Product Description

By 1977 England was in the throes of punk, a musical revolution that held hugely successful "dinosaur" rock groups in contempt. So ANIMALS, the album Pink Floyd released that year, found the band as musically stripped down as they'd ever been. The overabundance of soundscapes, ethereal synths and lush textures of the past gave way to a leaner, more guitar-driven Floyd.
Yet thematically, Waters and co. still reached for the sky. Inspired in part by George Orwell's classic novel, "Animal Farm", ANIMALS divides humans into three categories--dogs, pigs and sheep--and features each classification in song. The dogs are merciless opportunists, grasping for success at any price; the pigs are pathetic, self-righteous tyrants; and the sheep are the mindless followers, being used by the dogs and pigs. This anthropomorphising was Waters' view of the dehumanising side of capitalism. And befittingsuch a lofty theme was the length of the album's three mainpieces--none shorter than ten minutes.
"Dogs" was co-written by David Gilmour, and it features some of his most inspired playing. The greed driving these dogs towards grander heights of materialism eventually leads to a solitary death from cancer, cloaked in an air of self-importance. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" overflows with biting lyrics that scorn high-minded censors in general, and Mary Whitehouse (a self-appointed guardian of British pop music morality) specifically. The grunting of pigs preceedes Waters' venomous deliveryof each word, as Gilmour's scratchy playing and unsettling use of a Vocoder box become effective conduits for the song's malevolence.
"Sheep" starts out with the herd docilely grazing, blissfully unaware of the dogs lurking nearby. The sheep are led to the slaughter, before staging a revolt and killing off the dogs. The soundtrack of this defiance opens with Richard Wright's effect-free electric piano leading a galloping rhythm, before Waters' bass eases the group into a momentary lull. The pace picks up again, and Gilmour's slashing leads drive the song into a rousing climax, fading out with the peaceful sound of chirping birds.

Track Listing

1. Pigs On The Wing
2. Dogs
3. Pigs (Three Different Ones)
4. Sheep
5. Pigs On The Wing

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #732 in Music
• Released on: 1994-07-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Explicit Lyrics, Original recording remastered

Amazon.co.uk Review
Although not in the same vein as the deliciously hallucinogenic earlier Floyd works such as Ummagumma and Dark Side of the Moon, Animals is innovative and musically diverse in its own right. Inspired in part by George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm, Roger Waters condemns the avarice and inequalities of capitalism, metaphorically and musically grouping humans as pigs, dogs, and sheep. The pigs are self-righteous hypocrites inflicting their beliefs on everyone else, the dogs greedy money-grabbers, and the sheep witless followers. Dark, cynical, and brilliantly composed, Animals is an ingenious and under-acknowledged album. --Naomi Gesinger

Customer Reviews

ALBUM 3 IN THE SERIES OF THE GREAT ALBUMS FROM FLOYD
What more could you want. I read once that this was the end of all Floyd as we know it. How wrong can you get! As I'm writing this I'm listening to it, and believe me when I tell you this album does not disappoint. Ok, it might not be as good as Dark Side, Wish You Were Here or The Wall, but its in no way a bad record; and its on record where you really get the beauty of it. A cd is still good, but you don't have the raw-ness of the original format they released it to. Anyway the music: admittedly, looking at the lengths, dogs might be a little too long, and have an unnecessarily long bridge, but that's what Floyd are all about. Dogs just goes to show what a writing partnership of Gilmour/Waters can produce. And this being the only song on the album not written entirely by Waters, it also features less and less from keyboardist Rick Wright. He's still on the album, just with this album and The Wall, he became less involved. The open and closing folk rock ballads of Pigs On the Wing are really cool, and show just how good Waters was at writing. Side 2 features the best in guitar on the album for me, as we get that ace guitar solo from Gilmour at the end of Pigs (Three Different Ones), and we have that insanely cool Outro guitar riff on Sheep. Each of these songs end with fading out, and they end with some of Gilmour's best guitar work, and you wonder why they didn't make Pigs On The Wing one song and the end the album with either Sheep's ending guitar riff, or put Pigs (Three Different Ones) at the end, and have Gilmour's solo end the album, personally I think that would have made it perfect, and that really is the only let down of the album. Basically its 5 stars coz its got brilliant vocals/lyrics/guitar lines/bass lines/keyboards/drums. What more could you want.

