How did I come across Pink Floyd?

One afternoon in 1974, inside the cinema hall of the railway station in Alessandria, I was surrounded by hallucinogenic fumes that only years later I realized were not from the Marlboros that the people were smoking.

It wasn’t an easy love for Pink Floyd. The film impressed me, and I was curious, but I couldn’t declare myself a real fan of the band.

It took a few years before I lost my mind to them and began to listen to the previous discography in full and very well.

“Meddle”, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, “A Saucerful of Secrets”, “Atom Heart Mother”, are my four favourite albums of the group. Still, there is a record that has changed everything, and that’s why it’s on my personal record list of my life.

The disc in question came out in 1977; it was called “Animals,” and the urge to lose your head was exactly the same as the disc that I commented on last Sunday on this blog.

“Animals” is one of the records responsible for the direction my life took 22 years after the release of this record.

The sounds, lyrics, and cover of this record still resonate with me 43 years after its release.

When I visited London for the first time in 1983 under a robust set of emotions, the visit to Battersea Power Station was one of the first things I did.

Fate would have it that I then went to live in the municipality that housed the structure and has always been in front of my eyes for the last 20 years.

When you are a teenager, George Orwell is one of the almost compulsory reading. His Animal farm had been a book that a year before had fascinated me and the subject of heated discussions with friends.

The album is a clear attack on Capitalism and is a political, as well as a musical manifesto for myself.

Let’s say that with this album Pink Floyd finds the key to open my curiosity about them. I start to pay more attention to the previous albums I was listening to, but probably not with the due attention they deserved.

Pink Floyd ceased to exist in 1982, but as happened with Genesis after the Peter Gabriel left in 1975, the rest of the band continue to carry on the name that becomes an ordinary brand. 

I used to play Animals an awful lot. The difference between it and other Floyd records is that I still do.

There’s very little new to say about this album. It’s been analyzed and reviewed to death.

Just five songs, all extremely long, and “Pigs on the Wings” open and close the album to make to feel the album is, in reality, the three songs in the middle.

Three middle pieces, filling you with sorrow, regret, contempt, and disappointment in society.

Three long songs but no one could stop to listen to those songs till they finish and the riffs are so intense that you usually start again as soon the record stop to play.

Who is the crazy person would want to playback a song with depressing lyrics about stabbing people in the back and drowning under one’s own pompous weight? Me! This is what “Dogs” did to me. 

Repeat the song over and over again.

And on the other end, would “Sheep” really be a psychologically satisfying ending? Somehow, the songs manage to make an album ostensibly about betrayal, hypocrisy and slaughter a bearable, even enjoyable experience.

The album is very extremely deep, and that “Pigs on the Wing Part 2” on end offers some relief that rescues you from a deep depression. 

Without to may analyze, no ifs or buts, this is a five-star record. 

I could go on, but this is just a celebration of the album who change my life, and I’m happy to share it with you. 

---

All photographs and content on this website remain the property of Massimo Usai. Images may not be downloaded, copied, reproduced or use anyway without prior written consent.

---