21/01/2025
ON THIS DATE (48 YEARS AGO)
January 21, 1977 – Pink Floyd: Animals is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 4/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Animals is the tenth studio album by Pink Floyd, released in the UK on January 21, 1977 (February 10, 1977, in the US). It reached #2 on the UK Albums Chart and #3 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart.
Animals is a concept album, based on the flaws of capitalism. Various castes in society are represented as different types of animals (Dogs as the businessmen, sheep as the powerless pawns, and pigs as the ruthless leaders). Although this album mainly attacks capitalism, several components are similar to George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm”: In the book various animals (mainly pigs, sheep, dogs, etc.) represent different roles assumed by individuals in a communist society.
While singer and guitarist David Gilmour is only credited for the music of one track, the epic “Dogs” (previously known as “You Gotta Be Crazy”), this song and “Raving and Drooling”, a Waters song which would later become “Sheep”, were created at the same time as “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, and originally destined for Wish You Were Here. Their creation process was similar to the method the band used during the late sixties and early seventies. They would adapt and expand their compositions by performing them live, and later in the studio find a more coherent form and concept for the whole album, with Waters writing the lyrics. Animals was the last Pink Floyd album created in this way, as the subsequent The Wall and The Final Cut, were primarily conceived by Waters and worked out in the studio with some input from Gilmour. Although Rick Wright admittedly did not contribute much compositionally, he had some influence on the arrangement of the songs, including solo playing on “Dogs” and “Sheep”. As with “Welcome to the Machine” and “Wish You Were Here” on Wish You Were Here, Waters wrote “Pigs on the Wing” and “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” to tie together the other songs in the album’s concept. His dominance in the writing credits and the discrepancy with the actual creation process is directly related to the increasing tensions within the band.
The three core songs are bookended by a pair of love songs written by Waters for his then-wife Caroline: “Pigs on the Wing, Part 1″ and “Pigs on the Wing, Part 2″. Both are in stark contrast to the misanthropic middle three songs, and suggest that companionship can help us overcome our flaws though the final lines suggest that the singer is or was once one of the dogs. For the 8-track cartridge release, which looped, Parts 1 and 2 were linked by a guitar bridge performed by Snowy White (subsequently available on White’s 1996 album “Goldtop: Groups & Sessions”), and the 17:08 song “Dogs” was cut into two tracks.
The giant, helium-filled pig seen on the cover was actually flown over Battersea Power Station for the photo shoot (under the direction of Storm Thorgerson). On the first day of shooting, a marksman was on hand in case the pig broke free. However, according to Thorgerson, this was considered an “insurance problem”, and he was not hired for the second day of shooting. Ironically, on December 3, 1976, during the second day, a gust of wind broke the pig free of its moorings. Because there was no one to shoot the pig down, it sailed away into the morning sky. A passenger plane reported seeing the pig, causing all the flights at London Heathrow Airport to be delayed. A police helicopter was sent up to track the pig, but was forced to return after following the pig to an altitude of 5,000 feet. A warning was sent out to pilots that a giant, flying pink pig was loose in the area. The CAA lost radar contact on the pig near Chatham in Kent, at a height of 18,000 feet and flying East. It finally landed in a farmer’s field, without much damage. They then repaired the pig, and flew it up for a third time. The resulting pictures were not deemed suitable on their own (as the clear, blue sky from day three was thought to be much less evocative), and the final image was made as a composite of the power station picture from day one and the pig from day three.
The album had custom picture labels, using drummer Nick Mason’s handwriting as a typeface, as did the lyrics on the liner sleeve. Side one’s label depicted a fish-eye lens view of a dog and the English countryside. Side two’s was similar, but featured a pig and sheep instead of the dog.
The album's cover image, a pig floating between two chimneys on Battersea Power Station, was conceived by bassist and writer Roger Waters, and photographed by long-time collaborators Hipgnosis.
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QUOTES
“It wasn’t a great, one of the most productive periods of our life I don’t think. We used those two tracks, which went back to ’74 and changed the names and doctored them around and stuff and stuck them on the album. I like them, I love that album. It’s exciting and noisy and fun and it’s got really good bits of effects and stuff on it but it’s not one of our creative high points really.”
