War

Mixing together a wildly eclectic range of sounds and styles, War created some of the funkiest, free-form music of the 1970s and went on to sell over 50 million records. Originally a gang of R&B and jazz musicians named The Creators from some of Los Angeles' toughest ghettos, Eric Burdon - from 1960s British rockers The Animals - spotted them playing in North Hollywood and recruited them as his backing band. With this melting pot of Latin rhythms, African drums, funk swagger, blues guitars and jazz experimentation, War became one of the first truly multi-cultural bands and talked about social and political issues on debut album Eric Burdon Declares "War" (1970). Their single Spill The Wine shot to Number 3 in the US charts and second album The Black-Man's Burdon (1970) featured covers of The Rolling Stones' Paint It Black and the Moody Blues' Nights In White Satin; but Burdon quit the band soon after in 1971. The World Is Our Ghetto (1972) brought their biggest success, reaching Number 1 on the US album chart to become the best-selling record of 1974, and they cemented their huge popularity with Top 10 albums Deliver The Word (1973), Why Can't We Be Friends? (1975) and Platinum Jazz (1976). Saxophonist Charles Miller was murdered in 1980 and percussionist Papa Dee Allen died on stage in 1988 from a heart attack, but the band still perform and in recent years their music has been sampled by a large number of hip-hop artists.