, they came down with crates of Brown Ale, because they couldn't get it in London, England, UK, Europe.

John Steel (drummer, The Animals] : We'd had a little dabble with drugs in Newcastle but (The Scene) was the first time we'd ever come across people who took purple hearts by the handful. They used to call it being blocked. There'd be a whole roomful of these kids, all out of their brains, getting off on r'n'b. It was a great atmosphere. As a band, we weren't too keen on pills actually. I'd tried purple hearts in Newcastle, but one used to send me wild. I couldn't stop twitching and once I ended up bursting into tears. So I said stuff this and I never took speed again. But these kids ... handfuls.

We used to get a bottle of whisky from the off-licence and pour it into half-empty coke cans. You had to be careful. The club was raided quite often. In fact, I remember one night, the police walked in and made us stop playing. There was a sound like a hailstorm when everyone emptied the pills out of their pockets onto the dance floor. When the cops walked round frisking people, it was like they were walking on gravel - crunch, crunch, crunch. We were pissing ourselves.

The Crazy Elephant was the first "in" jet-set club we ever went to in London, England, UK, Europe. That was after we'd played The Scene Club and gone down well. Ronan took us down to this place in Mayfair and there was a line of people down the stairs, waiting to get in, with black ties and dinner suits and stuff like that. And we were sweaty and raggy and hicks from the sticks, you know, and we were very impressed that Ronan had the pull to get us in. We just walked straight past this line of people. And Lonnie Donnegan was one of them. He was standing there, waiting to get in, and we were ushered straight past him.

When we got inside … well, I'd never seen anything like it. I mean, this was Culture Shock, if you like.

Our roadie, Tappy Wright, had this heavin' old overcoat he always wore - he'd driven the van in it for two years, so you can imagine. Well, he wouldn't hand it in to the hat-check girl, and he was still wearing it when we were shown to our reserved table. The waiter made one last attempt: "May I take your coat, sir?"

"Not bloody likely," he said, "Someone might nick it!"

We got served up with baked potatoes and sweetcorn and steak on wooden platters. That was a novel thing to us. We were still in the egg 'n' chips bracket. There were lots of influential people dancing - boogying around to records. It was the first time we'd seen people dancing to loud, recorded music. I suppose it was the first disco. I remember being impressed by a waiter bringing some bloke his change on a tray - and the bloke left a fiver tip. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was half a week's wages to a lower-paid worker in the north-east at the time.

Ian Samwell : I was deejaying a lot in The Lyceum and The Flamingo, so I was in places like The Scene all the time. When I saw The Animals, I thought they were great, so I arranged to put them on at Greenwich Town Hall on one of my regular Thursday night gigs. I got on well with Chas, and he was keen to have me produce them, because he knew I'd written Move It for Cliff. But when Don Arden got a hold of them, he made it a condition of getting them on the Chuck Berry tour that they would use Mickie Most as their producer, so I was passed over.

Pete Meaden (publicist) : I used to go down to The Scene Club, and there it was very private, very dark. I used to go down there with Brian Jones, and Chuck Berry I took, a few people like that. The Animals used to play there, but none of that was exactly purism Mod — which was a society unto itself. As I say, Modism, Mod living is a euphemism for clean living, under difficult circumstances. You have your own values, your own set of time scales, your own units of existence, which are to have a good time, because it's alright, as the old Curtis Mayfield Impression song goes. (Source : Steve Turner feature in NME, November 17, 1979)