The song was intended for Wish You Were Here until Waters decided it didn’t fit the concept. Dogs is the only song on Animals composed by Waters and Gilmour, and it’s the perfect union of the former’s venomous lyrics and the latter’s innate sense of melody.ĭogs began life as Gotta Be Crazy, and was played live on Floyd’s 1974 UK tour, although Gilmour complained Waters had originally written too many lyrics for him to sing it properly). “ Animals was when Roger really started to believe he was the sole writer of the band,” complained Rick Wright in 1994. However brilliant it is, nothing has the everyman appeal of Wish You Were Here’s title track or Shine On. Unfortunately, after Floyd released The Wall and started having hit singles, Animals was done for. Part of the problem is that Animals came after Wish You Were Here and before The Wall. Like the band’s famous mascot, Pink Floyd’s tenth studio album is a curious beast. These days its cover image of a pig drifting over Battersea Power Station is better known than the music on Animals. They didn’t emanate any kind of warmth… They just said what they wanted and we did it… There were no smiles. "They weren’t very friendly," said Duncan looking back. The last verse is about passing a tramp in the street and not helping."ĭick Parry, an old friend of the band’s from Cambridge, overdubbed a sax solo on the song, and a quartet of female session vocalists – Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike and Barry St John – were brought in to embellish Us And Them, Brain Damage and Eclipse.
The second verse is about civil liberties, racism and colour prejudice. "The first verse is about going to war, how on the front line we don’t get much chance to communicate with one another, because someone else has decided that we shouldn’t.
"Rick wrote the chord sequence for Us And Them and I used it as a vehicle," says Waters. It actually feels quite seductive, which isn’t a word you’d normally associate with Floyd. Sax solos, lovely lingering piano fills, big choruses, crazy little talking additions. But as it starts to take shape, it suddenly starts to show off its vast range of colours. The case was settled out of court, details unknown, but she now gets a credit alongside Wright on the album.Ĭlearly a song often heard by Radiohead, it does that deceptive thing of starting off sounding like nothing much at all. In 2004 Torry began legal proceedings against Pink Floyd, claiming co-authorship of the song. Then she came back out looking embarrassed saying: ‘I’m really sorry’, while the rest of us were goin: ‘This is really great.’” That gave me an avenue to explore.” Wright remembered: “She went into the studio and did it really quickly. I thought, ‘I have to pretend to be an instrument’. Torry recalls that the band didn’t seem to know what they wanted, but after the first take they knew what they didn’t want.
We said, ‘Think about death think about horror, whatever’.” Not exactly musically but we knew we wanted someone to improvise over this piece. According to Wright, “We knew what we wanted. Engineer Alan Parsons recommended Torry who admits she didn’t know much about Pink Floyd before she arrived at the Abbey Road session. The song was among the last to be completed as the album took shape.
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