Review: Pink Floyd — Animals (2018 Remix)
45 years later and Floyd’s underrated classic still speaks…
Given the momentous events that have just unfolded over the past fortnight you would be forgiven for missing the quiet release of a remix of Animals, Pink Floyd’s 1977 concept album, last Friday. So what, I hear you say… After all remixes seem to be a regular occurrence at the moment (see the upcoming Giles Martin helmed Revolver in October for example), and surely they’re only of interest to the most obsessive fans.
Well — it just so happens that through a trick of fate this version of Animals appears precisely when, to my mind, we need it most, and if you haven’t already appreciated the masterpiece that this album is then now is your chance!
As made plain by the title these James Guthrie mixes, in stereo and 5.1, were completed in 2018, but due to the famously dysfunctional relationship between Roger Waters and David Gilmour they have languished unheard until now. The problem was apparently a dispute over liner notes by Mark Blake which Gilmour had insisted be removed. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this, the resultant delays mean that the timing of this release has become eerily appropriate.
Anyone familiar with the circumstances of Animals initial release will appreciate the parallels. The album was originally recorded in summer 1976 (a famously hot summer, with record temperatures), and released in January 1977. This was famously the period of the rise of punk, with Never Mind the Bollocks…Here’s the Sex Pistols appearing in October that year. A musical revolution was unfolding, set to a backdrop of spiralling inflation and growing industrial action, and Animals was Pink Floyd’s response — one that has arguably lasted better than the shouting and stamping of punk.
Loosely inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) Waters takes aim at three types of people he despises, and relentlessly skewers them. There are ‘Dogs’ (ruthless businessmen and movers and shakers), ‘Pigs’ (power hungry leaders) and ‘Sheep’ (mindless followers). Gone were the lush textures of ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, the bands ode to Syd Barrett, now Floyd doubled down on the paranoia and anger of tracks like ‘Welcome to the Machine’. As such Animals is relentlessly dark, with layers of moody synth work supporting three extended musical work outs. Ironically the chief relief is Gilmour’s spellbinding guitar work which powerfully explodes with lacerating licks and solos — arguably his best work.
The 2018 remix brings the drums and bass forward, making the mix brighter and allowing for some fresh look at the interplay between the guitar and the synth/vocoder work. It sounds brilliant, though critics have observed that this doesn’t necessarily suit the grimy, moody aesthetic of the album. But then in fairness this is hinted at by the re-imagined cover, which takes the iconic Battersea Power station image and re-presents it. This is Animals re-presented and the lesson is it still has a tremendous capacity to startle, musically and lyrically.
Waters famously took aim at Margaret Thatcher, recently made leader of the Conservatives, in ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. “You radiate cold shafts of broken glass… you’re hot stuff with a hat pin…” This was two years before she became Prime Minster and unleashed precisely the sort of greed and individualism that Waters slams in ‘Dogs’. Both tracks are musical masterpieces — Dogs with its multiple crescendos and savage lyrics (‘a club tie, a firm handshake, a sudden look in the eye, and an easy smile’) and ‘Pigs’ with its sinister almost inverted disco lolloping, mirroring a pig walking on hind legs…
With the advent of a new Conservative leadership Roger Waters’s refrain (“ha.ha. charade you are — you’re nearly a laugh, you’re nearly a laugh but you’re really a cry”) rings as true as it did 45 years ago.
Crucially though, in a very Orwellian move, the presence of the bookend tracks (‘Pigs on the Wing’) with a soft acoustic guitar, and soothing lyrics (‘You know that I care for you’) suggests that not everyone in society is like this. Just as some have argued that the Newspeak appendix attached to Orwell’s later masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests the existence of a post-Big Brother society, these two short tracks suggest that some people can escape the trap of being a dog, a sheep or a pig.
Perhaps those who fall outside this tripartite paradigm are in fact the listeners to Animals, heeders of a pertinent warning from the past…
Now is never a better time to stick on this Floyd masterpiece and appreciate just how prophetic it is really is.
