Animals is the Pink Floyd album that stalks you rather than hugs you. Five tracks, three of them epics, and almost no trace of the cosmic comfort that made The Dark Side of the Moon a household staple.
By 1977 the band had turned into a battleground disguised as a quartet. Animals was conceived almost entirely by bassist Roger Waters as a brutal update of Animal Farm, attacking capitalism by casting businessmen as “Dogs”, authoritarian leaders as “Pigs” and the passive public as “Sheep”, with only “Dogs” carrying a shared music credit for David Gilmour. In later retrospective accounts of the album, Gilmour admits that while he loves the album’s exciting, noisy energy and sound effects, he does not consider it one of Pink Floyd’s true creative high points.
How Animals Marked Roger Waters’ Takeover
Everything about Animals signals that Waters had taken command of Pink Floyd’s steering wheel. Writers now talk about an “architects versus musicians” split inside the band, with Waters and drummer Nick Mason obsessed with structure and concept while Gilmour and Richard Wright focused on feel, melody and harmony.
On Animals that imbalance became stark. Waters wrote all the lyrics and the music for four of the five songs, while Wright did not receive a single writing credit and later admitted he felt frozen out. The band no longer sounded like four equal voices colliding; it sounded like one man’s worldview delivered through three increasingly frustrated virtuosos.
That tension is baked into the music. Waters’ lyrics are some of the most venomous of his career, dismissing high finance sharks and moral crusaders, while Gilmour answers with some of the most aggressive, distorted tones he ever recorded. The chemistry still works, but you can hear the democracy dying in real time.
Gilmour In His Own Words: Proud Of The Sound, Wary Of The Album
Gilmour’s later description of the Animals sessions is a masterclass in understatement. He has said it was not one of Pink Floyd’s most productive periods, that two older pieces were reworked rather than freshly written, and that although he loves the record’s exciting, noisy atmosphere, he does not rank it among their creative high points. Coming from a musician usually generous about past work, that sounds a lot like a backhanded compliment.
Stack that up against how he talks about Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here, which he tends to praise without reservation, and a pattern appears. As a guitarist and singer, Gilmour is clearly proud of what he did on Animals. As a co author of Pink Floyd’s legacy, he is far less convinced by the album’s overall direction.
| Album | Gilmour’s role | Later attitude |
|---|---|---|
| The Dark Side of the Moon | Co architect of the music, defining guitar voice | Spoken of as a career defining masterpiece. |
| Wish You Were Here | Co writer, arranger and emotional centre on guitar and vocals | Often described as an album he can live with very happily. |
| Animals | Primary guitarist, co writer and lead vocal only on “Dogs” | Exciting and fun, but “not one of our creative high points”. |
He has also been candid about how hard Animals could be on a purely physical level. Talking about the song “Dogs” in its earlier incarnation, “You Gotta Be Crazy”, Gilmour recalled that Waters’ first draft had so many words he physically could not squeeze them into the vocal line, so the band hacked out roughly two thirds of the lyric just to make it singable, as he explained when discussing the Pink Floyd song he had trouble singing.
That is more than a funny studio anecdote. It hints at Gilmour’s discomfort with Waters’ growing habit of delivering long, densely packed tirades, a world away from the spacious, mantra like lines of “Breathe” or “Us and Them” where his voice could float instead of wrestle.
Waters’ Politics vs Gilmour’s Guitar
Critics and fans have long noticed the split in how the band members relate to Animals. One anniversary essay neatly summarised it as the album Richard Wright hates, David Gilmour equivocates over and Roger Waters passionately advocates, before dubbing “Dogs” Gilmour’s performative peak as a singer and guitarist in its 45th anniversary retrospective.
Listen to “Dogs” and that assessment is hard to argue with. Over seventeen minutes he shifts from icy clean arpeggios to howling bends and squealing harmonics, building solos that feel like a man clawing his way out of the very corporate machine Waters is condemning. It is some of the fiercest guitar work of the entire prog era.
Yet the emotional engine of the album is Waters’ fury, not Gilmour’s melancholy. The lyrics treat financiers, politicians and passive citizens as different species in a food chain, and the music rarely offers the catharsis that makes Dark Side so replayable. For a guitarist whose natural gift is bittersweet melody, that relentless sneer can feel like enemy territory.