Ha ha charade we still are.
In 1977 when Pink Floyd released Animals they were considered by the punk movement so prevalent at the time to be one of the so called dinosaurs bands that the spiky snotty denizens of anarchy land wanted to supplant . The irony is, that Animals was as angry, biter and spiteful as any punk album and being Floyd it,s made with a damm sight more intelligence than most of those.
Animals is a concept album-something that would earn it even more withering scorn from punks. Inspired by George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in that is uses animals as metaphors for social groups - where Orwell was denouncing communism , Floyd ,and in particular Roger Waters , are lambasting capitalism . The animals represent various caste,s in civilised society. Pigs are ruthless leaders, their snouts truffling in the trough, dogs are vicious amoral businessmen, while sheep are pliant followers- powerless and easily led.
Many of the songs for Animals were originally conceived at the same time as some of the material for "Wish You Were Here". The seventeen minute epic "Dogs" previously known as "You Gotta Be Crazy" and "Sheep" previously well known as "Raving And Drooling" are monumental pieces of music. "Dogs" is the one song on the album with a credit for David Gilmour and it,s accepted that this is the album where Roger Waters became the principle song-writer and where tensions within the band inexorably started to ratchet up.
The recording process for the album proved to be the last time that the band used their traditional approach of refining and adapting the songs live first before fleshing them out in the studio. From Animals on the band , or to be more accurate Waters. conceived the album then worked it out in the studio with some input from other band members.
The input from band members on Animals though minor in terms of song writing is vital in terms of sound . Rick Wrights keyboard playing is pivotal to the music's sense of disenchantment and misanthropic anger. The way the notes fizz in on the back of each Waters verse line in "Sheep" is phenomenal. The whole album seethes with indignant intensity. "Pigs (Three Different Kinds)" villifies the moral minority , attacking Mary Whitehouse directly -"You house-proud town mouse ha ha charade you are"- but also lays into power crazed politicians ( It,s a veiled attack on Thatcher) and mendacious business men."Dogs" is an especially bitter piece where the greed and materialism of the protagonist does,nt prevent him from the vagaries of fate -"All alone and dying of cancer". The guitar playing here is truly exceptional , the instrument seemingly lamenting the passing of old fashioned values. God knows what it would do today....probably explode in shower of incandescent sparks.
"Sheep" is driven by an fabulous galloping Waters bassline and has the trusting followers wandering into a "Valley Of steel" before they turn gleefully on the dogs to "March cheerfully out of obscurity into a dream". Congruously the album is book ended by two sweet brief acoustic numbers ."Pigs On The Wing" Pts 1 & 2 are love songs written by Waters for his then wife Caroline, and seems to be giving the message that in a world run by Pigs and Dogs love can conquer all in this case "Even a dog needs a home , shelter from pigs on the wing".
Animals like The Final Cut is an often ignored , sadly under rated Floyd album, though the number of reviewers who seem to agree with me is very heartening. I prefer this album to all their early albums and more than the album considered their classic -Dark Side Of The Moon , though that's great as well. It,s also , rather depressingly a more relevant album today than it was in 1977 after Thatcherism and New Labour. Market forces rule the world - the dogs and the pigs are more powerful than ever and as for the sheep. Ha ha charade we are

The BEST Pink Floyd Record
My liking of The Floyd started in 1989 with the Television Broadcast of the In Venice movie. Live, as it happened, and my brother recorded it on a old, battered VHS tape. On the dainty Long Play facility, so that now, some 15 years after, I've never been able to watch it or copy it since. For years, scraping by on pocket money, I never bothered with Animals or The Final Cut, reasoning that if The Floyddidn't play anything from it, it probably wasn't very good.

How wrong I was.

Animals is by no means an easy album : no collection of radio-friendly unit shifters here. But then again, genius is rarely easy either. Animals is undoubtedly the densest, darkest Floyd album there is.

For some, Animals has always been perceived, somewhat appropriately, the runt of the litter. : it was just another FloydCD box staring out of a rack (admittedly one that has a really cool picture on the front), another album where the songs never got played live or on the radio, and who wants 17 minute epics where you can sing to pretty songs like Wish You Were Here on the radio.

