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.