“I’m probably about the oldest person in the world,” says John Steel, drummer and the only remaining member of The Animals, soon to appear at The B in Queanbeyan.

When I catch up with him by WhatsApp, Steel is at his countryside home in northeast England, just 50 kilometres from where he was born, about six kilometres from Morpeth — “Vera country,” he says, to place it.

He’s just put his house on the market, with the first viewer arriving on the day of our conversation, and is preparing to move to the south coast, to Hastings (from another TV series, Foyle’s War country), to join his daughter.

“It’s a brutal decision based on my age. I love it out here, it’s very rural – but you can’t live here without a car,” he says.

He tells me the current Animals line-up includes Barney Williams as keyboardist, Danny Handley, their front man, lead guitarist and vocalist and Norm Helm, the bass player, who has been with them for two to three years.

“It’s an excellent team,” he says. “We really enjoy playing and going on the road together.

“It couldn’t be better at this time of my life,” he adds, a reference to the fact that he is now an octogenarian.

As for the title of the coming “Final Curtain” tour, Steel treats it with humour as a sort of Nellie Melba joke.

“This is about the third curtain-call tour we’ve done,” he says. “Every year we say this is going to be the last year, but then another one comes along and we say, why not? It’s what I do. As long as I’m not going to make a fool of myself, I feel I’ve got to do it.”

Another thing, he says, “I also feel as if covid robbed me of three years of not being able to tour, and I’m making up for that now.”

Looking back over the decades, Steel reflects on how he began his professional life not as a drummer, but as a trumpeter playing Dixieland jazz.

He and the future lead singer of the Animals, Eric Burdon, had met when they were 15 while studying at Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design.

“We were trying to avoid having to work for a living,” Steel likes to joke to everyone.

“In the ’50s the dance music for young people was still essentially jazz, so at first we were playing in a kind of Dixieland outfit, but then that British rock ’n’ roll thing started happening in the ’60s and we thought we should go another way.

“The guy who played the drums said he was going to play electric bass guitar, so I thought I might as well play drums – at 15, you think you can do anything.”

In 1964, after the sensational success of House of the Rising Sun, The Animals went to New York.

“In Greenwich Village, we heard the greatest jazz music in the world,” Steel says. “It was heaven for me. We were in the right place at the right time.”

But despite brilliant success and world tours, the original group made up of Burdon, Hilton Valentine, Chas Chandler, Alan Price and Steel, split up, reuniting just once more in 1968.

After extensive litigation, since 2013 Burdon has co-owned the name The Animals, and tours separately as Eric Burdon and The Animals.

Steel has fond memories of touring Australia and the Asia region.

“In Jakarta we were obliged to print copies of all the lyrics to be passed by the authorities. Most of our songs passed, so we got through,” he says.

When I ask Steel if they can still truly call themselves The Animals, he tells me: “I am an original. The band is true to the spirit of the original Animals.

“Of course, the original band was good, and I really enjoyed what we did, but this band is tuned into the energy of the songs.”

“When we sing We Gotta Get Out of This Place, we’re still so strong. Every generation seems to respond to the music.”

The Animals, The Final Curtain, The B, the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, November 2.