Waters, on the other hand, has leaned into Animals as a political weapon. On his Us + Them tour he placed “Dogs” and “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” at the heart of the second set, complete with giant flying pig and pointed visuals aimed at contemporary leaders, turning those songs into ten minute televised editorials.
Gilmour’s solo tours have tended to foreground material from Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and The Wall instead. The contrast is telling. The man who wrote most of the lyrics still sees Animals as brutally relevant agitprop. The man whose guitar turned that agitprop into thunder mostly remembers how good the band sounded doing it.
From Animals To The Wall: When The Audience Became The Enemy
The Animals era did not just sour relationships inside the band. It poisoned the bond with their own audience. On the In the Flesh tour, Waters grew increasingly hostile toward what he saw as drunken stadium crowds who were more interested in partying than in listening.
At Montreal’s Olympic Stadium in July 1977, that frustration exploded when he leaned down from the stage and spat at a fan trying to climb the barrier. Waters later described feeling instant disgust at himself, and that single, ugly act became the seed of The Wall’s whole concept of a barrier between performer and crowd, as detailed in accounts of the infamous spitting incident.
If Animals is the sound of Waters turning his rage outward at society, The Wall is that rage turned inward. For Gilmour, who has said little publicly about the spitting incident, the episode underlined how far Pink Floyd had drifted from the exploratory camaraderie of the early 70s into something harsher and more hierarchical.
Divorce In The 80s: The Long Echo Of Animals
Only a few years after Animals and The Wall, Waters walked out of Pink Floyd altogether. Convinced the band was a “spent force creatively”, he went to court in the mid 80s to stop Gilmour and Mason from using the name Pink Floyd, a move he later admitted on BBC television was wrong and driven by commercial thinking rather than art, saying simply, “I was wrong to sue the rest of Pink Floyd.”
Gilmour fought back, kept the name and went on to release a trio of successful post Waters albums, but the lawsuit turned private resentment into permanent public war. When you listen to Animals today, you can hear the prototype of that conflict. Waters is already acting as if the concepts are his alone. Gilmour is already being pushed toward the role of glorified session player even as he delivers solos that define the record.
Seen that way, Animals is not just another 70s classic. It is the document of a band tearing itself into factions, with the arguments about credit and ownership baked into every bar of music. That is part of why Gilmour’s praise for his guitar work comes wrapped in such cool language about the album as a whole.
The 2018 Remix: Old Album, Fresh Feud
Even the recent Animals 2018 Remix could not escape this tug of war. Roger Waters publicly claimed that David Gilmour had vetoed journalist Mark Blake’s liner notes because they laid out Waters’ central role in conceiving the album, alleging this in a post where he shared the disputed liner notes.
The new stereo and 5.1 mixes, completed in 2018 but held back for several years while the argument rumbled on, finally surfaced with updated cover art and a photo heavy booklet, but without Blake’s disputed essay. Coverage of the reissue highlighted how the clearer mix lets listeners pick apart just how much Gilmour, Wright and Mason still bring to a project driven by one man’s words, while noting that Waters wrote four of the five songs outright, with only “Dogs” credited jointly.
In other words, the remix brought sharper definition to the music while the feud over credits made the power dynamics even more obvious. Decades later, Animals still burns so hot that its authors cannot agree on how to describe what happened.
Why Animals Remains Gilmour’s Most Controversial Triumph
If The Dark Side of the Moon is the Pink Floyd record everyone can agree on, Animals is the one where the genius comes with teeth. It is the album where Waters’ contempt for modern society and Gilmour’s soaring musicality collide without compromise.
Gilmour’s mixed feelings make a certain sense. As a guitarist and singer, he is in devastating form, but the album also captures the point where his band stopped being a democracy and became a vehicle for somebody else’s crusade. That contradiction is exactly what gives Animals its strange power.
For listeners, the result is a record that feels both exhilarating and slightly dangerous, a masterpiece that even its own creators cannot fully claim with a straight face. Maybe that is why, all these years later, Animals still sounds less like nostalgia and more like a warning that never quite stopped barking.
