Towards the end of recording Roger created two pieces called ‘Pigs On The Wing’ to open and close the album, designed to give
the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it. An unwanted side effect was that it opened
up the question of the share-out of publishing royalties (which are based on the number of tracks, not their length) since
it gave Roger two additional tracks, and meant that the longer piece ‘Dogs’, co-written with David, was not split up, but
left as a single track. This was the kind of issue that would later prove contentious.
With a tour in the offing, we had been discussing the need to augment the band on tour, using another guitarist to play some
of the pieces that David had overdubbed in the studio, and Steve invited a guitarist called Snowy White along to meet us.
Snowy had played with the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green as well as Cockney Rebel, and had just finished touring
the States with Al Stewart when he received a message that Steve had been trying to get in touch, after Snowy had been recommended
to Steve by Hilary Walker, who worked with Kate Bush.
Snowy remembers arriving in the control room at an
unfortunate moment. While Brian was on a break, Roger and I had assumed engineering duties, and successfully erased David’s
recently completed guitar solo. This was a perfect moment for me to recognise Roger’s seniority… Snowy was given a cursory
interview by David (‘You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play, would you?’) and later Roger (‘Since you’re here you might
as well play something’), who gave Snowy a shot at a solo on ‘Pigs On The Wing’, a part made redundant when the track was
split in two for the final album. However, Snowy had the consolation of the whole track – including his solo – appearing on
the eight-track cartridge version, and thus appreciated by the select minority who purchased it. Snowy later appeared on the
Animals
tour, walking on every night to open the show with the bass intro to ‘Sheep’, confusing the front few rows of the audience
as they tried to work out which of the Fab Floyd this character was, since there were no programmes or announcements to explain
his appearance.
My memory of this period is that I enjoyed making this album more than
Wish You Were Here.
There was some return to a group commitment, possibly because we felt that Britannia Row was our responsibility, and so we
were more involved in making the studio and the recording a success. Given that it belonged to us, we really could spend as
long as we wanted in the studio, and there was no extra cost involved in unlimited frames of snooker or billiards.
Compared to some of our earlier efforts,
Animals
was really quite a straightforward album. My view is that it was not as complex in its construction as
Dark Side,
or
Wish You Were Here.
After recording the numbers the assembly seemed a relatively painless process, but maybe we had just got quicker at doing
it. I have to say I don’t have any particularly strong memories of the recording sessions themselves; it’s much more to do
with Britannia Row as a place.
Some critics felt that the music on
Animals
was harder and
tougher than anything else we had done. There were various reasons why that might have been so. There was certainly a workman-like
mood in the studio. We had never encouraged a stream of visitors to our previous recording sessions, but at Britannia Row
the lack of space meant there was really only room for the crew in the cockpit.
Any harder edge may also have been a subconscious reaction to the accusations of ‘dinosaur rock’ that were being thrown at
bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk – even anyone who
didn’t listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols’ explosion into the media spotlight. Just in case
we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching ‘I hate Pink
Floyd’ T-shirt.
Punk was perhaps also a reaction to the decision by record companies to concentrate on what they thought of as guaranteed
earners rather than taking risks with new acts – whereas in the 1960s they would have signed up anything with long hair, even
a sheepdog. Nearly thirty years later the same is true once again. If a record company pays a huge amount of money for an
established act, it is odds on that they will recoup the investment; they could spend the same amount on a dozen new bands
and lose the whole lot. Financially it is perfectly understandable, but it does not foster fresh talent. One of the messages
of punk was that it was possible to make records for thirty quid and some change. Although we could sympathise with the sentiments,
we were, however, on the wrong side of the divide, as far as the punk generation were concerned. ‘Of course, you don’t want
the world populated only with dinosaurs,’ I said at the time, ‘but it’s a terribly good thing to keep some of them alive.’
Britannia Row made an unlikely Winter Palace, but the punk movement was the moment when we found ourselves on the
wrong end of a cultural revolution, just as we had been very much on the right end of it during the underground days of 1966
and 1967. The ten-year cycle had turned, and will doubtless turn on. The cool blissed-out hippies of yesteryear are now harassed
and stressed-out parents who mutter about the banality of
Pop Idol
and the incomprehensible lyrics on
Top Of The Pops.
They have, inevitably, found themselves turning into their parents – although now they, at least, are excruciatingly aware
of the irony…
A year or so after the release of
Animals,
I got a call from Peter Barnes, our publisher. He wanted to know if I would like to produce an album for the Damned at Britannia
Row. I don’t think I was first choice. They really wanted Syd to produce them, which would have been remarkable, but impractical.
I enjoyed the experience, probably rather more than they did. Unfortunately they were having a nasty dose of musical differences
at the time, so there were conflicting messages about what they wanted to achieve.
The band contained a curious mix of outlooks. Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible were of the punk persuasion, but of the two
I found the Captain considerably more alarming. Though Rat might set fire to something in fun on the spur of the moment, the
Captain would have spent some time beforehand carefully assembling highly flammable materials. Dave Vanian was a dedicated
Goth, while Brian James was the one who seemed to want to move the band into new musical areas. The Captain was not taken
with this philosophical change. The suggestion of a particular bass line using a glissando slide was rejected out of hand,
and the idea of more than a couple of takes was seen as heresy. We finished the album, and mixed it in the time Pink Floyd
would have taken to set up the microphones.
Nick Griffiths, a former BBC engineer, who had joined us at the very end of the
Animals
recording, engineered these sessions. Nick remembers that one of the Damned crew took it upon himself to
write all over those expensive Lignacite walls. The only solution was to painstakingly grind away the graffiti. Even the band
were embarrassed, and although the vision of Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible donning rubber gloves is unlikely, they certainly
issued orders for the scrawling to be scrubbed off.
