Pink Floyd’s former bassist/vocalist Roger Waters announced that the band will be releasing new mixes of the recordings from their classic 1977 album Animals. He also noted that the remix release won’t have any liner notes included because Pink Floyd’s lead guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour “wanted Pink Floyd to remain enigmatic.”
Waters posted the full statement on his YouTube channel since he was banned from posting on Pink Floyd’s Facebook page, as he points out, by David Gilmour. “We have a new mix of Animals, which we finished about two years ago,” He stated. “It’s been sitting in a cupboard because a chap named Mark Blake wrote some sleeve notes for it which I then helped him correct a little bit, and it then got passed around, and I thought they were good and they were true. David, on the other hand, thought that they were good and that they were true, but they should not be included on the sleeve notes because he wanted Pink Floyd to be enigmatic.”
He continues to announce that the new mixes are now going to be released without the liner notes, and he has shared those liner notes on his personal webpage instead. Blake’s liner notes discuss the themes present in Animals, as well as some of the recording process and how the album’s iconic artwork was decided on.
On the webpage, Waters also mixes some personal notes in with Blake’s notes and adds emphasis on what he contributed to some of Pink Floyd’s most famous recordings. Waters makes it clear that he believes there was more to the liner notes holdup than simply being enigmatic. He theorizes, “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.'”
Waters also announced that he is working on writing his memoir, saying that if he hadn’t started writing it during the COVID-19 lockdown, he probably would’ve always been too busy to write it. The webpage also includes an excerpt from the memoir, in which Waters shows an example of Gilmour claiming credit for the cash register recordings on “Money” in an interview, alleging that those were his creation.
He states, “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!”
There has been a lot of contention between Waters and Gilmour recently. Last year, Waters criticized Gilmour for not posting any updates on Waters’ solo news, saying that Gilmour “thinks he is Pink Floyd.” Waters’ latest solo news is that he has rescheduled his This Is Not Drill tour for Summer 2022.
Photo credit: Sharon Alagna
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