~ David Gilmour, May 1992, Pink Floyd: The 25th Anniversary Special, Westwood One.
“Roger's thing is to dominate, but I am happy to stand up for myself and argue vociferously as to the merits of different pieces of music, which is what I did on Animals. I didn't feel remotely squeezed out of that album. Ninety percent of the song "Dogs" was mine. That song was almost the whole of one side, so that's half of Animals.”
–David Gilmour, Mojo (2008)
“I didn’t really like a lot of the music on the album. I have to say I didn’t fight very hard to put my stuff on and I didn’t have anything to put on. I played on it. I think I played really well but I didn’t contribute to the writing on it and also I think Roger was kind of not letting me do that. I think it was the start of the whole ego thing in the band, Animals.”
~ Richard Wright, November 1994, BBC Omnibus Pink Floyd Special 1994.
“Animals was a slog. It wasn't a fun record to make, but this was when Roger really started to believe that he was the sole writer for the band. He believed that it was only because of him that the band was still going, and obviously, when he started to develop his ego trips, the person he would have his conflicts with would be me.”
~ Richard Wright
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
For Pink Floyd, space has always been the ultimate escape. It still is, but now definitions have shifted. The romance of outer space has been replaced by the horror of spacing out.
This shift has been coming for a while. There was Dark Side of the Moon and "Brain Damage," Wish You Were Here and the story of founding member Syd Barrett, the "Crazy Diamond." And now there's Animals, a visit to a cacophonous farm where what you have to watch for is pigs on the wing. Animals is a song suite that deals with subjects like loneliness, death and lies. "Have a good drown," they shout dolefully as you drop into the pit that is this album: "Have a good drown as you go down all alone/Dragged down by the stone...stone...stone...stone...stone..." Thanks, pals, I'll try.
It's no use. Like all Floyd records, this one absorbs like a sponge, but you can still hear the gooey screams of listeners who put up a fight. What's the problem? For starters, the sax that warmed Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here has been replaced by a succession of David Gilmour guitar solos -- thin, brittle and a sorry substitute indeed. The singing is more wooden than ever.
The sound is more complex, but it lacks real depth; there's nothing to match the incredible intro to Dark Side of the Moon, for example, with its hypnotic chorus of cash registers recalling the mechanical doom that was Fritz Lang's vision in Metropolis. Somehow you get the impression that this band is being metamorphosed into a noodle factory.
Maybe that shouldn't be surprising. Floyd was never really welcomed into the Sixties avant-garde: space rock was a little too close to science fiction for that. But the extraordinary success of Dark Side of the Moon (released nearly four years ago, it's still on the charts) culminated almost a decade of ever-expanding cult appeal and gave the band an audience that must have seemed as boundless as space itself. The temptation to follow through with prefab notions of what that audience would like -- warmed over, spaced out heavy-metal, in this case -- was apparently too strong to resist.
Even worse, however, is the bleak defeatism that's set in. In 1968 Floyd was chanting lines like: "Why can't we reach the sun?/ Why can't we throw the years away?" This kind of stuff may seem silly, but at least it wasn't self-pitying. The 1977 Floyd has turned bitter and morose. They complain about the duplicity of human behavior (and then title their songs after animals -- get it?). They sound like they've just discovered this -- their message has become pointless and tedious.
Floyd has always been best at communicating the cramped psychology that comes from living in a place like England, where the 20th century has been visibly superimposed on the others that preceded it. The tension that powers their music is not simply fright at man's helplessness before technology; it's the conflict between the modern and the ancient, between technology and tradition. Space is Floyd's way of resolving the conflict.
Of course, space doesn't offer any kind of real escape; Pink Floyd knows that. But spacing out is supposed to. (Spacing out has always been the idea behind space rock anyway.) Animals is Floyd's attempt to deal with the realization that spacing out isn't the answer either. There's no exit; you get high, you come down again. That's what Pink Floyd has done, with a thud.
~ Frank Rose (March 24, 1977)
TRACKS:
Written by Roger Waters, except noted.
Side one
1 Pigs on the Wing (Part 1) - 1:24
2 Dogs (Gilmour/Waters) – 17:01
Side two
1 Pigs (Three Different Ones) – 11:20
2 Sheep – 10:22
3 Pigs On The Wing (Part 2) – 1:24
