Alan Price: Geordie’s Progress

The Newcastle native (we call them Geordies) was only getting started with that blistering organ solo on "House of the Rising Sun." Price's own output easily surpasses that of his Animals years.

To the extent that America’s music fans know who Alan Price is, and not many do, those of a certain age are familiar with his splendid organ playing on the Animals’ transatlantic #1 hit, “House of the Rising Sun.” It was Price’s organ, at least as much as the vocals of the band’s frontman, Eric Burdon, which made the Animals’ version of the old New Orleans blues ballad something special. I’d go so far as to say that Price, especially with that jazzy double-time organ solo, stole the song out from under Burdon and kicked it into high gear. ¹

The Animals came stateside just in time to catch the tail end of the British Invasion’s first wave, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in October, 1964. Price played on the Animal’s 1965 hit “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” but he left the band in May, 1965.²

The angry young Animals, including Eric Burdon on vocals and Alan Price on his spindly Vox Continental organ (the go-to organ for that day’s traveling musician), on the Ed Sullivan Show of Sunday night, October 18, 1964. You can tell by the squeals and screams that we’re still in the Beatlemania years.

Price quit ostensibly because of a fear of flying, but the rift between Price and the others was more complex than that. Apart from his interest in jazz and English music-hall fare (he shared his love of the latter with the Kinks’ Ray Davies), Price was, in one writer’s words, “a complex, moody character, prone to prolonged bouts of bleak introversion, who’d always been estranged from his colleagues.” A wide reader, Price had interests he couldn’t share with the others. During downtime, “he could often be found in the tour van reading Kafka, while the rest of the boys were out chatting up the birds.” Or, as Price put it in a 1992 interview, “I’d had terrible difficulties with the Animals. As soon as we’d cracked it, all they wanted was girls, sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll. I couldn’t get them to rehearse and I kept bugging them, which they didn’t like at all.” Although the band, including Price, periodically regrouped for brief nostalgic stints, Price was far happier on his own or in collaborations with his fellow jazz lover Georgie Fame.

Price, as were the other Animals, was born and raised in Newcastle-on-Tyne, a major shipbuilding center (though no longer) in the northeast corner of England. (Sting is another Newcastler, or “Geordie,” as the city’s residents, especially those of blue-collar origins, call themselves.) To home in further on Price’s origins, he is not from Newcastle proper, but from the city’s working-class suburbs. He was born on April 19, 1942 in Fatfield, an unincorporated community just south of the city, and attended school in Jarrow, a small shipbuilding city five miles east of Newcastle. Jarrow figures prominently in—lends its name to—one of Price’s biggest hits. Price’s family was working-class; his father was killed in an industrial explosion when the boy was six. A piano prodigy, Price was part of the mid-’50s skiffle craze that drew thousands of British teens, including John Lennon and his Quarrymen, into what was morphing into rock and roll. Working his way through one Newcastle cover band after another—the Pagans, the Kansas City Five, the Black Diamonds, the Kontours—Price founded the Alan Price Combo in 1961, which became the Animals in 1962, when Burdon joined. The elfin Burdon, effervescent where Price was recessive, was a blues belter who perfectly fit mid-’60s Britain’s growing taste for R&B. (The Rolling Stones, of course, began life as an R&B covers band.)

Since ending his three-year tenure with the Animals, Price has released at least 20 albums. He was still making records in 2021, aged 79. Most writers (but not all—see below) consider Price’s best album the autobiographical Between Today and Yesterday, released in 1974. It’s also his most popular, Price’s only Top 10 UK album, reaching #9. (Only two of Price’s albums have cracked the Top 200 in America.)

Between Today and Yesterday contains two versions of the lovely title song. In one, Price is alone with his piano. The other was scored by the gifted arranger Derek Wadsworth for a large ensemble, including strings, horns, and percussion. Each version has its virtues, and I include both.

What makes “Between Today and Yesterday” especially moving is its melody, a perfect, pensive setting for the artist’s reflections on approaching middle age. The lyrics are plainspoken enough—“Beware, the mirror on the wall/Gets less friendly with passing time”—except for the final line, which comes out of nowhere, and has stayed in my mind’s eye for years. “Please let me drink black wine!” Price shouts, almost desperately. What is he talking about? I have no idea, but “black wine” is a truly striking image.

