ALAN Price has been involved in music for 50 years and it’s his organ playing you hear on The Animals classics House of the Rising Sun and Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.
His most famous solo number is possibly The Jarrow Song, a stirring number inspired by the 1936 Jarrow March, when 200 men travelled from the north east to the Houses of Parliament to protest against mass unemployment.
You can hear all three numbers - and many more - when Alan appears in Bury on March 31 and Morecambe on April 15.
Q. As somebody with five decades experience of the music industry, what are the biggest changes he’s seen?
The biggest changes in modern music have been occasioned by the advance in recording and synthesizer technology, which has placed the means of recording and performing, with their lower prices, in the hands of the many, rather than the few.
Q. Why do you think the 60s was such an important decade for music?
The 1960s music scene was instrumental in bringing wider recognition and income to previously unheralded American blues musicians like BB King and John Lee Hooker, in both the UK and USA by the re-working of their material by the British R&B groups such as The Animals, The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds.
Q. Have you any funny stories you’d like to share about life on the road?
The most embarrassing is when we returned to our boarding house after a gig, followed the sleeping landlady’s instruction to ‘help yourselves from the fridge,’ went to the wrong fridge and ate the food which had been prepared for the next day’s wedding breakfast.
Q. What do you think of the current music scene and are there any contemporary artists you enjoy listening to?
Where once there was a limit to the access one had to pop music, there are now unlimited avenues of exploration on the internet. I enjoy listening to the work of my niece, Katherine Fussey who is a very talented singer songwriter with a group called Lunabelle. They are the new kids on the block to look out for.
* The Alan Price Set appear at The Met, Bury on Thursday, March 31 and the Platform, Morecambe, on Friday, April 15.
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