Pink Floyd recorded "Animals" at their own studio, Britannia Row in Islington, between April 1976 and early 1977, and the whole enterprise had the texture of a band turning inward and sharpening its teeth at the same time. The album runs five tracks across 41 minutes, and the structural argument it makes is one of the most deliberate in rock: two short acoustic sketches, under 90 seconds each, bookend three long-form assaults that clock in at nearly 17, 11, and 10 minutes respectively. That architecture is the whole point. "Pigs on the Wing" parts one and two are love songs, plain and simple, written by Roger Waters for his then-new wife Carolyne Christie. Waters himself said that without them the album "would have just been a kind of scream of rage." He was not wrong, and he knew it, and he built the record so that you feel the rage first and understand the love as the only exit.
The three middle tracks borrow their framework from George Orwell's "Animal Farm," though the target is different. Where Orwell was writing about Stalinism, Waters aimed squarely at capitalism and the class structure of mid-1970s Britain, a country grinding through industrial disputes, political division, and the first tremors of what would become Thatcherism. "Dogs" maps the predatory strivers, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" goes after the despotic authority figures, and "Sheep" follows the compliant herd that eventually rises up, briefly, before the cycle resets. The sequence is not arbitrary. Dogs precede pigs in the social chain; sheep are last because they are the ones being acted upon. The record argues that this is the order of things, and it does not offer much hope except in those two quiet bookends.
"Dogs," which opens side one, is the longest and the most musically complex track on the record, co-written by David Gilmour, who also plays lead guitar throughout the album's three central pieces. Gilmour's guitar on "Dogs" is the emotional counterweight to Waters' vocal fury: the long, slow instrumental passage in the middle of the song, where the band drops into a synthesizer-driven drift before the riff reasserts itself, is one of the great pieces of controlled tension in the Floyd catalog. Richard Wright, who received no songwriting credit on "Animals" for the first time in the band's history, plays Hammond organ, ARP Solina string synthesizer, piano, Clavinet, and Minimoog across the three core tracks, and his keyboard work on "Sheep" in particular provides the song's unsettling undertow. Nick Mason handles drums and cowbell, and runs the tape effects and vocoder that give "Sheep" its eerie pastoral-gone-wrong quality. The band produced the album themselves, with engineer Brian Humphries, a previous Floyd collaborator, running the desk.
The album was made at Britannia Row, a converted church in Islington that the band had purchased and spent most of 1975 converting into a recording facility. It was the first Pink Floyd album made entirely in a studio they owned, which matters because the insularity of the record reflects the insularity of the circumstances. Waters was consolidating creative control, Gilmour's co-write on "Dogs" being the last significant shared songwriting credit before Waters effectively took the wheel for the rest of his tenure with the band. The two songs that became "Dogs" and "Sheep" had actually been performed live for years under different names: "You've Got to Be Crazy" and "Raving and Drooling," both originally considered for the 1975 album "Wish You Were Here." Waters reworked them to fit the new Orwellian concept and separated them with "Pigs (Three Different Ones)," the freshest composition on the record and the one with the sharpest satirical edge.
The cover photograph has its own story, and it is a good one. Waters conceived the image of an inflatable pig floating between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station, a building he drove past regularly from his home near Clapham Common. The band commissioned a 40-foot helium-filled balloon, built by the German company Ballon Fabrik with design input from Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw, and arranged a photo shoot for December 1976. On December 3rd, the marksman hired to shoot the balloon down if it escaped was not called back for the second day of the shoot. The pig broke free, rose to 30,000 feet, disrupted flights at Heathrow Airport, and eventually came down on a farm in Kent, where it frightened a herd of cows. The cover photograph is a composite: the dramatic cloudy sky from day one, the pig from a later session, assembled by Hipgnosis co-founder Aubrey Powell. The pig, named Algie by Waters, became a fixture of the In the Flesh Tour that launched the same day the album was released in the UK, January 21, 1977.
That tour is where the sequel begins. Playing to stadium crowds in the summer of 1977, Waters found himself increasingly alienated from the audiences he was performing for, a disconnection that reached its breaking point at the Montreal Olympic Stadium in July, when he spat at a fan in the front row. He later told producer Bob Ezrin about his sense of isolation, about wanting to build a wall between himself and the audience, and that conversation became the seed of the next album. "Animals" reached number two in the UK and number three in the US, certified quadruple platinum in America, and generated almost no singles: "Pigs on the Wing" came out only in France, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" only in Brazil. The band was not interested in the door-in. The record stands as five tracks that only make sense as a sequence, a structure in which the fury is real and the love is the frame that keeps it from consuming everything, including the listener.
