Life with Burdon of fame
ONE of the great things about BBC4’s latest Friday night music documentary, ERIC BURDON: ROCK’N’ROLL – ANIMAL (9.30pm), is that it’s got Eric Burdon in it.
Rather too often, these profiles of rock and pop legends are missing the most vital ingredient – namely, the legend themselves. Usually that’s because the legend has long since paid the ultimate price for his or her crazy rock lifestyle.
Occasionally, it’s because the legend can’t be faffed.
But yes, The Animals’ frontman, the bloke whose magnificently raw vocals ring out from classics such as We Gotta Get Out Of This Place and House Of The Rising Sun, is with us in person to look back at his life and career, reflecting on where it all went right, wrong, and various places in between.
And it’s clearly done a lot of all three. Burdon, who’s now 78, might not be such an instantly recognisable name to some as, say, Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney, his Sixties contemporaries.
His career clearly suffered at times from, among other factors, his anger management issues.And at one point in the late Seventies he was so broke, he ended up sleeping in a car on Sunset Strip.
But his band’s contribution shouldn’t be underestimated. Bruce Springsteen certainly doesn’t underestimate it.
“To me, The Animals were a revelation,” he says. “The first records with full-blown class consciousness that I ever heard.”
The Burdon of today looks in decent shape. But I have to say he sounds a little bit odd.
His accent has become a curious American-Geordie – a smattering of both, merging to become neither. That said, it does rather suit the desert-based lifestyle he’s come to favour.
Yes, Burdon these days is happiest surrounded by nature at its rawest.And he’s rather a good advert for that remote existence.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m anti-human or whatever,” he says, “but wherever there’s people there’s trouble.”
Elsewhere tonight, a little closer to home, we have the final part of FRANKIE BOYLE’S TOUR
OF SCOTLAND
Frankie’s stop-offs this time include Bannockburn, where he gets to have a fight with a man called John.
John is a battle re-enactor, and since Bannockburn is the site of Robert the Bruce’s most famous scrap, where better for a stand-up comedian to brush up on his all-important sword skills?
John explains in graphic detail the damage these weapons can do. “That’s one of my favourite ways to finish people off in re-enactment,” he says of one particularly vicious move, with a tad too much enthusiasm for comfort.