Pink Floyd – A Collection of Great Dance Songs (1981)

There's no good reasons to make a Pink Floyd compilation album. If there's one band in the world that knows how to make great concept albums, it's Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd's albums are far more important than the individual songs on them. You can see it in the amazing album art, in thought of concepts and in songs that follow each other without gaps. Then why do I have this album? My father was a huge Pink Floyd fan back in the day and he had quite a few albums on vinyl. At some point, our vinyl player broke down and it was the 90's, so people didn't really care about vinyl records, so all the music was bought in CDs. I really liked Pink Floyd as well, and since my father was very pleased about that, he made a tradition to bring me one Pink Floyd CD from all of his work trips. For this reason, I have most of the Pink Floyd albums on CD. My father didn't perhaps realise that this was a compilation album so from one of his trips, he brought me this album.



Compilations are usually really long, but this one only has six songs on it. It's partly because Pink Floyd makes such long songs, but still the length is only 41 minutes, which is very short for a compilation. It does have probably the most well-known Pink Floyd songs on it. But there's a catch. All of these songs are actually slightly different versions from the original album versions. This album was released by a different record label than the one that released the original Pink Floyd albums and they refused to let David Gilmore led Pink Floyd without Roger Waters to release the original versions. You have to be a true Pink Floyd fan to notice the difference, but once you know, you can hear it quite easily.

The album's name is quite strange for a Pink Floyd album as well. There are not that many songs by Pink floyd that anyone would consider dancing to. Maybe the name is ironic as the album cover also features two ballroom dancers tied to the ground unable to move.

Pink Floyd is a curious band for the fact that they were making music videos back when almost no-one else was making them. Of course, The Beatles already started this tradition with their videos, but unlike The Beatles, Pink Floyd didn't portray the band in their videos. they were more like art pieces or short films. Of course this kind of thing got more common later on when MTV started in the 80's. Pink Floyd also made a full length movie of their album The Wall and the most well known song from that album has its music video that puts together some footage from the film and some footage from school kids running around.

The only song that I think is not quite as popular as the other ones, is Sheep. Animals album has a very recognisable album cover with the Battersea power Station and the flying pig, but I think the individual songs were never that recognisable. I'm quite happy that this song is on this album though, because now listening to it, I feel like I should pay more attention to the Animals album.

I will write much more about Pink Floyd later when I'm talking about the individual albums, so i'll just end this here. Pink Floyd has been one of the most important bands in my life and it has, no doubt, influenced numerous other bands out there and thus it has changed the world we live in.

Listen to the album on Spotify.