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Everything's done under the sun

A Defence of Animals

by Mark Reed

My liking of the Floyd started in 1989 with the television broadcast of the In Venice concert film. 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 Floyd didn'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 Floyd CD box staring out of a rack (admittedly one that has a really cool picture on the front). Just another album where the songs never got played live or on the radio. And who wants 17-minute epics when 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 five 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 musicianship. 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.

Battersea Power Station sits essentially abandoned.

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 of 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 underrated 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 song's 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 might very well have been 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 nearly 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, which symbolize the three strata of society. The characterizations make clear the underlying theme 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 two-part love song "Pigs on the Wing"--the one glimpse of light in a resolutely grey sky--which both serves as relief from the unremitting nihilism and reinforces the darkness of the rest of the set.

Following "Pigs On The Wing" comes "Dogs": the centerpiece of the album, and bearing the emotional resonance of an album in itself. The song, which evolved from "You Gotta Be Crazy", premiered on the band's

1974 tour, It was an 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. Seventeen minutes of Waters' spewing bile about humanity: a dog-eat-dog world of hard-nosed 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", humans--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 others around them, and the general mood of the song is one of ruthless paranoia. But "Dogs" is also, in my mind, Pink Floyd's best song. Constructed out of dozens of small parts, the song constantly shifts in style and structure from intimate to bombastic. It also has some studio wizardry, such as the bizarre moment where Waters' vocals merge slowly and indistinguishably with an eerie synth line in the middle of the song. It is a moment that still makes me feel slightly uneasy, 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 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 fat-cats, the leaders, the privileged elite who live in a world of luxury, and the three verses of "Three Different Ones" decontruct three different types of pig. The verses describe a fat-cat businessmen endlessly chasing profit, a power-crazed political leader (modelled on Margaret Thatcher), and finally, a very specific attack upon Mary Whitehouse. The most regional of the targets in Animals, Whitehouse came to fame as a staunchly ultra-conservative 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 CDs.

The three pigs reinforce the status quo in different ways, but Waters portrays them as being equally problematic. The pig of the first verse is the driver of big business, mercilessly exploiting anything and everything. The second pig is the essentially-mindless, reflexive politician chasing comfort and power. The third pig represents the repressed, scared, middle England who wants to live willfully in ignorance.

From a purely musical perspective, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is the least interesting song on the album. But thematically it works perfectly in establishing and cementing the concept of the album, despite being relatively slight musically.

The final major song is "Sheep", another epic that premiered on tour in 1974. In the context of Animals, it serves as the final closing point of this narrative. The music is a harsh, pounding assault, reminding one of being under hot pursuit by dogs. Lyrically, it seems to tie up the loose ends of the other two songs. But who are the sheep? In some respects, the sheep are what a particularly patronising politician might call 'The People'--the generally ignorant, working/middle class types who know only what the television feeds them, who 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, 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 abattoir. 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 (and thus, the collapse of society 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 Orwell's vision has become flesh.

Following this is 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. Yet it also provides sharp contrast to the album's lyrical apocalypse. 'It doesn't have to be this way', the song seems to say, '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 it rewards repeated listening. It is also easily the hardest of Floyd's albums in another, less obvious way. Whereas every record before--and since--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 dueling guitars, 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. Instead, there is 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 say 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 Floyd records, and also the one in which I feel the Floyd were working at the height of their powers.

Then again, living in the shadow of Battersea Power Station and seeing it every day on the train to work, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Mark Reed is a staff writer for Spare Bricks.

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