Eric Burdon and War: hostilities resumed 38 years on

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/04/2008

Andrew Perry reviews Eric Burdon and War at the Albert Hall
Eric Burdon was one of the great squandered talents of the Sixties. With his band, the Animals, he sang on The House of the Rising Sun and a handful of other top-notch hits.
A brawly Geordie with a gutsy bluesman's voice, he decamped to California for the Summer of Love. His hippified Stateside line-up of the Animals flopped, and he soon fell in with War, a mostly black combo from Los Angeles, with whom he cut two albums in 1970 - one a double-LP, both notorious for their improvisational excesses.
Thereafter, Burdon's career plummeted, never to recover, while War moved on up, scoring internationally as benign, be-afro'd knights of jazz-funk. Aside from CD re-issues, one wondered why either side might be keen to revive the partnership, 38 years after the fact, for this one-off concert.
War were led on stage by Lonnie Jordan, the band's original (black) keyboard player, who described the venture as "a beautiful flashback".
As the seven-piece dispensed some War biggies, including The World is a Ghetto, Cisco Kid and Low Rider, one would have needed to have imbibed a potent hallucinogenic not to notice that Jordan was the only original member: War are now mostly white and Hispanic.
They got a frosty reception. Burdon's arrival, happily, changed everything. With his silver hair, ruddy complexion and shirt unbuttoned, he filled the Albert Hall's cavernous space with a bluff, swaggering presence, and frequently threatened to blow off its roof, his voice a harsh and unrestrainable force of nature, which might best be measured on the Richter scale.
Behind him, the new War meshed together electric blues, R&B, funk, jazz, Latin percussion and prog-rock with considerable enthusiasm and expertise. Suitably buoyed, Burdon, during a tribute to the blind jazzman Rahsaan Roland Kirk, extemporised at length about slavery; and, on a reading of Memphis Slim's Mother Earth, about climate change.
As on those two collaborative albums, however, full-bloodedness soon erred into self-indulgence, with a sequence of flabby solos that took the concert into its third hour.
Then, Burdon settled on a barstool, and belted out a couple of Animals numbers - a lean, acoustic-rooted The House of the Rising Sun and an enjoyably reggae-tinged Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - and the whole, wayward flashback experience coalesced into something genuinely beautiful.