Pink Floyd - Animals

Personnel:

David Gilmour: lead vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, talk box

Nick Mason: drums, percussion, tape effects

Roger Waters: lead vocals, harmony vocals, acoustic guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, tape effects

Richard Wright: Hammond organ, ARP string synthesiser, Fender Rhodes, Minimoog, Farfisa organ, piano, clavinet, EMS VCS 3, harmony vocals

Recorded at Britannia Row Studios, London, between April and December 1976

Produced by Pink Floyd

Engineered by Brian Humphries Label: Harvest (UK), Columbia (US)

Release date: 21 January 1977

Chart places: Holland: 1, Germany: 1, Italy: 1, New Zealand: 1, Spain: 1, Austria: 2, Norway: 2, UK: 2, Australia: 3, Sweden: 3, US: 3, Finland: 9

Tracks: 'Pigs On The Wing (Part One)', 'Dogs', 'Pigs (Three Different Kinds)', 'Sheep', 'Pigs On The Wing (Part Two)'

All tracks composed by Waters except Dogs by Waters/Gilmour

The Story So Far.

London architecture students Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright joined Sigma 6 in 1963 before changing the name to The Tea Set in 1964, rebranding themselves a year later as The Pink Floyd Sound after the addition of Syd Barrett. A performance at the Marquee Club in London interested economics lecturer Peter Jenner and business partner Andrew King, who became their managers.

Signed by EMI, their first singles, 'Arnold Layne' and 'See Emily Play', hit number 20 and number six in the UK singles chart, respectively (despite radio stations banning 'Arnold' over cross-dressing references), and their debut album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was a top-ten UK psychedelic hit. Concerns over Barrett's mental health resulted in the recruitment of Cambridge-born guitarist David Gilmour. Barrett was dumped in early 1968 before their second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets, which signalled a more space-rock direction. Subsequent singles failed to register, and the band went through a period of uncertain and patchy albums: More (1969), Ummagumma (1969) and Atom Heart Mother (1970). Meddle in 1971, with side-long epic 'Echoes', was critically well-received and commercially successful in the UK, Netherlands and Italy but failed to break the US. Obscured By Clouds (1972) was a patchy but interesting soundtrack album. Then, in 1973, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side Of The Moon, catapulting the band to megastar status. Wish You Were Here in 1975 was an inevitable disappointment in comparison, but still reached number one in the UK and US.

The Album

The punks were not the only ones to gob on their audience. Roger Waters did it in July 1977 at the Montreal Olympic Stadium on the final date of the In The Flesh tour. After weeks of playing cavernous arenas to stoned fans screaming for 'Money', Waters had become increasingly depressed and disillusioned. He was also unwell, suffering from stomach cramps from hepatitis, and relying on muscle relaxants to make him comfortably numb enough to get through the shows.

He was also highly irritated by some fans setting off fireworks, particularly through part two of the gentle acoustic number 'Pigs On The Wing'. 'Oh, for fuck's sake,' he exploded, 'stop all that fireworks and shouting and screaming! I'm trying to sing a song!' Then, incensed, it was said, by a fan at the front constantly demanding 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', Waters stepped forward and spat directly into his face. Other reports suggested the fan threw a beer bottle on stage.

Afterwards, Waters was disgusted with himself. 'Oh my God, what have I been reduced to?' he said. David Gilmour was also mortified and sat out the encore behind the sound desk. In the massive stadium, with the band just tiny stick figures on a distant stage to most of the audience, no-one noticed he wasn't there.

How had it all come to this for the Floyd, just a few years after their commercial and critical breakthrough? In many ways, The Dark Side Of The Moon had become a millstone around their necks. It had brought them fame and fortune, which sometimes can be as destructive to a band as penury and failure. They bought big houses, travelled separately to gigs, brought their bickering wives on tour and lost money in dodgy financial deals. The band were also under pressure to create equally successful follow-ups to The Dark Side Of The Moon, which most critics believe they never managed to do (although, as stated before, I rate Animals more highly). In fact, Pink Floyd always seemed on the verge of breaking up every time they went into a studio as their personal relationships began to deteriorate.

These days, Roger Waters likes to paint himself as the sole creative force in Pink Floyd and the rest of the band as lucky passengers just along for the ride. He told The Telegraph recently: 'They can't write songs, they've nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have, and that drives them crazy.' Of course, it wasn't true - Pink Floyd would have been nothing without David Gilmour's languid, lyrical guitar solos and distinctive vocals, Richard Wright's atmospheric, slightly jazzy keyboards and Nick Mason's gentle, laidback drumming. Every band member contributes something to the recording and performance of a song, no matter whose name is on the credits - including Gilmour, who wrote or co-wrote at least a third of the tracks officially issued when he and Waters were in the band together.

However, it is true that Waters had started to take creative control of the music, deciding the themes and concepts around which he would pen most of the songs, culminating, of course, in The Wall (1979) and its spin-off, The Final Cut (1983). The ego had landed. So, it was he who decided on the concept of Animals, loosely based on George Orwell's 1945 political fable Animal Farm, although with its anger directed towards capitalism rather than Stalinism (then again, all extremist 'isms' look the same in the end). It was Waters' increasing sense of isolation and frustration - and his bitter cynicism towards the record industry and, sometimes, the fans themselves - that brought a harder, darker, more aggressive mood to the music.

In his highly readable biography Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd, Nick Mason suggests the band may have been subconsciously influenced by the punk zeitgeist of the time. However, a look at the history of the songs on Animals doesn't quite bear this out. Two of the three main tracks were actually composed in early 1974 when punk was but a twinkle in Malcolm McLaren's eye, during writing sessions for the follow-up to The Dark Side Of The Moon.

The story of the band's struggle to create Wish You Were Here is for another book, but it impinges on our little tale because, among the many start-stop attempts to produce something that was as successful but nothing like Dark Side., there was a song called 'Raving And Drooling'. Based on an insistent, pounding bass rhythm not unlike the one that underpinned 'One Of These Days' on Meddle, it had Waters yelling out lines such as 'How does it feel to be empty and angry and spaced/Split up the middle between the illusion of safety in numbers/And the fist in your face'. It seems to be a song about a homicidal maniac, raving and drooling while he 'fell on his neck with a scream'. On the recording of the track's live debut in Paris on 24 June 1974, Waters does indeed scream, although it's more of a long, drawn-out howl of pain and anger, while Gilmour supplies vicious slabs of guitar chords and Mason beats the hell out of his drum kit.

There was a slower, slightly less manic instrumental section in the middle that once again harked back to the same device used in 'One Of These Days', with Gilmour playing piercing guitar licks that would be repeated on the final recorded version. Then, we gradually go back into the screaming, the raving and the drooling, followed by a fantastic descending chord sequence by Gilmour that also made it onto the vinyl record three years later.

It has been suggested that 'Raving And Drooling' was a reaction to the breakup of Waters' marriage to childhood sweetheart Judith Trim - although he admits it was HIS fault. Perhaps it was the feeling that the band themselves had become prey to the wolves of the record industry, feasting on Pink Floyd's success, and a reaction to the press accusations of a sellout following a misguided decision to take part in an advertising campaign with French drinks company Gini. Perhaps it was an attempt to recreate some of the more disturbing music they used to make earlier in their career. Or maybe it was a wider comment on the 'violent social disorder' of the 1970s, as suggested in the (eventually withdrawn) sleeve notes for the new 2021 Animals remix (although most of the 'disorder' referenced there occurred later in the decade).

Whatever the reason, 'Raving And Drooling' wasn't the only disturbing song to come out of Pink Floyd's 1974 jam...