Pink Floyd All the Songs

by Jean-Michel Guesdon

  A British society in total decline, plagued by social and race riots, teenagers burning their old idols… the changes were as brutal as they were radical.

  For Roger Waters, who refused to conform to the image of an artist shut away in his ivory tower, a criticism leveled at the giants of rock by the young punks, the moment had come to step up his commitment, to wage war against every form of conservatism, and even warn crowds of the possibility of an authoritarian regime being established in Britain, that global bastion of parliamentary democracy. This, broadly speaking, is the theme of what would become Pink Floyd’s tenth studio album. “I was always trying to push the band into more specific areas of subject matter, always trying to be more direct,”109 he commented in 1987.

  Album of the Animals

  Animals, then, is first and foremost Roger Waters’s work, the record with which he consolidated his influence and his authority over the other band members. “That was the first one I didn’t write anything for,” Rick Wright would say. “And it was the first album, for me, where the group was losing its unity as well. That’s when it was beginning where Roger wanted to do everything.”110 However, Wright also acknowledged that he did not have any new compositions to offer at the time. So Waters wrote all the lyrics for Animals, composed four of the five tracks—both parts of “Pigs On the Wing,” “Pigs,” and “Sheep”—and co-composed the fifth, “Dogs,” with David Gilmour. What’s more, for the first time he performed nearly all the lead vocals, with the exception of “Dogs,” which he sang as a duet with Gilmour.

  A conceptual work following on from The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, which deal respectively with madness and absence, Animals is not a straight adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945, unlike David Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs (1974), which is a kind of musical illustration of the novel 1984. Animals is a much looser adaptation. In his novel, Orwell delivers a hard-hitting satire on the Bolshevik revolution, then on the Stalinist regime, by describing how the animals seize control of a farm hitherto run by men (all the more genuine since he himself was a passionate socialist activist). The revolutionaries are the pigs, commanded by old Major, who is modeled on both Marx and Lenin, and by Napoleon, who bears a strong resemblance to Stalin, these two having ousted Snowball, who is none other than Trotsky. There are other animals—horses, donkeys, sheep, and cows—and of course men, like Mr. Jones and Mr. Frederick, modeled on Nicolas II and Hitler respectively. One line alone sums up Orwell’s masterpiece. It is one of the commandments laid down by the pigs: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

  Roger Waters borrows George Orwell’s anthropomorphic approach, not to criticize Marxism-Leninism, but to launch an all-out attack on capitalist society, which he holds responsible for all society’s ills—injustice, exploitation, inhibition, oppression. He espouses the theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (La Reproduction) in 1970, which proposes that it is a characteristic of ideology that it sets out obvious facts as obvious facts. Waters divides liberal society into three classes: the pigs, which represent the capitalists, the corrupt ruling class that owns the means of production and embodies social success; the dogs, symbols of the middle and lower middle classes, which aspire to one day advance to the next level up—the dog dreaming of becoming a pig, so to speak; then there are the sheep, naturally the most numerous group, the vast proletarian masses who have no choice but to obey the pigs and the dogs. David Gilmour would remain rather doubtful about his bandmate’s uncompromising view of society: “Animals I could see the truth of, though I don’t paint people as black as that,”9 he said.

  A Raw, No-Frills Brand of Rock

  The music on the album matches the seriousness of the subject matter from which Roger Waters drew his inspiration and reflects the anger he felt in the face of his social observations. The change in musical style compared to the previous albums is striking. The psychedelic flavor of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the symphonic epic style of Atom Heart Mother, the mind-blowing soundscapes of Meddle, the pop aestheticism and prog rock of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here: these different musical facets that propelled Pink Floyd to the pinnacle of the rock hierarchy have been dispensed with in favor of a raw, no-frills brand of rock. Could it be the influence of punk? A new interest in heavy metal? Perhaps. But more than that it is the expression of a sense of outrage at what Britain had become—and of a frustration stemming from the troubled state of his private life. “I think I played well but I remember feeling not very happy or creative, partly because of problems with my marriage,” Waters told a Mojo journalist in 1994. “It was the beginning of my writer’s block.”39 In the same magazine, David Gilmour stated that he himself was “the prime musical force” on Animals, whereas “Roger was the motivator and lyric writer.”39

  Although according to Nick Mason there was a better cohesion among the band members during the production of this new album, compared to the recording sessions for Wish You Were Here, there was also a growing sense of discord. Wright, who freely admitted to his own failings and his lack of involvement, for personal reasons, was critical of Waters’s rigidity and his increasingly relentless autocratic style: “I think Roger was deciding, ‘I’m gonna be the writer of Pink Floyd. I’m gonna write everything, and these guys are gonna be the musicians to play my stuff.’ If you’re thinking like that, you’re gonna reject things. It’s very sad that’s the way it happened.”72 Gilmour, too, felt frustrated at the way the credits were allocated. Toward the end of recording, Waters proposed an addition: “Pigs On the Wing,” a piece about three minutes long, which he decided to split in two and have it bookending the album. So in terms of royalties, he was adding two relatively short songs, and the royalties’ split was based on the number of titles, not on their length. Gilmour protested on the grounds that “Dogs,” the only song that he co-wrote but which is over seventeen minutes long, deserved to count for more than “Pigs On the Wing.” “This was the kind of issue that would later prove contentious,”5 Nick Mason commented.

