Progressive Rock
Pink Floyd will release “Animals 50” on Sony Music on 22 January 2027, fifty years after the album came out in January 1977. The first taste arrived today: “Sheep (Original Radio Edit)”, a four-and-a-half-minute edit made for radio in 1977, pressed only on promo copies and never commercially released until now.
It’s one of five tracks on the “Rarities” disc, all of them unreleased: early versions and rough mixes of “Dogs” and “Sheep”, a studio jam and “Young Nicholas Jon”, a Roger Waters song that has never been released in any form.
The other previously unheard piece is the 9 May 1977 show at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, taped by Reinhard Hohlwein, then a 19-year-old fan. It runs to two discs, with “Animals” and “Wish You Were Here” in full, plus “Money”, “Us and Them” and “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”.
“I’d driven past Battersea Power Station every day going to and from my house in Clapham,” Waters says of the idea behind the cover. Nick Mason looks back on the period: “There were all sorts of differences beginning to surface within the band, but in some ways Animals was a remarkably cohesive enterprise.”
The box set holds three LPs, five CDs, a Blu-ray and a 64-page hardback book with a new essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem, an interview with Hohlwein, an excerpt from the memoir of Hipgnosis’ Aubrey “Po” Powell and previously unseen photographs. The Blu-ray carries the original 1977 mix and James Guthrie’s 2018 remix in stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos.
There’ll also be a 2LP and a 2CD edition, with the original album and the rarities, and the album on its own on orange and sandstone vinyl.
Text by Guillem Cardós