Rick was robbed nonetheless. His beautiful stereo panned "calm before the storm" Fender Rhodes work adds so much to the song, and makes the transition where the vocals kick in way more jarring and dramatic. The track would be something much less without it.
I think it's a mistake. Nothing on the hype sticker about the 1977 mix and AS are the only ones listing it this way.
You're probably right, but even the Sony Legacy page lists the SACD with the 77 mix included. Strange!
This reads as though each of them (both of them) are somehow equally to blame for their ongoing ‘spat’… as if their working battles weren’t more akin to something not entirely unlike asymmetric warfare. Do they both simply need to ‘forgive’ each other? Did both of them grow into people who became difficult or arguably ‘impossible’ to worth with collaboratively, as equals? I won’t take sides publicly here in this post — but do not think it’s simply a matter of two difficult people being like oil and water.
Exactly. Interpersonal relationships are often complicated. Better concentrate on music appreciation rather than trying to understand who’s who and who did what in the Floyd zoo.
How would they pack four separate mixes (3 stereo, one 5.1) on a single hybrid SACD? Maybe I don't understand the capacity limitations of the format...
I'm guessing that they are using the CD redbook layer to have tracks 1-5 be the new mix and the old mix as tracks 6-10 or vice versa. The SACD hybrid layer has 8.5 GB of Data so again they are doing 2 sets of tracks 1-5 (new and old) whether they can add a third group of 11-15 tracks to cover all the bases (SACD 5.1, SACD 2.0 x2 for new and old, I don't know but it might be possible. The SACD Hybrid layer does not have to be 5.1 it can be encoded to 2.0, 3.0 etc. SACD can play well beyond 80 minutes and is just limited to Gigabytes not time (there are a few SACD's out there that do play a very long time).
Sure, and I am often on the side of the songwriters in these situations. But, in this case, it's a unique intro not just a solo played over the song's chord changes. Unless a similar thing is on Roger's demo minus the Rhodes. Also, what about the middle bridge. These sound very much to me like sections that were developed by jamming, as opposed to individual parts created by each player. That's songwriting IMHO.
It's news to me too. People (consumers, musicians, record company) try to justify their consumerism and greed through this sort of logic that the sound is poor or even terrible. It really isn't. It's a bit like The Beatles on CD. You would have thought if you read comments on this forum that the 87 CD's were the worst thing ever prior to the remasters. Now there are members saying they were not so bad after all and better than the 'futzed with' or 'goosed' remasters.
I agree. Band can determine songwriting how the wish. U2, Van Halen, REM, and Queen in their later career wisely credited all band member with the writing process because I believe the correctly determined that what you are hearing on the album is the result of each band members contribution to the song, and that the song would not sound the way it does without it. And although some of those bands are no more, None of those band broke up due to disagreements over writing credits. Looking at the credits to Animals the only hint that the other band members did anything aside from Dogs is that it was ‘produced by Pink Floyd’.
Perhaps he looks more comfortable in this one? (from the ObC sessions, circa 1972) P.S. note: this is not Carin in the background. Just sayin'.
Anybody here anticipates more 'instant grat' previews of the 2018 remix, following Dogs? Or is it going to be us patiently waiting until Sep/Oct for the rest?
The trouble is they co-own a catalogue worth many millions and have different views on how to present it to the world. If they weren't putting out a steady stream of yet more re-issues year by year, they would probably get along better, or simply ignore each other.
Exactly. I was always a bit puzzled that there was such a fuss over the other band members' names not appearing on the cover of The Wall, because they don't appear on the covers of Animals and Wish You Were Here either.
One could say the same about the whole band, and their output. A handful of songs aside, Animals was IMO their last fully engaging or cohesive album. And lest we forget, most of it was written by 1974. That's a long time ago.