And I was one of those. It took me until 1999 to buy a copy of Animals. In the past few years it has been the Floyd album I return to the most, and for good reason. Even now I feel as if there is still more to be gained from listening to again - yet another layer of meaning to be unravelled from the complex lyrics and the inventive musicianships. And whilst some may say that Animals is the Floyd's simplest album, in terms of the bluntness of the lyrics, concept and music, one of the beauties of a democracy is that some have the right to be wrong.

Let us start with the cover.

Everyday, as I look out of my bedroom window, I see four white cannons reaching to the sky. I live in the shadow of perhaps the greatest symbol of human ambition, and human failure there is. The single largest piece of undeveloped inner-city real estate in the whole of Europe.

Battersea Power Station, now derelict, the ancient, rotting skeleton of the industrial revolution. On the cover to Animals, in its glory days, the station stands immobile, surrounded by trains, sheds, rail tracks. And a small, tiny pig hovering near one of the chimneys.

Mankind might create something of worth in this world. Man's ambition to conquer nature may prevail. But we're all Animals, even the ones that wear clothes. And pigs might fly.

Animals is the most under-rated Floyd album in their body of work. Whereas the albums around it, the immensely popular Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and the bloated The Wall, were all chock full of shorter, more palatable material, Animals, is a dense, difficult work, reprising the side-long 17 minute epics that characterised Meddle and Atom Heart Mother. There's little chance of ever hearing the splendour of the full version of "Dogs" on the radio, even if it weren't for the songs aggressively spiteful lyrics and barbed deconstruction of capitalism.

Lyrically and musically Animals is, unwittingly, very much a precursor to the punk revolution. At the time of its release Floyd looked to be just another dinosaur, another relic of the past that may very well be swept aside in the new wave. In some respects, the Floyd were everything that Punk was fighting against, and in the midst of this, they released their most obviously anti-establishment album : Animals is a damning indictment of capitalism, hypocrisy, and near enough everything and everybody.

Thematically, the album revolves around a sort of retelling of Orwell's Animal Farm, adrift as it is with Sheep and Dogs and Pigs (the three strata of society), and making clear the underlying themes of both texts : man is an animal who happens to wear shoes, and is as ruthless as any other animal in the wild. This theory is offset by Waters sweet love songs "Pigs On The Wing" - the one chink of light in a resolutely grey sky - which serve both as relief from the unremitting nihilism and to reinforce the darkness of the rest of the set.

Following "Pigs On The Wing", comes "Dogs" : the centre point of the album, and baring the emotional resonance of an album in itself. The song, which evolved from "You Gotta Be Crazy", premiered on the bands 1974 tour, was a long established staple of their live set by the time of release, and was the only Waters / Gilmour collaboration on the album. In fact "You Gotta Be Crazy" was probably the last time that the Floyd worked together as a cohesive unit, borne as it was from the same writing sessions that gave us "Wish You Were Here". But the song barely changed from its premiere performances to its final recording in January 1977.

As a whole, "Dogs" is a long, hard song. 17 minutes of Waters spewing bile about humanity : a dog-eat-dog world of hardnosed predatory capitalism, probably best espoused in this lyric:

"Everyone's expendable, and no one has a real friend And it seems to you the thing to do would be to isolate the winner Everything's done under the sun And you believe at heart everyone's a killer"

In "Dogs", human beings - that is the majority of the population who enforce the Status Quo are presented as not particularly clever or informed, slightly vicious, and generally ignorant and fearful. Everyone's scared of showing weakness and being exploited by other around them, and the general mood of the song is ruthless paranoia. But "Dogs" is also, in my mind, Pink Floyd best song. The song, constructed out of dozens of small parts, constantly shifts in style and stature from intimate to bombastic, and reveals a few excellent stylistic tricks : the bizarre moment where Waters vocals merge slowly and indistinguishably with an eerie synth line in the middle of the song is a moment that I still feel slightly uneasy listening to no matter how many times I listen to it. The other moment of unease in "Dogs" is the masterful work of Gilmour, who transforms his guitar tones to resemble those of barking dogs, and braying sheep through some wonderful playing and inventive use of effects pedals.

