Sound Samples   

Hilton Valentine, guitarist in The Animals' classic 1963-1966 line-up, and auteur of those arpeggios that gave the band their massive "House of the Rising Sun" breakthrough, recorded a solo album, All in Your Head, for Capitol in 1970. There's no sophomore slump evident on Valentine's new solo set where he's billed as Skiffledog, both to ward off inferences that this is some nod to Animals nostalgia, and to salute the event that made him take up guitar in 1956, when the Lonnie Donegan-centered skiffle craze laid the foundation for the British Invasion. Valentine's never been entirely copasetic with the horns & strings cat clothes Capitol layered over his minimalist folk songs of 1970, to tart them up for the style-conscious airwaves, so he's (re-) undressed two of those tunes, "Run Run Run" and "Peace" for the new set, and they just gleam in the nakedness of Hilton's acoustic guitar and his somewhat-Donovan-like vocals. Two songs which directly address the fog of class war that produced these intense rivers from the North - Valentine's own "River Tyne," and his cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" - are hauntingly compelling in their understated anger, in their invocation of that same coal-dusted heart that drove the Animals' best songs. But Valentine's his own man now, per the "Looking To The Sun" existential credo that opens the album and frees the Skiffledog from the "House" that once contained him. Vintage liner photos of Valentine's earliest gigs polish off this prime package. (Richard Riegel - Harp Magazine, August 2004)