Animals (1977) has long been the red-headed stepchild of the Pink Floyd discography. Nestled between the iconic classics The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975) and The Wall (1979), it's the only album that was skipped when those other albums got expanded editions in 2011. The "Why Pink Floyd?" campaign included "Experience Editions" (each with one bonus CD) and "Immersion Box Sets" (content varying, but always with multiple discs and a lot of memorabilia) for the aforementioned three 1970s albums. Animals, like the rest of the band's discography, was limited to a single remastered CD, the so-called "Discovery" version.
One of the reasons the album tended to get overlooked by the wider public (but all the more loved by the more dedicated fans) is that it contains no radio-friendly songs. Pink Floyd famously didn't release any singles in their native UK between 1968 and 1979, but songs like "Free Four" and "Money" would still be made into singles in the US, and there are promo singles for other songs as well.
Animals doesn't have anything that lends itself well to that treatment. It's bookended by two halves of the folky "Pigs on the Wing", while three long epics make up the main part. The 17-minute "Dogs" and the ten-minute "Sheep" were developed from "You've Got to Be Crazy" and "Raving and Drooling" (itself a descendent of "One of These Days"), songs the band had already started playing live in 1974, but put on the back-burner while the equally old "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was split in two and made into the centerpiece of Wish You Were Here. That album, of course, includes three shorter songs, of which both the funky "Have a Cigar" (featuring Roy Harper on lead vocals) and the melodious, largely acoustic title track were nice "single length" songs. The latter, with its catchy guitar hook and memorable melody sung by David Gilmour, has ended up being one of the band's most perennial pieces, and must have been covered by millions of guitar playing singers by now.
"Pigs on the Wing" doesn't have that kind of appeal; it's more of a sketch with Roger Waters singing while strumming. And both parts are under two minutes, which isn't ideal single length either. The other newly written song for Animals, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" recalls "Have a Cigar" in its groove, but is twice as long and has no catchy chorus, so it's not a single candidate either.
Nevertheless, record companies, desperate to promote this rather dark and bleak album, tried to find something that could be delivered to radio. "Dogs" is a lost cause due to its overarching structure, but both "Pigs" and "Sheep" were edited in various territories.
The "Pigs" edit (which simply fades out after half the runtime) has been digitised by fans and included in the exhaustive unofficial rarities release "A Tree Full of Secrets", but the "Sheep" edit remained rare and seemingly never turned up in bootleg collector's circles, inspiring at least one creative fan to come up with their own ideas for how the song might be shrunk to less than half its length.
Since the 2011 releases, a lot has happened. Pink Floyd sold their rights to Sony Music, who picked up on the template of the band's 50th anniversary edition of The Dark Side of the Moon from 2023, but improving upon it with the Wish You Were Here set from 2025, which - unlike Dark Side of the Moon - collected not only the studio rarities from the Experience/Immersion editions, but also several unheard outtakes from the recordings.
The announcement of a 50th anniversary release for Animals is therefore not surprising: Sony obviously want to monetize the catalogue and even the previously overlooked 1977 record has enough ephemeral material to entice collectors. Its reputation has also improved in the meantime, as the album once seen as a bit of a failure is now a critical darling, less diminished by overexposure. While Pink Floyd never performed its songs after Roger Waters' departure, Waters featured it in concert regularly.
However, the band's own releases somewhat diminish the impact of this upcoming edition. After all, one of the band's issues with Animals has recently been addressed: Murkier than the pristine sounding, surrounding albums, its sonics were yet another reason for the album's inferior status. Longtime Pink Floyd engineer James Guthrie had finished a completely new mix of the album, both in stereo and 5.1 surround, in 2018, but the conflict between David Gilmour and Roger Waters over the inclusion of liner notes (which somewhat needlessly centered on Waters' creative direction during the album's making) meant that it was delayed for several years. It's also possible that Gilmour wanted to focus on "his" albums first, with the Later Years campaign that included a new mix of the controversial 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, a new edit of the 1994 concert movie PULSE and an official (if edited) release of the Waters-less band's appearance at the Knebworth 1990 festival.
The 2018 remix finally appeared on the market in 2022, on CD, LP, Blu-ray audio and SACD, as well as a modest box set which simply contained the new mix in several versions (CD, LP, DVD and Blu-ray). By then, technology had moved on and Dolby Atmos had gained traction. Pink Floyd, who had long been pioneers of multichannel sound, joined the bandwagon with The Dark Side of the Moon in 2023, and James Guthrie revisited his Animals 5.1 mix in Atmos, which meant another Blu-ray edition happened in 2024.
