“Dogs” by Pink Floyd

Seventeen minutes of slow, coiled menace, "Dogs" fills a huge slab of Pink Floyd's Animals, which Harvest released in January 1977. It started out in 1974 as "You've Got to Be Crazy", a tune David Gilmour and Roger Waters wrote that turned up in the band's live sets around the Wish You Were Here era, before Waters reworked the words, moved the key so he and Gilmour could both sing it, and gave it a new name.

It creeps in on Gilmour's acoustic guitar, tuned to D and strummed in a jumpy, off-beat pattern over Richard Wright's droning Farfisa, and the chords are strange ones for this band, knotty suspended shapes that all keep hold of the same root note. From there it sprawls: Gilmour's electric leads cut through, Wright stacks Hammond, Rhodes and Minimoog, Nick Mason keeps a patient pulse, and Waters threads a vocoder into the gloom. Brian Humphries recorded and mixed it; the band produced it themselves.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.