Happy (American) Anniversary: Pink Floyd, Animals

38 years ago today, Pink Floyd’s Animals was released in America, at which point a number of UK Floyd fans no doubt point in the general direction of the US and roundly mocked their across-the-pond counterparts for having only just gotten their hands on an album that they’d owned since January 23.

Recorded at 35 Britannia Row in Islington, north London, in a former block of church halls the band converted into a recording studio and storage facility, Animals was an Orwellian concept album which examined members of social classes as if they were – as the title suggests – animals. (In case you’ve somehow never listened to the album, we’re talking about pigs, dogs, and sheep.) In addition, the members of Pink Floyd treated the album as a reaction to punk rock, since they’d been pointedly singled out as a target by Johnny Rotten, who turned a Floyd shirt into an angry statement against the musical enemy by scribbling the words “I Hate” above the band’s name. This turned out to be slightly ironic, as Nick Mason clearly had a fondness for punk, subsequently producing The Damned’s second album, Music for Pleasure, but, hey, it got the Sex Pistols’ fans riled up, and that’s what the gesture was all about, anyway.

Animals was a commercial success, to be sure, hitting #2 in the UK and #3 in the US, where it has since gone on to achieve quadruple-platinum status, but listening to it now, there’s no question that it was the album where Roger Waters very much took over as the creative force of the band. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you’re on Team Roger, but it’s definitely the album where Pink Floyd started to get a bit gloomy, and given that the band followed it with The Wall and The Final Cut, one could definitely say that it was the start of a trend.