This Creeping Malaise

In the long, hot summer of 1976, Pink Floyd were holed up in their brand new studio in Islington making what would become their 10th studio album, Animals. Ten years earlier, they had been the sound of the underground and soon began making their name on the London scene. Thanks to 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd had become the biggest underground band in the world. And, now, as the establishment themselves, they were old news. Britain was in the grip of industrial unrest and a drought that seemed to provide a metaphor for the lack of direction in the country. Far-right groups were stirring, punk rock was emanating from the children of those who’d welcomed Floyd a decade earlier. With one eye looking over his shoulder, Roger Waters wrote a Pink Floyd album that remains discrete within their catalogue even today. Released at a time when anything more than a three-minute, three-chord thrash was an early candidate for cancel culture, Animals stands as odd and as proud as those four thrusting chimneys on the cover.

Even today, for an album with such a well-known, iconic sleeve, comparatively few know the music within. Given that the group had already attained megastar status, it was a difficult album to promote, aside from the fact it was by Pink Floyd and they promoted themselves. With three pieces all over 10 minutes long, there was no track to take to radio. Even in the US, where singles had repeatedly been taken from albums, they knew the game was up, and had nothing to offer. Just how did a group that had the world at its feet come to make quite such a bitter, idiosyncratic record?

“I don’t think the humour of the work has ever really escaped in the way it might have.”