Roger Waters has posted an update to his website and YouTube account, announcing the upcoming release of new 5.1 and stereo mixes of Animals, by James Guthrie.

The remixes were first mentioned in 2018, but the project apparently got bogged down with disputes between band members around the material to be included. With the disputes now settled, the new mixes will finally get an official release!

There had also been rumours of possible live material from the 1977 In The Flesh tour or studio out-takes being included, but the cover art included near the end of Roger’s video seems to indicate the new release is just the 5.1 and stereo mixes on vinyl, CD, DVD and high resolution Blu-ray.

See the full statement below :

“A note from Roger Waters to Pink Floyd fans:

As I am banned by Dave Gilmour from posting on Pink Floyd’s Facebook page with its 30,000,000 subscribers, I am posting this announcement here today and in full on rogerwaters.com.

First, a warm welcome back to our little band of brothers and sisters who have always kept an open mind, let’s hope some of the fans whose access to my words is suppressed by Gilmour find their way here and discover some truth. What precipitated this note is that there are new James Guthrie Stereo and 5.1 mixes of the Pink Floyd album Animals, 1977.

These mixes have languished unreleased because of a dispute over some sleeve notes that Mark Blake has written for this new release. Gilmour has vetoed the release of the album unless these liner notes are removed. He does not dispute the veracity of the history described in Mark’s notes, but he wants that history to remain secret. This is a small part of an ongoing campaign by the Gilmour/Samson camp to claim more credit for Dave on the work he did in Pink Floyd, 1967-1985, than is his due.

Yes he was, and is, a jolly good guitarist and singer. But, he has for the last 35 years told a lot of whopping porky pies about who did what in Pink Floyd when I was still in charge. There’s a lot of “we did this” and “we did that,” and “I did this” and “I did that.” So, two things:

(1). I am agreeing to the release of the new Animals remix, with the sleeve notes removed. Good work James Guthrie by the way, and sorry Mark Blake. The final draft of the liner notes was fact checked and agreed as factually correct by me, Nick and Gilmour. Here they are, enjoy, there’s nothing controversial, just a few simple facts.

Mark Blake: Liner Notes
Pink Floyd: Animals

Despite being recorded in London during the long, summer heatwave of 1976, Pink Floyd’s Animals remains a dark album. Its critique of capitalism and greed caught the prevailing mood in Britain: a time of industrial strife, economic turmoil, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the race riots of Notting Hill. The album was released on January 23rd 1977, but the roots of Pink Floyd’s tenth studio album go back earlier in the decade.

Following the success of 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd pondered their next move. During a two-to-three week jam session in early 1974, the band worked on ideas for three new compositions. From these sessions the band developed Shine On You Crazy Diamond, (A passionate tribute to Syd Barrett, words by Roger Waters. Added by me, sorry couldn’t help it.) which became the centrepiece of Floyd’s next album, Wish You Were Here, and Raving And Drooling (composed by Roger Waters) and You Gotta Be Crazy written by Waters and David Gilmour.

Raving And Drooling was a tale of violent social disorder, while You Gotta Be Crazy told the story of a soulless businessman clawing and cheating his way to the top. Both were performed live for the first time on the Floyd’s winter tour of 1974. They were both considered for the Wish You Were Here album, but Roger insisted that neither song was relevant to the overall idea, that “Wish You Were Here” was essentially about absence, and as neither song fitted his conception of the record’s overall theme, neither song should be included.

The band eventually concurred. Scroll forward two years, and Roger had an idea for the next Pink Floyd album. He borrowed from George Orwell’s allegorical story, Animal Farm, in which pigs and other farmyard animals were reimagined anthropomorphically. Waters portrays the human race as three sub-species trapped in a violent, vicious cycle, with sheep serving despotic pigs and authoritarian dogs. You Gotta be Crazy and Raving And Drooling perfectly fitted his new concept.

