BBC to air one of the last ever interviews with The Doors’ Ray Manzarek

One of the last ever interviews with The Doors’ keyboard player Ray Manzarek will be broadcast on Friday (January 10).

The footage will be aired as part of a new three-part BBC4 series Born To Be Wild: The Golden Age Of American Rock, which charts the rise and fall of US classic rock from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The first hour-long episode, which will feature interviews with Manzarek as well as Alice Cooper, Tom Petty, and John Densmore, will be shown at 9pm.

Manzarek died aged 74 in May 2013. The Doors formed in 1965 but disbanded in 1973, two years after Jim Morrison’s death. Manzarek continued to make music, releasing a number of solo albums and then as part of the group Nite City.

Last July, the band’s guitarist Robby Krieger announced that he and fellow surviving member of the group John Densmore will reunite in tribute to Manzarek. “We’re going to do at least one show for Ray and have a big send-off. That’s either the start or the end of it, I don’t know,” he said.

The pair fell out in 2002 when Krieger and Manzarek began touring as The Doors Of The 21st Century, leading to a lawsuit over the use of band name, and a £25 million countersuit against Densmore for his refusal to sign off on multi-million-dollar licensing of band songs for commercials.

“That’s what you do – if someone sues you, you sue them twice as hard back and hope that they drop the suit,” Krieger said. “It was a very stupid idea. We had the worst lawyers.” The row has now ended, but the lawsuit is the subject of Densmore’s new book, The Doors Unhinged.