Pink Floyd Marks ‘Animals’ 50th Anniversary With Reissue Featuring Unreleased Music — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Pink Floyd will release Animals 50 on January 22 for the 1977 album’s 50th anniversary, just four years after the prior reissue, pairing the original Animals with its 2018 remix.
- Pink Floyd and former member Roger Waters fought over liner notes, a dispute that delayed the prior reissue from the 40th-anniversary target to 2022.
- Animals 50 adds early studio versions of “Dogs” and “Sheep,” the unearthed “Studio Jam,” and Roger Waters’s previously unheard composition “Young Nicholas Jon.”
- Pink Floyd shared the original radio edit of “Sheep” ahead of the release, trimming the track from 10 minutes to four minutes for FM.
- Animals 50’s deluxe edition makes the 1977 Oakland Coliseum concert its first official release; the show features full-album performances of Animals and Wish You Were Here, two Dark Side tracks, the tour’s sole “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” and the band’s last-ever playing of that early instrumental.
- Animals 50’s deluxe box set contains 5 CDs, 3 LPs and a Blu-ray, plus a 64-page hardback book with liner notes by Jonathan Lethem and unpublished images from the Animals cover shoot at Battersea Power Station.
- David Gilmour said he suspected punk’s 1977 rise had some influence on Animals, describing the album as stripped-back, aggressive and rough-and-ready, with more aggressive lyrics from Roger Waters.
Why it matters: For longtime Pink Floyd listeners, the January 22 package adds substantial material to the prior reissue: 5 CDs, 3 LPs, a Blu-ray and a 64-page book, anchored by the first official release of the 1977 Oakland Coliseum show. Its full-album performances of *Animals* and *Wish You Were Here* preserve a major live document from that tour.
Ask SkimNews