In the meantime, a year earlier, the group had bought a set of disused church buildings in Britannia Row, Islington, which they’d converted into a studio and storage facility. Prior to this every Pink Floyd studio release had been partly or wholly recorded at Abbey Road studios. Pink Floyd had also found a new recording engineer. Brian Humphries, an engineer from Pye studios, who they had met while recording the sound track for “More”, a movie directed by Barbet Schroeder. Brian had gone on to engineer Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road, and also helped them out on the road, so they had got to know him very well. Using their own studio marked a significant change in their working methods. There were setbacks and teething problems, but also a great sense of freedom.

Following Roger’s instincts about the new songs paid off, the songs had an aggressive edge far removed from the luxuriant soundscapes on Wish You Were Here. It was a timely change of direction. At Britannia Row, he renamed Raving And Drooling, Sheep and Gotta Be Crazy became Dogs. The narrative was completed by the addition of two new Waters songs: Pigs (Three Different Ones) and Pigs On The Wing.

On Pigs (Three Different Ones), the lyrics namechecked Mary Whitehouse, the head of the National Viewers And Listeners Association. Whitehouse was an outspoken critic of sex and violence on British television and a topical target for Roger’s ire. The subject matter was bleak, but Nick Mason recalled lighter moments over dubbing songs with special effects and barnyard noises. While Sheep also made room for Roger’s blackly comic variation on Psalm 23: “He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places/ He converteth me to lamb cutlets…” The music and the performance mirrored the intensity of the lyrics. Keyboard player Richard Wright’s eerie-sounding synths and Hammond organ cranked up the unease.

While David Gilmour’s shared lead vocal on Dogs and his guitar playing throughout Animals offered a striking counterpoint to Roger’s brutal lyrics. In contrast, Animals began and ended on an optimistic note. The verses of Pigs on The Wing were split in two and bookended the album. Roger’s lyrics and vocal performance of acoustic intro and outro (“You know that I care what happens to you/ And I know that you care for me too…”) suggested hope for humanity.

The idea for Pink Floyd’s flying pig was also Roger’s. He had already commissioned its building as a stage device for the next tour. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of the design company Hipgnosis, had produced a number of design ideas for an Animals sleeve and presented them to the band but none of the band, liked them, and when Roger added his disapproval someone said, ”Well why don’t you come up with something better then?” So he did, on the drive from his house in South London to Britannia Row, he regularly passed Battersea Power Station. He was drawn to the imposing brick building, and by the number four.

Four in the band, four phallic chimneys, and if the power station were turned upside down then it resembled a table with four legs. He pursued his idea and had a maquette made, a small scale model of the eventual full scale inflatable pig. He then took photographs of Battersea Power station and created a photographic mock up of an album sleeve. The rest of the band loved it. Storm and Po, who had designed all of the previous Pink Floyd album covers, graciously offered to source photographers for the photo shoot, and did. On the first day of the photo shoot, the pig failed to inflate.

On the second day, it broke free of its moorings and disappeared into a beautiful brooding sky, prompting a frantic call to the police and a halt to all flights in and out of Heathrow. The pig eventually crash-landed in a farmer’s field in Kent.

The following day, the shoot went ahead without a hitch, great shots of pig in situ but no brooding sky. So Storm and Po stripped Day three Pig into Day two sky, bingo! History. Animals was a hit, reaching Number 2 in the UK and Number 3 in the US. Pink Floyd’s pig, Algie, made its live debut on their subsequent “In The Flesh” tour in 1977. At stadium shows in America, it was joined by another Water’s idea, an inflatable nuclear family comprising a mother, father and 2.5 children, surrounded by the spoils of a consumerist lifestyle: an inflatable Cadillac, oversized TV and refrigerator. Roger called it Electric Theatre.

Both the album and the tour signposted the way to Pink Floyd’s next release, The Wall, and to Roger’s ever more ambitious ideas, both in terms of his music, narratives, politics and stage shows. But his themes and ideas explored on Animals have endured. More than 40 years on the album has been remixed in stereo and 5.1. In troubled times and an uncertain world, Animals is as timely and relevant now as it ever was.