Side Two - for those of us ancient enough to remember vinyl records - commences with "Pigs (Three Different Ones)". In Orwell's Animal Farm, the Pigs are the FatCats, the leaders, the privileged elite who live in a world of luxury, and the three verses of "Three Different Ones" deconstruct three different types of `Pig'. The verses take respectively, a fatcat businessmen endlessly chasing profit, a powercrazed political leader (modelled on Margaret Thatcher), and finally, a very specific attack upon Mary Whitehouse. Probably the most provincial and local of the targets in Animals, Mary Whitehouse came to fame as a staunchly, overconservative campaigner for censorship of television and radio : the equivalent of a very grey, very wrinkled, very old Tipper Gore campaigning for "Parental Advisory" stickers on CD's. In their ways these three Pigs reinforce the Status Quo in different ways, being seen by Waters as equally problematic : The Pig of the first verse being the driver of big business, mercilessly exploiting anything and everything, the Pig of the second verse being the effectively-mindless reflexive politician chasing comfort and power, and the Pig of the third verse being that of repressed, scared, middle England who wants to live wilfully in ignorance. Musically, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is the least interesting song on the album, and one to which I still have difficulty remembering what the music goes like. That said, Thematically it works perfectly in establishing and cementing the concept of the album, despite being relatively slight musically.

The final major song on the album is "Sheep". "Sheep" is another epic, also premiered on the bands 1974 Winter Tour, which acts as the final closing point of this narrative : In "Sheep" (originally titled "Raving And Drooling", as we all know), the music is a harsh pounding assault, reminding one of being under hot pursuit by Dogs, and lyrically seems to tie up the loose ends of the other two songs. What are the "Sheep" though? In some respects the Sheep of the song are what a particularly patronising politician may call The People. That is, the generally ignorant working/middle class who know only what the television feeds them, believe what they are told, buy what they are told, and follow the leader, as indicated in this particularly telling couplet :

"Meek and obedient, you follow the leader Down well trodden corridors, into the valley of steel"

Further into the song, given the retelling of Psalm 23, acts as a warning. These sheep, We the People, are being lead to our slaughter by our own ignorance, like lambs in an abbatoir, it is only too late, when the truck enters the killing floor and the noise of sluices and grates is heard, that we realise, too late to act, that we are just meat fed into the grinder, like children being ground into sausages in The Wall. Following the ritual slaughter of the Sheep, and thus, the collapse of society in lyrical form caused by the untenable continuation of a rampant capitalist / consumerist society, there is nowhere else for "Sheep" to go. Mankind has amused itself to death. And Orwells vision has become flesh.

Following this, the final, swift reprise of "Pigs On The Wing". In one respect, this resurrects the initial hopeful conclusion, that somehow man can be saved from destruction through the healing power of love, but also provides sharp contrast to the sural and lyrical apocalypse around the album. It doesn't have to be like that, it says. Because someone can, and does care. And maybe, like John Lennon said, Love Is All You Need.

Animals is hard work : hard to sell, hard to digest, but my God, it rewards repeated listening. It's also easily the hardest of Floyd's albums in another, less obvious way. Where as every record before - and after - Animals uses rock and blues as a template, Animals sounds and roars like a hard rock album. Like a beast. Take, if you will, the duelling guitars, the pounding bass and seemingly relentless drums of the climax of "Sheep" - never, not even in "Run Like Hell", have Floyd sounded so aggressive, so uncompromising, so fierce.

Whereas each Floyd album rotates around a central theme or idea, Animals is the one that most clearly expresses that idea simply and clearly. Not for this album the convuluted, confusing plots of The Wall or The Final Cut, or the vagaries of Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here but a simple and clear statement : Animals is a rock reshaping of Orwell's Animal Farm, equating all human behaviour to that of Animals.

Animals though, far more than any other Floyd album, is the one for whom there is the deepest affinity. One could be flippant and says it allows an old nihilist like me to vent his absolute disgust with human nature to a pleasing and unchallenging blues-rock soundtrack. On the other hand, one could say that it's a dark and damning statement about human nature and capitalism. But ultimately, Animals is the Floyd album to which I return the most, for me, it is the most satisfying, most complete of Floydrecords, and also the one in which I feel The Floyd were working at the height of their powers. Then again, when you live in the shadow of Battersea Power Station and see it every day on the train to work, I would say that, wouldn't I?