  Success this Side of the Sun

  Pink Floyd’s tenth studio album was released in the United Kingdom (and in continental Europe) on January 21, 1977, and then in the United States on February 10. On February 12, Angus MacKinnon, writing in NME, called it: “One of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing, downright iconoclastic hunks of music this side of the sun.”61 Karl Dallas, in Melody Maker, preferred to play the offbeat humor card, declaring: “Perhaps they should rename themselves Punk Floyd.”111 Rolling Stone, meanwhile, highlighted how the London foursome’s music had evolved over time, and now had little in common with what they were playing in the good old days of the sixties (which reviewer Frank Rose thought was a shame): “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.”112

  Despite the reservations expressed by Rolling Stone and a number of other rock magazines, Animals made it to number 2 in the United Kingdom and number 3 in the United States. It even reached the number 1 spot in several countries, including France, West Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. In France, 800,000 copies were sold (200,000 more than in the United Kingdom!). David Gilmour later said that this record, from the outset, was aimed at a much narrower audience than their last two albums. “There’s not a lot of sweet, sing-along stuff on it! But I think it’s just as good, the quality is just as high.”9

  A mere two days after Animals came out, Pink Floyd set off on a long European tour, from January 23 to March 31 including West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. That was followed by the North American tour (called “In the Flesh”), from April 22 to May 12, and then from June 15 to July 6.

  The Sleeve: Algie in the Sky with Helium…

  For the sleeve artwork, Storm T
horgerson and Aubrey Powell initially came up with two highly provocative illustrations. The first showed a child (seen from behind) watching his parents engaged in sexual intercourse (“copulating… like animals,”1 as Thorgerson later put it). The second was a twisted version of an old British custom of hanging ceramic flying ducks on one’s wall: in place of decorative birds, the two iconic figures from the Hipgnosis studio imagined real ducks, bought from the butcher’s shop, nailed above a fireplace. These two proposals were immediately rejected by the four band members, and especially Roger Waters, who already had a very specific idea of what he wanted: Battersea Power Station, a power station built on the banks of the River Thames in the 1930s, already partially decommissioned at that time. “I like the four phallic towers,”53 he said. For the songwriter, these four highly symbolic towers were synonymous with power and domination. He added later on that they also reminded him of a tortoise lying on its back with its four legs in the air, unable to move, and at everyone’s mercy. According to Mason, the idea simply came to him as he passed the power station each day on his way to the studios.

  Waters took his concept one step further: he imagined having a balloon in the shape of a pig flying above the power station as a “symbol of hope,”1 as he later called it, in the sense that the kindly pig would appear to observe from a great height—and hence with detachment—the contradictions of the modern world, of capitalist society. So he asked the company ERG in Amsterdam to design an inflatable pig 30 feet long and 20 feet high, with the idea of shooting some cover images that would stick in people’s minds. It was a German company, Ballon Fabrik, that was commissioned to make the pig, which very soon acquired the nickname Algie. Apparently, according to Nick Mason, this firm “had learnt their craft constructing the original Zeppelins!”5

  The shooting turned out to be a lot more complex than anticipated, and did not go entirely smoothly. “Po and I had organised a veritable army of photographers (at least eleven of them),” Storm Thorgerson explained, “and had deployed them at key positions round the power station, covering nearly every conceivable angle, including the roof.”80 On the first day various technical problems prevented the balloon from being fully inflated. The following day poor Algie broke free due to a strong gust of wind and disappeared into the sky, where he sailed up to an altitude of 30,000 feet. Panic ensued! All flights at Heathrow Airport had to be canceled for several hours, and the inflatable was eventually recovered after it came down in a field near Godmersham in Kent. Pink Floyd’s roadies were dispatched to collect it and brought it straight back to London. The third day brought a different problem: the cloudless blue sky over the Thames was not the backdrop Waters had in mind. So the decision was taken to get around this problem by superimposing images from the third day (the inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station) onto images from the first day (cloudy sky).

  Recording at Britannia Row

  Animals was recorded between April and December 1976, not at the Abbey Road studios this time, but at Pink Floyd’s own studio at 35 Britannia Row, Islington, North London. The three-story building bought by the band in 1975 was a former chapel that they converted for use as warehouses for their tour equipment (PA system, light shows), offices (with a billiards room) and, in particular, a fully-fledged recording studio (one that could bear comparison with the Abbey Road studio). So after the release of Wish You Were Here, Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason had new premises at their disposal. They acquired state-of-the-art equipment and decided, having learned from their own experience, to make it intelligible to all who wished to use it. All the machines came with simple instructions in terminology accessible to anyone. No need now to spend hours searching for a headphone socket, as Nick Mason put it. The job of designing the studio went to Jon Corpe, a former friend from London Polytechnic on Regent Street. The design was quite stark: the control room was fairly cramped and not that inviting. The structure had been built from cinder blocks made of Lignacite, a composite of sawdust, sand, and cement that is less reflective than brick. When he saw the final result, Roger Waters apparently exclaimed: “It looks like a fucking prison.” Adding, “That’s appropriate, I suppose…”5