Mark Blake

“Thanks Mark, sorry you were redacted.” – Roger Waters

“Continued Note from Roger Waters to Pink Floyd fans:

(2). I am in the middle of writing my Memoirs and inevitably some of it contains references to some of the content above. For anyone with a faint heart, I suggest you sit down, but anyone who likes a good laugh, sit back and fucking howl! 😂 🤣 ✊🏼 I’m going to sit back and howl along with you.

At the beginning of this post on the subject of porky pies, I say, “There’s an awful lot of “we did this” and “we did that,” and “I did this” and “I did that.” Right? So here’s a short extract from my memoir:

“As chance would have it I was doing a bit of delving in a book of press clippings and came across an interview David Fricke of Rolling Stone Magazine did with DG in a hotel room in NY in 1982, DG’s talking about the Cash register tape for the defining 7/8 rhythm on Money. The interview was published in Musician Magazine, so even back then DG was sowing the seeds of the false narrative. I quote this bit of the article verbatim:

David Fricke: “You recorded the sounds for ‘Money’ on a loop of tape.” Gilmour explains: ”You’re trying to get the impact from the cash register, ‘the snap, crack, crsssh,” You’d mark that one and then measure how long you wanted that beat to go, and that’s the piece you’d use. And you’d chop it together. It was trial and error. You just chop the tapes together, and if it sounds good, you use it. If it doesn’t, you take one section out and put a different one in. Sometimes we’d put one in and it’d be backwards, because the diagonal cut on the tape, if you turn it around is exactly the same. We’d stick that in and instead it would go ‘chung, dum, whoosh.’ And sound great so we’d use that.”

Well! The reason everything DG is saying here to David Fricke sounds like gobbledygook is because it is fucking gobbledygook. He has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. Why? Because unless he was hiding under the fucking chair, DG wasn’t there when I made that SFX tape loop for Money in the studio I shared with my wife Judy at the bottom of our garden at 187, New North Road, Islington, next door to the North Pole Pub where I used to play darts!

THE FULL STORY OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IS IN MY MEMOIRS!
So, I hope that whets your, and David and Polly’s appetites 😂
Love
R.”

Rockonteurs is a podcast all about the real stories behind real music.

Presented by Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, who wrote and performed megahits like ‘Gold’ and ‘True’, and Guy Pratt, a bass player who shaped songs for the likes of Madonna and Pink Floyd, you’ll hear exclusive stories of life on the road, in the studio and what really happened behind the scenes from artists who wrote, performed and produced the some of the biggest classic rock and pop tracks of all time.

Rockonteurs is a podcast all about the real stories behind real music.

This weeks upcoming episode is Number 39 and features guest Mica Paris

Available from 29th May 2021 on Itunes, Spotify and all other Listening Platforms. Click Here to be taken to Apple Musics Listening Page

Chester Kamen, Former lead guitarist with Roger Waters band and last seen playing With David Gilmour on the 2016 Rattle That Lock tour has been busy writing and working on his forthcoming album,

In a rare month of double releases this month, we have seen the release of “Child Of The Damned” and now “Stories” which is featured on the “Take This “ album which is currently in progress.

As Chester says briefly ” It’s called “Stories” and features my trio, The Twins, which comprises myself, Dale Davis on bass(Amy Winehouse’s bassist and MD) and Hugo Degenhardt on drums and backing vocals.

Rockonteurs is a podcast all about the real stories behind real music.

Presented by Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, who wrote and performed megahits like ‘Gold’ and ‘True’, and Guy Pratt, a bass player who shaped songs for the likes of Madonna and Pink Floyd, you’ll hear exclusive stories of life on the road, in the studio and what really happened behind the scenes from artists who wrote, performed and produced the some of the biggest classic rock and pop tracks of all time.

Rockonteurs is a podcast all about the real stories behind real music.

This weeks upcoming episode is Number 27 and features guest Jools Holland

Available from 16th May 2021 on Itunes, Spotify and all other Listening Platforms. Click Here to be taken to Apple Musics Listening Page

Earlier this month we shared the news that a compilation entitled Still Wish You Were Here was being released.

