Pink Floyd have announced Animals 50, celebrating their 1977 album with a new anniversary collection featuring multiple formats, including a deluxe box set.
Ahead of the January 22nd release, Pink Floyd have unveiled “Sheep (Original Radio Edit)” along with a visualizer for the track (stream below).
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“Sheep (Original Radio Edit)” trims the atmospherics that build up the track and carry its bridge, reducing it to a throbbing rocker reminiscent of the more uptempo material on The Dark Side of the Moon and presaging the more overt hard rock influence on The Wall, which was to come two years later.
Animals 50, available for pre-order via Amazon and the official Pink Floyd webstore, is next in the line of their 50th anniversary series following The Dark Side of the Moon 50th Anniversary and Wish You Were Here 50. It is set to feature rare and unheard music alongside unseen photographs documenting both the making of the album and the iconic photoshoot at Battersea Power Plant that eventually became its cover.
The 3-LP edition is set to contain the original 1977 mix, the 2018 remix, as well as an LP featuring five rare tracks including early versions of “Sheep” and “Dogs,” as well as an unheard Roger Waters track titled “Young Nicholas Jon.” The 5-CD edition contains the same material as the three LPs, plus a bootleg of the May 9th, 1977, show at Oakland Coliseum Arena recorded by then-19-year-old legendary bootlegger Reinhard Hohlwein, as well as a BluRay featuring all of the above plus a 5.1 and Atmos mix of the 2018 remix of Animals.
A deluxe box set also includes a 64-page hardback book with new sleeve notes from famed author Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Reinhard Hohlwein, as well as an excerpt from the memoir of Audrey “Po” Powell of the design firm Hipgnosis regarding the creation of the iconic cover art.
The reissue will also be available in a single-LP edition comprising the original album mix in orange and sandstone colored vinyl, as well as a double-LP and 2-CD set editions featuring the original album on one disc with rarities on the other.
Roger Waters said of the cover image, “I’d driven past Battersea Power Station every day going to and from my house in Clapham. I guess I just loved the building. I liked its symbolism that it’s a power station and that it belches smoke, so there’s something menacing about it. It’s got four phallic chimneys, and it looks like an upside down table. And there were four people in the band that had been turned upside down. It seemed like a really cool place for a pig to fly.”
David Gilmour said of Animals, “The mood in music was changing in ’77. Punk music was hitting everything and I suspect that had a little bit of an influence on the way we were working on the Animals album. I mean it’s quite an aggressive, stripped-back album. It was moving away from the sort of soundscapes that we had on Wish You Were Here. This album is more in your face and more rough and ready. And definitely the lyrics are a lot more aggressive from Roger. We had a lot of fun making it.”
Nick Mason added, “There were all sorts of differences beginning to surface within the band but in some ways Animals was a remarkably cohesive enterprise. The big thing was the development of Britannia Row. Britannia Row was this building we’d bought some few years before in which we’d actually started building our own recording studio. We tried to design the studio in such a way that any of us could operate it and all the trunking was labelled clearly so anyone could plug in a set of headphones without someone else having to do it for us.”
Animals was originally released on January 21st, 1977, and is routinely cited as one of the band’s best albums. It was third in a historic run of four albums beginning with 1974’s The Dark Side of the Moon and ending with 1979’s The Wall.
Meanwhile, a tour dubbed Roger Waters Presents LEGACY – A Pink Floyd Show,” led by the Pink Floyd legend’s son Harry Waters, will travel through North America in 2027. Get tickets here.
See the full tracklist of Animals 50 and watch the visualizer for “Sheep (Original Radio Edit)” below.
Animals 50 Cover:
Animals 50 Track List:
Disc One
01. Pigs on the Wing 1
02. Dogs
03. Pigs (Three Different Ones)
04. Sheep
05. Pigs on the Wing 2
Disc Two
01. Pigs on the Wing 1 (2018 Mix)
02. Dogs (2018 Mix)
03. Pigs (Three Different Ones) (2018 Mix)
04. Sheep (2018 Mix)
05. Pigs on the Wing 2 (2018 Mix)
Disc Three
01. Dogs (Early Version, Rough Mix)
02. Sheep (Original Radio Edit)
03. Sheep (Early Version, Rough Mix)
04. Studio Jam
05. Young Nicholas Jon
Disc Four
01. Sheep (Live)
02. Pigs on the Wing 1 (Live)
03. Dogs (Live)
04. Pigs on the Wing 2 (Live)
05. Pigs (Three Different Ones) (Live)
06. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5) (Live)
07. Welcome to the Machine (Live)
08. Have a Cigar (Live)
09. Wish You Were Here (Live)
10. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9) (Live)
11. Money (Live)
12. Us and Them (Live)
13. Careful with That Axe, Eugene (Live)
