I’ve always loved Pink Floyd. I’m not ashamed to say that. Some people look down their noses at them for being too hippy, too proggy, too out of touch, too intricate. Perhaps I’m all of those things too, but they hold a memory for me. I connect with a time and a place and a feeling, and that can never be taken away.
I had two elder brothers when I was growing up, and they both loved Pink Floyd. They had grown up with Syd Barrett’s Floyd, whereas I was only born in the year that Meddle came out – 1971, after Barrett had already left the band.
My brothers both had expensive Sony separates stereo systems. They had a lot of vinyl records and tapes, and as a child I loved nothing more than lying on my back on the carpet between the speakers, listening to the heartbeat at the start of Breathe or marvelling at the gatefold E.L.O. Led Zeppelin or War of the Worlds albums.
Before my parents split and our happy home finally disbanded, I stole a tape from one of my brothers. It was a cassette of Meddle – Pink Floyd’s 1971 masterpiece. An album which has since been with me every step of my life. From long weekends working in the woodshop at school to the trips with my own family to the South of France in the car, listening to the dreamy track of that illicit destination, St Tropez.
In the eighties I learned to love The Wall. It was bleak, angry and everything a teenager growing up in a boring backwater needs. It speaks of emptiness and nothingness, but also a scintilla of hope. Something in there.
Floyd had a sound that spanned decades but kept its shape. Somehow I dismissed Animals during all of that time. I wrote it off as not serious, not elegiac like Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here and not angry like The Wall or The Final Cut. But it turns out that Animals is the link between early 70s Floyd and the Waters era.
Animals links the farewell to the powerful vision of four musicians and the start of a takeover. It marks the start of Roger Waters’ influence over everything the band did, until he ultimately destroyed it.
Pink Floyd ceased to exist as a going creative concern after The Wall. Waters sacked Wright, yet you can still hear his ghost on The Final Cut in the form of hired musicians doing an impression. By then, everyone had run their race and they knew it.
I remember buying my brother A Momentary Lapse of Reason. He enjoyed it as a bridge to the past, but honestly, aside from Learning to Fly and a preview of Dave Gilmour’s future work, there’s not much to recommend to a Floyd fan.
And so, as I discovered just the other day, Floyd essentially started to die after Animals. If you need proof, then read the fascinating Wikipedia entry for the album. I’ve included a few relevant sections below.
Loosely based on George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm, the album’s lyrics describe various classes in society as different kinds of animals: the predatory dogs, the despotic ruthless pigs, and the “mindless and unquestioning” herd of sheep. Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs. The album was developed from a collection of unrelated songs into a concept which, in the words of author Glenn Povey, “described the apparent social and moral decay of society, likening the human condition to that of mere animals”.
Animals, both as an album and as the tour that accompanied it, sends shockwaves both backwards and forward through Pink Floyd’s existence. It’s a moment of reckoning for the band members as much as for the music.
In July 1977 – on the final date at the Montreal Olympic Stadium – a small group of noisy and excited fans in the front row of the audience irritated Waters to such an extent that he spat at one of them, which he later said he immediately regretted. Gilmour also felt depressed about playing to such large audiences, and refused to join his bandmates for their third encore. Waters later spoke with the producer Bob Ezrin and told him of his sense of alienation on the tour, and how he sometimes felt like building a wall to separate himself from the audience. The incident formed the concept for the next Pink Floyd album, The Wall.
It’s ironic, of course, that Roger Waters’ increasing estrangement and alienation came to a head during those tours, launching him on a path that would rip the band apart. All of this echoed in earlier work, like lyrics in Time from Dark Side of the Moon:
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you, no-one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
Time, Dark Side of the Moon
And in Dogs from Animals:
Just another, sad old man, all alone dying of cancer.
The fear of the future. The fear of being alone. The fear of being on stage. The fear of losing family, losing touch, losing everything.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And it’s too late to lose the weight you weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown as you go down, all alone.
Dogs, Animals
We strike out in anger at the unfairness of what’s happening to us. The rest of Animals is angry. Very angry.
Waters is still angry. Gilmour, I guess, is still sublime. Nick Mason is still with us, but sadly Richard Wright is not, and neither is Barrett. I wonder if we’ll ever see the remaining members of 70s Pink Floyd make up?
I’m not the first to ask this question, and I probably won’t be the last, but I’m at least glad I can enjoy the work they put together during their collaboration. And perhaps a band having an arc – a beginning, a middle and an end is the natural way of things. It gives fans the chance to discuss, reminisce and enjoy things that only occur once.
As punters, we’re constantly tempted by promoters like Live Nation and Ticketmaster to pay inflated prices to see bands over and over on their endless tours. They play the same songs to packed stadiums and venues around the world. So perhaps we should ask ourselves: who are the real sheep?