Sheep

The song Sheep by Pink Floyd did not start out as such. In 1974, during the Dark Side of the Moon tours, the band premiered three new tracks in the first block of the shows. One of them was Raving and Drooling, an instrumental with a repetitive riff in F♯7 and A7 that Waters had built with a sustained chord in the voice, later crossed with a processed synthesizer to sound almost inhuman. The name came from an idea of Waters himself: during the performances, a random fragment of a BBC Radio broadcast with DJ Jimmy Young was played, cut and rearranged to simulate someone speaking nonsense. The lyrics accompanying that section were different at the time, but the seed was already there: a theme that spoke of control and submission, with an air of social criticism that would later become more explicit.

The definitive version arrived in 1976, when Pink Floyd recorded Animals in their own Britannia Row studios in Islington, London. Waters had already rewritten the lyrics to turn it into an allegory about the working class —the "sheep"— who blindly follow the "dogs" and "pigs" of power until one day they wake up. The central passage, between 6:27 and 7:08, is a parody of Psalm 23 where the biblical text is distorted to speak of sacrifice and rebellion: "With shining knives, free my soul. Hang me on hooks in high places." That section, narrated with a vocoder by an uncredited roadie, clashes with the rest of the song, which moves between distorted guitar riffs and a bass that sounds like a constant threat. The recording of Richard Wright's Rhodes piano —overloaded with sheep sound effects— and the bass line that David Gilmour recorded in overdub, using a style similar to Waters', give it that dark weight that contrasts with the irony of the text. By the time Animals was released on January 21, 1977, Sheep was already a key link in the album: a biting critique disguised as a rock song, where sound and lyrics reinforce each other.