ANIMALS AND ME BY STEVEN WILSON

The modern prog superstar explains how the album changed everything for him.

“Animals was the first record I ever spent my own money on. It would have been 1978 and I was 11 years old. I absolutely adore it. For me, it’s Gilmour’s party; the guitar work on the album is the greatest of all, which is saying something.

It’s an example of an album in the progressive rock tradition; long modular pieces with a sense of journey and narrative to them, but there’s nothing about it that’s stereotypically progressive rock. A sense of anger pervades. Pink Floyd’s songs are deceptively simple; the musical vocabulary is accessible and straightforward. They didn’t often work in clever time signatures and there’s never anything particularly technical about what they’re doing. The art and the genius was in the sense of storytelling that you get through listening to their music. Animals is a great example of that; the architecture of the songs is brilliant, even though the component parts are relatively simple.

“There’s no great technique at work; no great complexity in the rhythms. There are some great production gags, like the dog barking through the vocoder or the way that the voice on

Sheep becomes the synthesised note. Things like that made me want to be a producer. It wouldn’t be overstating to say that Animals is responsible in many ways for the path that my career took. It made me understand the genius of creating an album; the idea of a record as a continuum, something you listen to, analogous with the way you watch a movie. It tells a story; you have scenes and those scenes can be emotionally very different.

“Progressive rock is one of the only forms of music where you can go through all different emotions within a single piece: you hear it in Dogs, Pigs and Sheep. I think Animals stands alone within their catalogue and in the whole progressive genre.

That whole middle section of Dogs, where it breaks down to the keyboard texture, it’s the same chords from the other part of the song, but you wouldn’t necessarily make that connection.

It’s amazing how simple the basic ideas are. For me, that’s why Floyd are the most transcendent progressive rock group of all; it’s why they speak way beyond the realm of the genre; they speak to a whole audience that have no interest in the notion of progressive rock. Pink Floyd are always the exception, everyone likes Pink Floyd. I think it’s because at their very heart they have very simple songs, without unnecessary complexity and I think that’s given them a timeless quality.

I think a lot of that beauty comes from that dynamic between

Roger – a very simplistic songwriter, Tin Pan Alley G, C and D; always sounds good – David and Rick who come along to give it the complexity in terms of the sonic soundscaping and different chord inversions. They’re an anomaly. You can analyse them all you like, but the music is magical.”