Pink Floyd: Animals at 50, bootleg and all

Animals is the Pink Floyd record with nothing soft in it. Four long songs, two short ones, no single, and a mix harsher and less layered than anything the band had released. Fifty years on it returns as a five-disc box on Sony Music, out 1/22: the original album, the 2018 remix, five rarities, and a double disc of the May 5, 1977 show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

The run it belongs to goes The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967, The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, Wish You Were Here in 1975, this, then The Wall in 1979. Animals comes in the stretch where Roger Waters took the band over. He wrote almost every song here alone; Dogs is the exception, co-written with David Gilmour. It is the first Pink Floyd album with no writing credit for Richard Wright. It reached number 2 in the UK and number 3 in the US, and quadruple platinum, between two records that outsold it. By then the band had spent most of 1975 turning a three-storey block of church halls at 35 Britannia Row in Islington into a studio, and in April 1976 they started recording in it.

Brian Humphries engineered, the band produced. Two songs they had already played live, Raving and Drooling and You've Got to Be Crazy, were rebuilt as Sheep and Dogs, with Pigs (Three Different Ones) written to sit between them. Gilmour has said the punk wave of 1977 pushed the sessions toward something rougher. Nick Mason has described Britannia Row as wired so any of the four could operate it, trunking labelled, headphones plugged in without asking. You can hear that decision on the record: fewer layers, harder edges.

Pigs on the Wing (Part One) opens at a minute and a half, and Part Two closes it at about the same length. Everything between them is long. Dogs runs past seventeen minutes, Pigs (Three Different Ones) past eleven, Sheep past ten. The words work one idea hard: mid-1970s Britain sorted into dogs, pigs and sheep, greed and hypocrisy and class, out of Orwell's Animal Farm and delivered with punk's bad mood. Waters's contempt drives it, Gilmour's guitar pushes back, and the friction between them is most of what the album sounds like.

Pigs on the Wing is the exception to the concept. Waters wrote it around his own life, and Carolyne Anne Christie, then married to the Grateful Dead's manager Rock Scully, is in it. Snowy White, brought in when the band discussed a second guitarist for touring, played a solo on it that was dropped from the vinyl and survived only on the 8-track cartridge. Dogs is Gilmour's co-write and his showcase, built out of You've Got to Be Crazy and handed to the guitar for minutes at a stretch. Sheep, once Raving and Drooling, is the ugliest run on the album. Pigs (Three Different Ones) puts its three targets in the title and then takes eleven minutes to say it.

The box earns its keep. Among the five rarities are unearthed versions of Sheep and Dogs, and Young Nicholas Jon, a Waters song that has not been released in any form before. The Oakland tape is the find, recorded by Reinhard Hohlwein, who was nineteen at the time, on the road behind the album. A four-and-a-half-minute radio edit of one of the long tracks, cut down from ten minutes, is streaming now and has never been sold before. The 64-page book carries a new piece by Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Hohlwein, and an excerpt from Audrey Powell's memoir about the cover, the inflatable pig set between two chimneys at Battersea Power Station.

This is for the listener who wants Wish You Were Here's argument more than its haze, and for anyone who thinks The Wall explains itself too much. Set it beside the punk records of its own year and it holds up better than its prog neighbours. Come for Dark Side melody and you get two short parts of Pigs on the Wing and a lot of guitar in between.

The cost is range. Wright's smaller role is audible in the thinner palette, and Sheep is where it shows: ten minutes pushing the same harshness with no keyboard arriving to change the light. The rarities lean on alternate passes at two songs instead of unheard material, and the two halves of Pigs on the Wing are gone before they land, sketches standing where songs should be. Four and a half, then. The record was already this good, and the box hands over the evidence: somewhere in California a nineteen-year-old with a tape machine made the best argument for it.

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