  There were multiple reasons for this move. Firstly there was the contract with EMI, which stipulated reduced percentages in exchange for unlimited time in their studios. Then there was the fact that the band wanted to own its own premises where it could record without time constraints, in the same way as artists like Pete Townsend or the Kinks. There were also personnel considerations, as Robbie Williams, one of the members of the management team, explained: “Brit Row was really started to give a reason to not fire the crew.”25 After all, Pink Floyd was an organization that employed a considerable number of people. Up until 1975 the band had toured for around nine months of the year. From now on it would be six months every two years. So Britannia Row was, to a certain extent, a way of making up for this lack of activity. The group was also hoping to turn this complex into a flourishing stage equipment company, whereby they would rent out their own equipment, which had been extremely expensive, allowing them to recoup the cost. But the project was not profitable, and the band members all ended up selling their shares, before Brian Grant and Robbie Williams took over the business in 1986 and made a success of it.

  The sound engineer on the album—and in the studio—was Brian Humphries, who had already been heavily involved in the recording sessions for Wish You Were Here. But relations between him and the Floyd were becoming strained. It seems that Humphries found it hard to deal with the cramped confines of Britannia Row and the pressure of touring. Moreover his political opinions clashed with the band’s more center-left stance, and he tended to express his views openly in Roger Waters’s presence, which only added to the awkward atmosphere. This would be the last studio album he would record with them. Nick Griffiths assumed the role of assistant sound engineer, but only toward the end of the sessions. A former BBC engineer, he would continue his collaboration with the band, working on The Wall, especially, but also on Gilmour’s and Waters’s solo albums.

  When the band assembled at Britannia Row, Roger Waters had not yet decided on the concept for the album. The group started by reworking two songs they had composed nearly two years earlier during rehearsals in King’s Cross in January 1974: “Raving and Drooling,” which was to become the song “Sheep”; and “You’ve Gotta Be Crazy,” which ended up as “Dogs”1; as well as a recent Waters composition entitled “Pigs On the Wing,” which he presented to the band toward the end of the recording sessions, and which, in the end, he decided to split in two. The recording of Animals left Nick Mason with better memories than that of Wish You Were Here. Rick Wright was happy with the quality of his keyboard playing, despite the feeling of having been excluded from the creative process by Roger Waters and the fact, he eventually admitted, that he “didn’t really like a lot of the music on the album.”25

  This time there were no outside musicians involved in the sessions. The sax parts by Dick Parry and the backing vocals by the fantastic backing singers, which had lit up the last two opuses, would not be making a return. However, a new guitarist was recruited to assist David Gilmour in their concerts, which were increasingly turning into mammoth events. This was Terence “Snowy” White, a talented musician who would tour with the Floyd until the eighties before joining Thin Lizzy. He went on to work on Richard Wright’s Wet Dream album in 1978, and accompanied Roger Waters on numerous solo tours.

  Technical Details

  The recording equipment at Britannia Row marked a break from what they had been used to at Abbey Road. No more EMI or Neve consoles or Studer tape recorders. The band decided to go with an MCI JH-440 custom console (with equalization specifically requested by Roger Waters), an MCI twenty-four-track tape recorder (with DBX N/Rs), but also a four-track and a two-track (again MCI), three Revoxes (presumably A77s), a Nakamichi cassette recorder (1000 or 700), together with UREI 1176 compressors, Lexicon 102 digital delays (coupled together)
, Eventide H910 harmonizers, and four powerful JBL 4350 speaker cabinets. It seems the decision to opt for an MCI console instead of a Neve was prompted by a lack of funds at the time, since firstly the band had made some bad investments, and secondly it was still waiting to collect its royalties from The Dark Side of the Moon.

  The Instruments

  Roger Waters still played his Fender Precision basses, particularly the black one, having replaced its white pickguard with a black one as Gilmour had done on his “Black Strat.” For the first time he also used an Ovation Legend acoustic guitar, just like Gilmour, incidentally. The latter still favored his “Black Strat” fitted with DiMarzio pickups. He also used a Heil Sound Talk Box from Dunlop, and probably the guitar effects pedal board made by Pete Cornish (which enabled all the effects pedals to be brought together in one place with one central connection) with, among other things, a Big Muff V2 “Ram’s Head.” Although this pedal board proved useful in concerts, it was less so in the studio. Gilmour also recorded with a 1959 Fender Custom Telecaster, plugged in to a Hiwatt DR-103 amp and a Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker (similar to a Leslie cabinet). Rick Wright, meanwhile, continued to add new instruments to his keyboard collection, including a Hammond B-3 organ and a Yamaha C7 grand piano. There was one synthesizer that particularly made its mark: the vocoder. This piece of equipment, generally used for voice, allows you to achieve a robotic effect. The model the band used may have been the Korg VC-10 vocoder or the EMS Synthi Vocoder 5000, although various people have claimed that there was a Korg at the sessions, despite the fact that these weren’t produced until a later date (1978). Could this have been a prototype?