With a star-studded lineup featuring Rick Wakeman, Ian Paice, Todd Rundgren, Geoff Tate, Joe Satriani, Steve Hackett, Steve Hillage, Edgar Froese, Tony Levin, James LaBrie, Bootsy Collins, Rat Scabies, Jah Wobble, Carmine Appice.

With a release date of May 28th, 2021 AFG Correspondent Richard Hobo has been on hand to very kindly write a review ahead of the release later this month.

STILL WISH YOU WERE HERE –VARIOUS ARTISTS
By Richard Hobo

Part of the beauty of music is that listening to a good album evokes the memories of when you first heard it and I’m happy to say that the tribute album Still Wish You Were Here, featuring a wide variety of musicians has the same ability to transport me back to the mid-seventies when the original album was first released.

Personally, I found it particularly mind-blowing that the bass lines of Roger Waters were now being played by King Crimson and Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Levin,(who also features on tribute albums for The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall), PiL’s Jah Wobble, Megadeth’s David Ellefson and even Funkadelic’s Bootsie Collins. I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Even David Gilmour who has admitted that his “fingers were never designed to go fast” must be curious to hear just what Joe Satriani and Steve Stevens have done with his guitar parts

The album opens with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, now featuring a flute and some blazing guitar work, which sets the tone for the rest of the album. A mostly respectful rendition of a much-loved album with some additional flourishes here and there.

There are a couple of clunkers, however, the worst one being Todd Rundgren inflicting the American two-syllable pronunciation of “Jagwar” upon us on Welcome to the Machine, as opposed to the “correct” three-syllable English version of “Jag-u-ar.” I couldn’t care less about which is right or wrong in the grand scheme of things, but in a song, missing out a syllable means missing out a beat. Even Taylor Swift, who is as American as apple pies and slammin’ screen doors manages to sing Jag-u-ar in one of her songs.

The other spider in the soup happens during Have a Cigar, where the last syllable is left off the line “Now I’ve always had a deep respect and I mean it most sincerely,” making it, “Now I’ve always had a deep respect and I mean it most sincere,” which, of course, turns the whole line into a complete nonsense. A case of misheard lyrics perhaps? Maybe, but Wish You Were Here has only been out for 46 years and sold millions and millions of copies, all of which had lyrics in the packaging, so really, there’s no excuse for getting it wrong.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-9) is probably the best musical rendition of the whole album. Rod Argent, Steve Hillage, drummer Ian Paice, and bassist Bootsy Collins captures the feel of this song and, for me anyway, evoked lazy summers of my youth spent staring at the pictures on the original gatefold sleeve and wondering about where those trees were, trying to find the naked woman in the red scarf, wondering how they got the burnt corner of the front cover photograph and the sand falling out of the back cover.

This is not a note-perfect rendition of Wish You Were Here, because we’ve already got that; it’s more of an honorable tribute. Overall, it sounds like a collection of musicians gathered together in a barn grooving to one of their favorite albums. At times it made me yearn for the original and the vocals are probably the weakest performances. For instance, no one can replace Roger Waters on the vocals for Shine On You Crazy Diamond, not even David Gilmour, and the absence of female backup singers is certainly notable. King Crimson saxophonist Mel Collins plays some bang-on sax work, which is probably not surprising as he played on Roger Waters’solo albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking and Radio KAOS and their subsequent tours in the eighties, as well as Waters’ In the Flesh tour in 2000.

There are other Floyd connections, as the man who replaced Waters on bass on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Tony Levin also features and plays a great bassline on Welcome to the Machine. I had a bit of a chuckle when I saw Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson was involved, as any real Pink Floyd Nerdist will know, one of the names Pink Floyd was called before Syd Barrett came up with The Pink Floyd Sound was The Meggadeaths.

It’s worth noting that most of the musicians involved in this album are not far off the ages of the original Pink Floyd members and while it must be quite satisfying to have your peers pay homage to your work in such a grand and serious fashion, personally I can’t wait to see what the next generation of young musicians makes of the works of this great band.

Our sincere thanks go to Richard for sending us this wonderful review