Willie Simpson

Animals by Pink Floyd is my absolute favorite Floyd album and one of my favorite albums ever.  For me, this is the highlight of Pink Floyd week as I get to share a live performance of “Pigs on a Wing 1″ as an intro to “Dogs,” my favorite Pink Floyd song.  Animals is Pink Floyd’s real masterpiece, with better songs then Dark Side of the Moon, and is way more thematically focused then The Wall.  Animals has 5 songs, with the intro “Pigs on a Wing 1,” being brought back at the end with slightly different lyrics, so its really 4 songs.  The record is mostly the work of Roger Waters, who at this point took full creative control of the band.  It’s a concept album loosely based on George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, mainly a railing against with the oppressive social-political of Great Britain.  The whole thing is a psychedelic progressive folk rock masterpiece.  It is also an angry finely manicured response to the emerging punk rock movement.  Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols famously wore an “I hate Pink Floyd,” t-shirt, and Roger Waters and company wanted to remind the punkers they too emerged from an underground movement determined to unmoor the uptight and conformist British hierarchy.  For “Dogs,” Waters wrote the lyrics, and Gilmour, in his only songwriting contribution to the record, wrote the music.  It was originally titled, “You’ve Got to Be Crazy,” and features some of Pink Floyd’s best lyrics and dynamic guitar solos.  It’s a piece of fantastic psychedelic dark funk, and demands worship.  So check out this live performance and go for the gold by sitting through the whole thing, its worth it.

Part 2 cannot be embedded, so just click this link to be taken to it on youtube.

Here is a clean recording of “Dogs,” but with no live footage.

This entry was posted on November 24, 2011 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Pink Floyd, Youtube Favs with tags 60s rock, 70s rock, Animal Farm, Animals, British Psychedelia, British Rock, Dark Side of the Moon, David Gilmour, Dogs, funk, George Orwell, Johnny Rotten, Nick Mason, Pigs on a Wing, Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd Live, Pink Floyd Performs Dogs, Pink Floyd performs Pigs on a Wing 1, Pink Floyd vs. the Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd Week, prog rock, Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Funk, psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock, punk rock, Richard Wright, Rock and Roll, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, The Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols vs. Pink Floyd, The Wall, willie simpson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.