Pink Floyd's Animals at 50 Arrives With Unreleased Roger Waters Tracks

On December 2, 1976, Roger Waters inflated a 12-metre pig balloon called Algie at Battersea Power Station for a cover photo shoot. The pig broke free, drifted across Heathrow Airport's flight paths, and landed in a field in Kent. That accident became the image on Pink Floyd's Animals. The album it announced was no accident at all.

Now comes Animals 50, the 50th anniversary box set. Paste Magazine reported on November 5 that the set includes a previously unreleased Roger Waters composition, 'Young Nicholas Jon,' plus alternate studio versions of 'Sheep' and 'Dogs.' The 10-minute original radio edit of 'Sheep' is already available. A full recording of the band's 1977 show at Oakland Coliseum Arena, captured by Reinhard Hohlwein when he was a teenage bootleg filmmaker, is included alongside an interview with Hohlwein conducted by author Jonathan Lethem, a 64-page book with Lethem's liner notes, and an excerpt from the memoir of Hipgnosis designer Aubrey 'Po' Powell about the cover art.

The Album That Got Overshadowed Twice

Animals was released on January 21, 1977. It peaked at No. 2 in the UK and No. 3 in the US. It went on to be certified quadruple platinum in the United States. And yet it has spent most of the last five decades in the shadow of the two records that bracket it, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, the ones that defined Pink Floyd's public legacy in ways Animals did not.

The original critical reception was poor. Rolling Stone gave the album two out of five stars. Pitchfork later scored it ten out of ten. The gap between those two verdicts is not really about taste. It is about whether a listener is willing to sit inside a record that is uncomfortable from its opening note to its last.

Animals is a concept album about mid-1970s British society, structured loosely around George Orwell's Animal Farm, with one difference: unlike in the novella, the sheep rise up and overpower the dogs. Roger Waters wrote virtually all of it at Britannia Row Studios, the band's own facility in Islington, converted from church halls in 1975. Recording began in April 1976. David Gilmour co-wrote 'Dogs,' and his guitar playing is central to what makes the album physically present in a way that Pink Floyd's more atmospheric records are not.

What Gilmour Said About Punk

Gilmour's statement for the box set, quoted by Paste via Rolling Stone, is characteristically measured. 'The mood in music was changing in 1977 and punk was hitting everything,' he says, adding that he suspects punk influenced the album's direction, that it was 'rough and ready' and 'stripped-back' compared to the soundscapes of Wish You Were Here, and that 'we had a lot of fun making it.'

What Gilmour does not mention, and what the box set's promotional framing mostly sidesteps, is what happened during the album's tour. In July 1977, in Montreal, Roger Waters spat at a fan during a show. That incident directly inspired The Wall, which became Pink Floyd's biggest commercial success and effectively ended the band's functioning creative partnership. The fun and the fracture were running on the same timeline.

The Pig's Real Story

The cover art is worth its own examination. Hipgnosis offered three concepts for the album artwork. Waters rejected all of them and designed the concept himself. He lived near Clapham Common, drove past Battersea Power Station regularly, and commissioned a 12-metre inflatable pig called Algie from fabricators in Germany and Australia. On the first day of the shoot, a marksman was on standby in case the pig escaped. On the second day, the marksman was absent, and Algie broke free.

It drifted over Heathrow's flight paths. Air traffic control issued an alert for a 12-metre pig. It landed in Kent. The photos from the first day were considered better anyway, so the final cover used an earlier Battersea image by photographer Howard Bartrop with the pig composited in. The accidental balloon became the definitive image for a deliberately angry record.

Animals 50 is the first time the album has received proper archival treatment. The 1977 Oakland concert film brings a document of the In the Flesh tour into official release, decades after Reinhard Hohlwein filmed it as a teenager. That the box set exists at all is the reassessment the album has been waiting for.

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Sources & further reading

• Paste Magazine: 'Pink Floyd to Celebrate Animals With 50th Anniversary Reissue' (Bea Isaacson, Nov 5 2026)
• Wikipedia: Animals (Pink Floyd album) — recording, chart data, cover art, tour incidents (accessed Nov 6 2026)
• Wikimedia Commons: Roger Waters at Newport Folk Festival, July 24 2015 (digboston via weeklydig, CC BY 2.0)