you radiate cold shafts of broken glass

More election-themed stuff to come soon, probably, but for the moment here's just a quick tip of the hat to the Independent's John Rentoul for managing to weave a selection of Pink Floyd lyrics into this piece about the Conservative Party's manifesto launch.

The connection is that the launch took place at Battersea Power Station, famously used for the cover of the Floyd's 1977 album Animals, whence the lyrics in the Independent piece are taken (from Sheep, mostly, though there is a snippet of Pigs in there as well). One of their less well-known albums, it probably suffered from being an album released at the height of punk that featured just five songs: two of them being short acoustic bits of a minute or so each that bookend the other three which are 17, 11 and 10 minutes long respectively - not really in line with the punk ethos of 3 minutes, tops.

Paradoxically, though, this is their punk-est album musically - none of the noodly synths and wailing gospel vocals from The Dark Side Of The Moon here; it's all pretty savage and guitar-driven. Pigs and Sheep are both cracking tunes; to be honest Dogs is a bit long (at 17 minutes) and the central metaphor is a bit overdone by the end, mainly because it's a bit more obvious and less clever than Roger Waters thinks it is. It does feature a couple of glorious long double-tracked David Gilmour guitar solos, though, so it's not all bad news.