In December 1976 the recording and mixing of
Animals
was complete, and work started on the album cover. Hipgnosis had presented three ideas, and just for once none of them appealed.
So the cover emerged from a concept of Roger’s, executed by Storm, based around Battersea Power Station, an odd vision of
the future on the banks of the Thames, which was nearing the end of its active service. Initially completed in the early 1930s,
and designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott – designer of Britain’s iconic red telephone box, now also superseded – the building
in fact consisted of two linked power stations; it was the second of these, constructed in 1953, that provided the skyline
of London with its four towering chimneys. At the time Roger was living in Broxash Road, just off Clapham Common, and so was
driving across London to reach the studios in Islington on virtually a daily basis, a route which took him past the looming
chimneys of the power station, and provided the seed for the idea used on the cover.
A maquette for an inflatable pig was made by Andrew Saunders – with involvement from Jeffrey Shaw – and then the actual object
was built for us by a German company. Ballon Fabrik had learnt their craft constructing the original Zeppelins, but in a nice
display of swords into ploughshares, they subsequently built a number of inflatables for us. We ended up in early December
at the disused power station with a giant porcine balloon (which was known as ‘Algie’ for some reason) – some thirty foot
long, full of helium and very truculent – straining at its tether. As an extra precaution we had a trained marksman on standby
in case Algie made a run for it.
Photography was scheduled for 2nd December, but the weather was inclement; we also had some rigging problems, so we decided
to reconvene the following day. Unfortunately, although the weather had improved by early the next morning, the marksman had
not arrived and was not in position by launch time. There was a sudden gust of wind, the steel hawser snapped, and Algie was
off, ascending into the heavens at about two thousand feet a minute, a lot faster than the police chase helicopter scrambled
to intercept it. This was not a deliberate stunt and we were well aware that apart from losing an expensive piece of kit we
could cause a major aviation disaster. Lawyers were summoned, emergency plans mapped out, and scapegoats nominated.
One of my favourite memories from the whole incident is the meeting involving our lawyer Bernard Sheridan, at which Linda
Stanbury, our PA at the time, indoctrinated in the mentality of tour paperwork and overhearing the news that the pig was heading
towards Germany, groaned ‘But it hasn’t got a carnet…’ (The bureaucracy of touring was daunting. Endless lists of equipment,
forms in triplicate every time the trucks were loaded up. The team could not cut any corners. At any border crossing, the
customs control might decide on a whim to go through the whole damn lot. The annoying thing was that even the customs didn’t
seem to know how the forms worked. On one occasion we had a run-in with the authorities when Belgian customs tore off the
wrong part of a form, or stamped the wrong section of a carnet, and it took three years to convince the Belgian authorities
that we had not had a mammoth car boot sale of three articulated lorries’ worth of equipment. The encouragement of free movement
within the European Community has led to at least one advantage.)
Thankfully the pig descended of its own accord, and was recovered by a farmer in Kent with no damage done. There was a
story of an airline pilot spotting the errant pig as he came in to land at Heathrow, but being afraid to report it in case
flight control thought he had been drinking. Sadly I think this is apocryphal. The awful truth is that the image of the pig
was stripped into the final cover later on, because the best image of the power station, in a moody cloudscape, had been taken
on an earlier recce day, when Algie was absent.
A number of inflatable pigs were to become tour regulars. At some of the outdoor shows one would float over the audience before
being pulled in to disappear behind the stage. Later an identical, but cheaper, cousin would rise in its place and, filled
with helium with a propane stomach, explode in a conflagration that on the Hollywood scale of disaster effects was well up
at the
Die Hard
end. At one venue, the propane was replaced with a mix of oxygen and acetylene as an experiment, producing such an explosion
that Mark Fisher’s ears still ring, not from the blast, but from the dressing-down he received from Steve O’Rourke.
We also had some fireworks which when they detonated released sheep-shaped parachutes which then gently floated down. The
company which made these for us had polished the technique for a Saudi Arabian sheikh whose picture was similarly released
for his birthday celebrations – this particular company told us they inherited the job when their predecessors, at the sheikh’s
enthronement, had inadvertently used a picture of his cousin, who had just been deposed…
The
Animals
tour was our first ‘branded’ tour. Previously material from a new album would naturally have been included in any gigs on
tour, but this was the first time that we were conscious of going out on the road specifically to promote a particular album.
The tour opened at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund on 23rd January 1977 and after Europe in February and the UK in March we
headed over to the States for three weeks in April and
May, and a further three weeks in June and July.
We had underestimated our promoters’ enthusiasm for the pig motif. In San Francisco, Bill Graham had organised a pen full
of the animals backstage, and none of them seemed very happy to be there. David’s wife Ginger, who he had met on one of our
US tours a couple of years earlier, was a strict vegetarian and animal lover, and she was aghast. She leapt into the pen demanding
their freedom, and refused to leave until oaths had been sworn as to their future welfare.
Marcel Avram, our long-time German promoter, presented us with a piglet in Munich. Once again a home had to be found for the
new arrival, and with various apparently hungry Germans eyeing the piglet greedily, our tour manager Warwick McCredie was
drafted in to take it back to the hotel for the night. We were staying at a particularly smart Hilton close to the venue,
but Warwick managed to smuggle the piglet in without detection. The real problem was that Warwick’s room had mirrored walls,
and the pig kept seeing a myriad of other pigs staring at him. He did not care for this. During the night the piglet cracked
most of the glass at floor level, as well as spreading a film of excrement along every surface. The next morning I saw Steve
peel off to the reception desk as we hurriedly left after surveying the full horror. I never could quite bring myself to ask
him about the conversation that ensued.