Above: “Between Today and Yesterday,” Alan Price accompanying himself on piano

Below: “Between Today and Yesterday,” Alan Price, accompanied by orchestra

“Jarrow Song,” the third tune from Between Today and Yesterday that I’m including, was one of Price’s biggest hit singles, reaching #6 in the UK. “Jarrow Song” is freighted with local and national history. On October 5, 1936, the Unemployed Worker’s Union, as a group of blue-collar Jarrowites, primarily out-of-work shipwrights, named themselves, sent 200 of its members on a march from Jarrow to London’s Westminster Palace, some 280 miles away. The march was intended to draw attention to the collapse not merely of shipbuilding, but of all British industry in the mid-1930s; the Depression, of course, was not confined to America.

The opening verse to “Jarrow Song”:
“My name is Geordie McIntyre, and the bairns don't even have a fire
So the wife says ‘Geordie, go to London town!’
And if they don't give us half a chance, don't even give us a second glance
Then Geordie, with my blessings, burn them down
Come on follow the Geordie boys, they'll fill your heart with joy
They're marching for their freedom now
Come on follow the Jarrow lads, they'll make your heart feel glad
They're singing now, yes now is the hour!”

The marchers reached London on November 1, presenting the House of Commons with a petition, bearing 11,000 signatures, that demanded a government-backed reestablishment of industry in and around Newcastle. Parliament refused to debate the petition. Despite the strikers’ sense of failure, the Jarrow March came to be regarded as a defining event in Britain of the ‘30s, inspiring the thoroughgoing reforms, which amounted to the welfare state, that Britain’s postwar Labor government enacted. The Jarrow Crusade, as the march was known, was famous throughout Britain, and remains so in today’s Newcastle.

Price obviously had a deep empathy for his fellow Geordies. “I’m not really qualified to talk about politics,” he told Melody Maker after “Jarrow Song” became a hit. “I can only talk from a gut reaction. Some people win and some people lose. I just know that the ones who lose usually aren’t those who deserve to.

“I never ever thought ‘Jarrow Song’ would evoke so many bloody different reactions. I got a letter from a woman who helped to clothe and feed the marchers as they walked; I got letters from people that thought I was being very bolshie and didn’t like it. I’ve noticed that in places that had near-Socialist governments, like Chile, Between Today and Yesterday sold really well. That pleased me.”

The Cliff Richard Phenomenon: musicians celebrated in their native Britain who fail to duplicate that success in the USA—is a fate that Price shares with performers as varied as Georgie Fame, Cilla Black, Dame Shirley Bassey and Ralph McTell, whose “Streets of London” and “From Clare to Here,” big English hits, have had next to no impact on American listeners. Price is strongly rooted in northeast English culture, his speaking, and sometimes singing, accent so deeply Geordie as to be all but incomprehensible to American ears. “We in the USA,” writes one critic, “have missed out on one of the most idiosyncratic talents to emerge from the British Invasion.”

Two Price songs—one song, actually, in two versions, as with “Between Today and Yesterday”—remain to be heard and discussed: the two best tracks on what I consider, by some distance, Alan Price’s best album. There’s a studio version and a live version. The studio version opens the most daring, if flawed, British movies of the ‘70s. Song, album, and film have the same name: O Lucky Man, directed by the unabashedly left-wing filmmaker Lindsay Anderson. O Lucky Man, wrote a critic in May 2024, “has lost little of its disturbing, lurid, carnivalesque power in the half-century since it was released.” At times, its grotesqueries make it difficult to watch, “an anarchic joyride,” wrote another, “through the tragicomic horrorscape of early 1970s Britain.”

