PINK FLOYD Vinyl Releases Continue With Animals Reissued On Vinyl For First Time In Over 20 Years; Wish You Were Here, The Dark Side Of The Moon Also Being Reintroduced
October 7, 2016, 8 years ago
On 18th November 2016, Pink Floyd Records will continue the reintroduction of the Pink Floyd catalogue on vinyl with Animals remastered from the original analogue master tapes and reissued on vinyl for the first time in over 20 years. Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side Of The Moon are also back in stock on vinyl from October 14th and November 4th respectively.
These albums began the band’s most successful run of releases, gaining them a whole new audience around the world as their musical style progressed and they toured extensively.
After over eight months of continuous recording at their own Britannia Row studios in 1976, Animals was originally released in 1977 and became one of the band’s most popular albums. The album is amongst Pink Floyd’s most recognizable covers featuring the iconic pig flying above Battersea Power Station (‘Algie’ the pig was most recently seen flying above London’s V&A Museum to launch The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains).
Often cited as one of the greatest albums of all time, The Dark Side Of The Moon, released in 1973, has gone on to sell in excess of 50 million copies and is the band’s most commercially successful album. Including the songs “Time”, “The Great Gig In The Sky” and “Money”, this became their first No.1 chart placing in the US.
Released in 1975, Wish You Were Here was Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album and features the band’s epic tribute to former member Syd Barrett, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. The album reached No.1 in the UK and US charts.
All previous Pink Floyd studio albums are available on vinyl now.
“Childhood's End”, from Pink Floyd's seventh album Obscured By Clouds, has been remixed from the original master tapes in 2016 by Andy Jackson and Damon Iddins.
In February 1972, the band were already playing The Dark Side Of The Moon live and starting to record its songs, but production was briefly halted when they accepted their second commission for filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, to create the soundtrack for his feature film La Vallée.
In the last week of February 1972, Pink Floyd started work, at Strawberry Studios in Herouville, France, and as David Gilmour later described: “We sat in a room, wrote, recorded, like a production line.” The result was 10 pieces of music: six songs and four instrumentals, which Melody Maker described as “some of the most aggressive instrumentals the Floyd have recorded.”
David Gilmour’s “Childhood's End” was one of the few songs from the soundtrack to be included in Pink Floyd's live shows and was featured on European dates, starting on December 1st, 1972, and at the start of the band's March 1973 tour of North America, usually with an extended instrumental passage.
Pink Floyd will release The Early Years 1965-1972 on Friday, November 11th. A comprehensive 27-disc boxed set, it pulls together material from the Pink Floyd archive, as well as licensed Radio and TV recordings, to comprise a deluxe package that includes seven individual book-style volumes, (six of which are dedicated to particular years), featuring much previously unreleased material, as well as bonus content, reproduction memorabilia, and the band's first recording from 1965, released on CD for the first time.
Check out an unboxing video below:
The packages contain more than 100 photographs of Pink Floyd, the majority of which are previously unseen, as well as more than 40 items of memorabilia in special wallets. In addition, Pink Floyd's first five UK singles have been included in the box, on 7" vinyl with replica sleeves.
The Early Years 1965-1972 box set contains unreleased tracks, BBC Radio Sessions, remixes, outtakes and alternative versions. Ten CDs, nine DVDs and eight Blu-ray discs contain more than 130 audio tracks, as well as more than 14 hours of audio-visual material. There are more than 20 unreleased songs, plus previously unreleased live audio, rare concert footage, feature films and new sound mixes. Previously unreleased tracks include 1967's Vegetable Man and In The Beechwoods, both mixed especially for this release.
The six individual year-specific book-style packages will be released separately early in 2017, although the bonus volume, Continu/ation, will be exclusive to the box set, as will the larger memorabilia items, which are reproduced in actual size for the box.
Pink Floyd’s “Grantchester Meadows” (taken from The Early Years 1965 – 1972) is a Roger Waters song, originally performed solo on the Ummagumma album, that celebrates the English countryside, as in other compositions such as “Time”. This special group performance, taped for the BBC, with acoustic guitars and vocals from Roger Waters and David Gilmour, plus additional piano from Richard Wright and taped songbirds, successfully evokes a summer’s day in Grantchester, a small village close to Cambridge, England.
Grantchester’s famous former residents include the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke, who moved there and subsequently wrote a poem of homesickness entitled The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
Creative Director: Aubrey Powell, Hipgnosis. 2016 footage directed and edited by Nick Edwards. Performance footage director: John Coney for KQED, San Francisco 1970. Audio recorded for BBC Radio, 12 May 1969.
Also released on Friday, November 11th will be a companion edition, Cre/ation – The Early Years 1967-1972, a 2CD collection of some of the highlights of the box set, focussing on the band's material from 1967 to 1972.
2CD tracklisting here. Full tracklisting here.