So, all things considered, there's less to add to the album now for its 50th anniversary that hasn't already been released. Two main omissions were noted many times in 2022: A live recording from the 1977 "In the Flesh" tour and the alternative version of "Pigs on the Wing", which was only available on the 8-track edition of Animals and featured a guitar solo by Snowy White bridging the two halves. White would go on to play a similar solo on the tour, where he joined the band's live line-up, playing second guitar and bass depending on what the song demanded.
The tour saw Pink Floyd playing the entirety of their latest two records and therefore marked not only the live debut of the Animals songs in their final form, but also of "Welcome to the Machine" and "Wish You Were Here", as there was no tour supporting the previous album (the band's 1975 concerts, which already featured "Have a Cigar", happened prior to the album's release).
Unfortunately, while the band apparently made semi-professional recordings of the tour, they've probably been lost since then, perhaps taped over with something else as was common back in the day. Sony opened the doors for the official release of decent sounding audience recordings with the Mike Millard bootleg from Los Angeles Sports Arena 1975 as part of the Wish You Were Here Blu-ray audio (later released as a standalone double CD and quadruple LP), and Animals continues this trend by including the legendary Oakland Coliseum recording, which is usually held up as the best recording from this tour and also features an extra encore not present at other gigs on the tour, the band oldie "Careful with that Axe, Eugene".
The 8-track version of "Pigs on the Wing", however, is absent from the Animals reissue. The reason for this is that Sony have just released a new compilation called 8-Tracks, which, aside from slightly edited versions of the band's most popular shorter songs from 1971-1979, also included this particular version as a selling point.
For me, it's an unfortunate decision all around; the Animals reissue with its rarities section is where it belongs, historically speaking. It might also have allowed for a correction of the song's speed (the 8-Tracks version runs noticeably slow).
So, all this considered, what's actually left to entice the collector? Not that much, really; the two early versions of "Dogs" and "Sheep" should be interesting, while a look at the length of the completely new tracks "Jam" (2:53) and "Young Nicolas Jon" (1:19) dampens expectations. At least the set also includes the original radio edit of "Sheep"! Hooray! Or does it...?
Turns out, apparently not. Pink Floyd fans are known for getting deep into the weeds with stuff like this (no pun intended). When this particular edit was released as the first teaser track, one fan quickly analysed it and found that the song was basically the same as the 2011 high resolution mastering, with the edits performed cleanly in a digital audio workstation as opposed to analog tape. Link 1 - Link 2 - Link 3
Now, this isn't an entirely unique situation. The remastered editions of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band catalogue also included a few of these modern recreations of vintage edits, because the original tapes got lost ("California" from WATCH being one such example). But is it a recreation of the original? No, unless the YouTube uploader who had never heard the original edit while making their own, had somehow made a carbon copy of the original without realising it. Because a comparison shows that the official "Original Radio Edit", as released by Sony, resembles that fan creation way too closely.
Obviously, it's silly to suggest that Sony ripped a fan off. It's the band's music, which belongs to Sony now and they can do with it what they want. But to suggest that a modern recreation based on a fan's work is actually a vintage 1977 edit is shoddy, to say the least. Releasing this as the first song of an anticipated reissue makes for a bad look, and also puts a damper on the excitement a lot of fans had after the band's music got sold to Sony. No, the members' strained relationships and sometimes overly critical ears are no longer holding back the release of archival material. But apparently, the expertise & decisions necessary to make for truly definitive editions of these albums aren't quite there either. After all, there's plenty of space on the rarities CD to also include "Pigs on the Wing" (8-track version) as well as the radio edit of "Pigs". And this makes me a bit more anxious about the upcoming anniversaries of other Pink Floyd albums such as The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets or The Wall. Please, Sony, don't mess this up...
NB: This isn't the most egregious flaw on a deluxe edition. When Steven Wilson remixed the first two albums by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, a song was discovered on the reels of Tarkus that became released as "Unknown Ballad". Turns out it's by another group (Spontaneous Combustion, who were produced at the time by Greg Lake). A similar case happened with the Yes album Fragile: The box set included a supposed outtake called "The Dean", which is actually an unreleased version of the Terry Reid song "Sabyla". It was then removed from the digital edition of the set.
NB 2: This might be the first album to get no less than three separate releases on Blu-Ray audio! And each of them looks markedly different.
