Pink Floyd's Animals is 44 today

Today is the 44th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's Animals. This is one of my favorite Floyd albums and, to my taste, their best after Meddle. It's got the proggy twists and turns but also a drive - an anger and perhaps even a bit of menace that not only fits in with the punk ethos of the time, but also was something new for their music.

Most of the album actually dates back to 1974 as the band were trying to figure out how to follow-up Dark Side of the Moon. A short tour of France in June '74 saw the debut of a song called "Raving and Drooling" which the world would come to know as "Sheep" two and a half years later. (An early version of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was also performed on these dates.) Later that year Floyd toured England and "You've Got to Be Crazy", eventually to become "Dogs", joined the set.

For ages the only way to hear these early versions of the songs was via bootlegs. I'd heard them on recordings from the mid-November shows at Empire Pool (Wembley Arena) that, although taped from the audience, were of excellent quality. But in 2011 recordings of these songs were officially released by the band.

I really like "Raving and Drooling" with its persistent percussion and the soloing by Wright. It has a raw feel that harkens back to the pre-DSotM days and would certainly have been the black sheep of Wish You Were Here had it been included. On the other hand, "You've Got to Be Crazy" sounds like it would have fit on Wish You Were Here quite well. Less mayhem and anger plus the keyboards sound like other songs on that album.

In 2014, I believe it was, a bootleg started making the rounds called The Extraction Tapes, Vol. 1. Supposedly from Britannia Row Studios and recorded in June 1976, it contains in-progress versions of all the songs on Animals. (Also included are field recordings of sheep baaa-ing and some blues improvisation from their 6 July 1977 show in Montreal.) Sometimes a vocal is just a bit different than the album version while "Sheep" still has the lyrics from "Raving and Drooling" and some of the music which would later be excised. "Pigs on the Wing" hasn't been riven in twain yet and has an electric guitar solo, although I'm not sure if it's the same one that's on the 8 track version of the song.

To the best of my knowledge, Pink Floyd never played any songs from Animals after the In the Flesh tour of 1977. But Roger Waters has so here is "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" live from Milwaukee, WI on 29 July 2017.