It is very logical indeed that if you did something, no matter how small for the album, your name would appear next to whatever little you did... Also if you are a band, something like "Pink Floyd are..." is not unreasonable to expect... The way things are credited indeed confirm that Roger believes the concept/idea is the only thing.... Wonder if Dave or Rick ever reminded Roger of Opera - pretty much always only the music composer name appears... and Roger is no Wagner to be able to do everything himself.... v
Here are a few excerpts from the "How Pink Floyd made Animals" Dec 2020 issue of PROG magazine, which is available to buy as an electronic Back Issue (PROG app available in the Apple App Store, among other e-places, for anyone interested). The sections below are from the main feature penned by Daryl Easlea. I'm mostly picking quotes by Brian Humphries. After the recording and touring of Wish You Were Here, 1976 marked a fresh start for the band - they had bought a property in Britannia Row, Islington, the previous year. The old Architectural Abdabs themselves, Waters and Mason, brought in architect Jon Corpe, their old friend from Regent Poly, to help them realise their dream of a purpose-built studio and, after some recordings by Robert Wyatt and Michael Mantler, Pink Floyd were ready to being work. Brian Humphries was employed by the group as their full-time engineer at the studio. He had first worked with them on More, and become their front of house sound man from the Wembley shows in 1974. He had also engineered Wish You Were Here. "I went and looked at it, but I did feel a bit "Do they know what they are getting into?" Humphries says. "They had got a friend of theirs who was an architect. I think he was bluffing his way through it because I don't think he knew anything about soundproofing, so I kept away. When they had finished touring, they all went on holiday, so of course I had to keep Britannia Row running because I was the only engineer there at the time." [...] The group worked from April to December. "All four of them would lay down the basic tracks," Humphries recalls. "It was basically more Roger, because upstairs they had a gaming room with a billiard table." Dogs [...] takes up the first side, and is one of the group's greatest performances. Gilmour's playing is unparalleled as he romps through a range of solos and refrains. It's almost as if Dogs shapeshifts every single time you hear it. After eight minutes, it fades away, Echoes-like, to a brooding instrumental section. But here, there are no spacey gulls, just barking, baying animals, complete with Humphries' performing as well. "I was doing the dog whistling," he laughs. "I used to bring Tina, my Golden Retriever into the studio with me, when it was overdubbing time and it wouldn't be that crowded." The way the barking dog becomes a vocoder during this section shows a band able to play around in the studio to come up with something unique. "That was Roger on the mixing console. Even back to the days of More, the band liked to be involved in the mixing." [...] "Roger and Nick wanted to listen to the 24-tracks," Humphries recalls. "In Dogs, there are some very heavy-duty drum things in the middle eight; that wasn't Nick, that was David. That's not a well-known fact. They asked me if I could find sound effects of dogs and sheep. I was letting them get on with the 24-tracks. Unbeknown to me, they wiped David's over-dubbed drums. I got hell to pay for that. It wasn't my fault; I was being asked to do something else, they were in control of the 24-track and the remote. So, David had to redo the drums: he wasn't a happy bunny." [...] [in Pigs 3DO] the music is a queasy funk: and the voice box used by Gilmour - a device so giddily paraded by Peter Frampton a year earlier, all shiny backlit locks - here was being used to make quite the most horrible noise you could possibly imagine. [...] Animals is often cited as the beginning of the schism between Rick Wright and Roger Waters. [...] "There was always the thing about Rick," Humphries adds. "It's been in print - Roger said he never pulled his weight; he never did anything. If you listen to the beginning of Sheep, that Fender Rhodes solo, that was just me and him in the studio. The lights went down, I did it on purpose, I said to him: 'Rick, just do your thing.' We had about four takes, and we used the first one that I told him was great. When I listen to the album today, I think back to that day and Rick. He was quiet - he put his four penn'orth in when needed, but I think Nick and Roger had already made their mind up, that he wasn't going to be around for the next album as such." [...] The former Raving and Drooling, recast as Sheep, is a fitting climax to the album. The sheep believe they are 'harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away', before realising things may not be as they seem. At the song's heart, there is a rewritten Psalm 23, run through a vocoder, intoned by Nick Mason. 'With bright knives he releaseth my soul, he maketh me to hang on hooks in high places, he converteth me to lamb cutlets.' The sheep had better mobilise. "I don't think the humour of the work has ever really escaped in the way it might have," Waters told Chris Salewicz in 1987. "The political subject matter on top of it has been generally dour. I suppose I have always appeared as a rather melancholy person. But I'm not. My situation is like the opposite of the cliché of the comedian who when he's not performing is a miserable sod."
The PROG magazine piece also features a (rare for him, I think) written eulogy by Steven Wilson. Animals and me by Steven Wilson Animals was the first record I ever spent my own money on. It would have been 1978 and I was 11 years old. I absolutely adore it. For me, it's Gilmour's party; the guitar work on the album is the greatest of all, which is saying something. It's an example of an album in the progressive rock tradition; long modular pieces with a sense of journey and narrative to them, but there's nothing about it that's stereotypically progressive rock. A sense of anger pervades. Pink Floyd's songs are deceptively simple. The musical vocabulary is accessible and straightforward. They didn't often work in clever time signatures and there's never anything particularly technical about what they're doing. The art and the genius was in the sense of storytelling that you get through listening to their music. Animals is a great example of that; the architecture of the songs is brilliant, even though the component parts are relatively simple. There's no great technique at work; no great complexity in the rhythms. There are some great production gags, like the dog barking through the vocoder or the way that the voice on Sheep becomes the synthesised note. Things like that made me want to be a producer. It wouldn't be overstating to say that Animals is responsible in many ways for the path that my career took. It made me understand the genius of creating an album; the idea of a record as a continuum, something you listen to, analogous with the way you watch a movie. It tells a story; you have scenes and those scenes can be emotionally very different. Progressive rock is one of the only forms of music where you can through all different emotions within a single piece: you hear it in Dogs, Pigs and Sheep. I think Animals stands alone within their catalogue and in the whole progressive genre. That whole middle section of Dogs, where it breaks down to the keyboard texture, it's the same chords from the other part of the song, but you wouldn't necessarily make that connection. It's amazing how simple the basic ideas are. For me, that's why Floyd are the most transcendent progressive rock groups of all; it's why they speak way beyond the realm of the genre; they speak to a whole audience that have no interest in the notion of progressive rock. Pink Floyd are always the exception, everyone likes Pink Floyd. I think it's because at their very heart they have very simple songs, without unnecessary complexity and I think that's given them a timeless quality. I think a lot of that beauty comes from that dynamic between Roger - a very simplistic songwriter, Tin Pan Alley G, C and D; always sounds good - David and Rick who come along to give it the complexity in terms of the sonic soundscaping and different chord inversions. They're an anomaly. you can analyse them all you like, but the music is magical." ------- Steven sums it up well, in that final paragraph, doesn't he? /
