Pink Floyd’s Animals album turns 50 early year and so almost half a century to the day since its initial release, it’s been announced that an anniversary edition of the album is on its way.
Animals saw the skies over Floyd-land turn dark (literally, look at the black clouds above Battersea Power Station on its famous sleeve). Unleashed just as punk was breaking, it was in many ways as angry and bleak as anything released that year.
David Gilmour, considering the reissue, says, “The mood in music was changing in ’77. Punk music was hitting everything and I suspect that had a little bit of an influence on the way we were working. I mean it’s quite an aggressive, stripped-back album.”
It was also the first Floyd album to be recorded at their own studio in Islington.
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This was Britannia Row, which opened in 1975. Situated within walking distance of both Roger Waters and Nick Mason’s houses, the idea was that it would be simpler to operate and would – in theory – speed up the process of making Floyd albums.
In a 2022 interview, Mason compared it to their previous experience of using Abbey Road. “It was very different. But I think it was good – although the result, sonically, was inevitably not quite as good, quite simply. But it was this thing of, we’d sort of done it all at Abbey Road – and that was great – but we wanted to build our own studio with this idea we’d build one that was very simple to operate.
“The idea being, particularly if we wanted to do something individually, we wouldn’t actually need a lot of staff, and maybe even we could engineer it ourselves. It was a much more intimate, relaxed operation – very different to what we’d done in the past. I think it was very enjoyable. It was sort of ‘home’, in a way.”
The new studio had a MCI JH500 console and an MCI tape machine. “It was a perfectly good, workable piece of kit,” Mason recalled. “But not quite as good as the studio stuff at Abbey Road – and, inevitably, not as well-maintained. I mean, it was looked after, but Abbey Road would go to enormous lengths to do the set up each day.”
Despite Mason’s reservations, Britannia Row would become a widely-used studio for the next two decades. Pink Floyd cut parts of The Wall there in 1979 and Mason himself produced the Damned’s second album Music For Pleasure at the facility later in 1977.
The (very) wide variety of artists that recorded there includes everyone from New Order to Peter Gabriel, from Kate Bush to Kylie. The building was later used as office space, and – inevitably – was converted into flats.
Now, as Animals is re-issued, Mason says, “The big thing was the development of Britannia Row. Britannia Row was this building we’d bought some few years before in which we’d actually started building our own recording studio.
“We tried to design the studio in such a way that any of us could operate it and all the trunking was labelled clearly so anyone could plug in a set of headphones without someone else having to do it for us.”
As for Animals, the reissue will be – as per usual – in an array of different formats: Deluxe Box set, one LP, two LP, two CD, Blu-Ray Audio and digital. Amongst the goodies in the box set is a disc of rarities that includes a previously-unheard Roger Waters track Young Nicolas Jon, as well as a 64 page hardback book. They all come out on 22 January next year.
