Which passage of the ‘Bible’ does Pink Floyd parody on ‘Sheep’?
Was there anything that Pink Floyd weren’t willing to draw inspiration from? The band truly knew no limits, to the extent that God himself became a mere muse in the face of their unrelenting devotion to rock.
It was a special moment when Roger Waters realised what kind of songwriter he was going to be. After Barrett left, or was abandoned, Waters tried to emulate his writing style, and failed miserably. He realised he was never supposed to be an experimental musician, and instead, drew from various emotions, both real-world and fictional ones, in a bid to create great music that could be enjoyed at face value or dissected heavily.
Many would argue that the band perfected this writing style on two of their most popular albums, The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, and yes, they’d be right. Despite being decades old, these albums still sound so innovative and special that they could be passed off as brand new. However, while these records remain triumphs, the albums which Pink Floyd released in between them also have moments of brilliance which are often glanced over.
One of them is 1977’s Animals. The tracklist consisted of bloody numbers that invoked feelings of revenge and loss. Roger Waters has since admitted that there were a number of factors that went into the album, one of which was his marriage breaking down. “I was somewhat disturbed at the time,” he said, “It was around that time my first wife left me in the middle of a tour”.
Of course, while Waters’ relationship went into different aspects of this record, it was a feeling of revolution that helped him write the track ‘Sheep’. At the time of creating the song, the Notting Hill riots were ongoing in West London, and the song, which very much depicts the idea of people being led into slaughter and trying to break out of that cycle, was somewhat inspired.
In 1978, Waters said the song was “My sense of what was to come down…with the riots in England”. When he was asked to revisit that comment in 2017, he doubled down, saying, “It may well be about all that. ‘Sheep’ does have that idea of revolution, of people being led to slaughter”.
In a bid to effectively convey this bloody imagery, Waters didn’t just rely on metaphor, but also drew from a passage in the Bible to highlight the idea that large organisations have the ability to influence swaths of people, even when it’s not in their best interest to be influenced in such a way.
So, what biblical passage do Pink Floyd reference in ‘Sheep’?
The verse that Pink Floyd picked was the 23rd Psalm. For those of you who may not be well-versed in the Bible, that passage reads: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake”.
While incredibly beautiful, it doesn’t fit with the narrative of Pink Floyd’s ‘Sheep’. As such, they made some changes so that it reflected the revolutionary gumption of the track. During the song, you hear a slight robotic voice reading their rewritten verse, as it says, “The Lord is my shepherd, he converteth me to lamb cutlets…”