Scene 1 of Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant but flawed 1973 film, the middle film of a trilogy, each film starring Malcolm McDowell, that begins with 1968’s if….. and ends with the relatively little-watched Britannia Hospital (1982). Alan Price was hired to score O Lucky Man, he candidly told Goldmine magazine in December, 1995, “through a case of mistaken identity.” Anderson, said Price, “thought I had written “Simon Smith.” Price had a #4 UK hit in 1967 with Randy Newman’s song “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear.” Anderson, an ardent but not especially well-informed music fan, wanted to work with the guy who, he thought, wrote “Simon Smith.” (Choosing Price was, to be fair to Anderson, an easy mistake to make; in 1967, Newman was almost a complete unknown). “We arranged a meeting,” Price told Goldmine, “which was not very fruitful. He asked me what I liked, and I said Ray Charles. He said, didn’t I think the Concert Iron Works Male Voice Choir was just as legitimate and exciting? I said no and walked out. But he persisted in the relationship.”

Anderson helped himself to the device of having normally offscreen figures—the director, the soundtrack musicians, and others—appear on-camera. This was, to abbreviate greatly, a technique devised by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who called it a “Verfremdungseffect,” or “alienation effect.” Brecht wanted his audience to remain at all times aware that they were watching a play. Creating the illusion of reality, in which theatregoers could lose themselves, was the last thing Brecht desired. What better way to do this than to have stagehands, carpenters, etc. appear onstage, cheek by jowl with the actors—with the work’s characters, as it were?

In O Lucky Man, Price’s music is sometimes a conventional off-screen soundtrack. At other times, as in the film’s opening scene, Price and his band are characters in the movie (some of its more appealing and down-to-earth, at that). Lindsay Anderson appears onscreen multiple times, interacting with McDowell’s character, Mick Travis, and with McDowell’s on-and-off love interest, a very young Helen Mirren, the daughter of a rapacious British industrialist (played to perfection by Sir Ralph Richardson). The point was to continually remind moviegoers that this was a construct they were watching, which, if they paid attention, would illustrate, point by point, what for Anderson were the barbarous, exploitative workings of 20th-century society.

O Lucky Man’s final scene is presided over by Price (splendidly outfitted in a tux, not his usual workaday togs) and band, playing a wholly rewritten, take-no-prisoners version of the song with which they’d opened the movie three hours earlier.³ (The film does run long.) Betrayed by Richardson’s ruthless industrialist, down on his luck and homeless, Mick Travis answers a casting call for a film production. (The film unbeknownst to us, is the as-yet-unmade O Lucky Man.) When, during the audition, Anderson commands him to smile, McDowell is too depressed and disillusioned to muster a smile—”What’s there to smile about?” he wants to know—until Anderson slaps him across the face with the scriptbook. After a cut to black, we’re thrust into the movie’s final scene. A grinning McDowell has evidently won the role (as Mick Travis), the film (O Lucky Man) has just wrapped, and the entire cast, everyone in character, is celebrating, McDowell in a glittery gold suit, Mirren gorgeous in a low-cut gown, everybody frugging away. Here’s Anderson himself, throwing his arms around McDowell/Travis. As great as the Price band’s music is, the final scene is a repellently cynical statement. Having just completed a film that shows, in clinical detail, the step-by-step degradation of a naif at the hands of a ruthless elite, everybody parties hearty.

1. The Animals’ bass player, Chas Chandler, was to have a significant post-Animals impact. In 1966, on his final American tour with the group, Chandler came across an unknown Jimi Hendrix performing at a club in Greenwich Village. Stunned by Hendrix’s talent, Chandler offered to manage him, which he did during the making of Hendrix’s first two albums, Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, and part of the third, Electric Ladyland. Chandler, that is, played a key role in Hendrix’s success.

2. Bruce Springsteen has said that it was the distinctive recurring lick from the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” that inspired Springsteen’s song “Badlands,” on his 1978 album Darkness at the Edge of Town. In his keynote address at 2012’s South by Southwest festival, Springsteen spoke at length about how the Animals' harsh, propulsive sound and working-class lyrics deeply influenced his music. Darkness on the Edge of Town was "filled with Animals," Springsteen told his SXSW audience. Playing “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”’s signature riff and "Badlands" back to back, Springsteen said, "Listen up, youngsters! This is how successful theft is accomplished!"

3. I never get tired of listening to the live version of “O Lucky Man”. It pushes more of my buttons in 2:15 than…. well, it’s f-ing great rock & roll.