Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Price

The myth of the perfectly fused band gets punctured here with a shrug and a wince. Alan Price frames The Animals not as a brotherhood but as a collision: "separate and dissonant" is doing double duty, describing both their social chemistry and the sound they were famous for. That word dissonant is the tell. It suggests tension as an asset, not a problem to be solved, a kind of built-in friction that can turn raw R&B influences into something urgent and jagged.

Price also quietly rejects the tidy origin story rock culture loves to sell. Most great-band narratives lean on shared hometowns, shared childhoods, shared dreams. He insists on the opposite: different backgrounds, different areas, "we didn't even come from the same town". The repetition matters, a piling-on that feels less like nostalgia and more like clarification, as if he is correcting a record that has been smoothed over by decades of legend-making.

In early-60s Britain, regional identity and class were not cosmetic details; they were social facts with sharp edges. A band assembled across those lines would bring mismatched ambitions, tastes, and resentments into every rehearsal and every decision about money, credit, and control. Price's phrasing hints at why The Animals burned bright and burned out fast: the same distance that made them exciting made them hard to hold together. The subtext is almost managerial: don't romanticize the chaos, but don't miss what it produced.