A COLLECTION OF GREAT DANCE SONGS

This collection of great dance songs by Pink Floyd, if anything, is a testimony to the band`s worldwide selling power. Released in early `81 on the insistence of their record label EMI this short anthology is a blatant example of corporate exploitation capitalizing on the monumental success of artists` previous work, in this case Pink Floyd`s 1979 Wall album. Despite soaring into the top forty charts on both sides of the Atlantic ( in 2001 it achieved multi-platinum status ), niether of Pink Floyd`s principals, Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour were too thrilled with this executive decision ( at least they could agree on something during this waning period of the band )! Gilmour would even remark that it was "just awful". Featuring just 6 tracks expropriated off 5 studio albums from the seventies they are for the most part just studio re-mixes with the exception of Money which was re-recorded for legal reasons and is virtually identical to the original with minor variations in the guitar parts and Sheep from the Animals LP which remains untouched.

What really adds to the sorrow and disappointment here though is the waste of the brilliant cover concept from the Hipgnosis art studios on such a superfluous album. The suspended body movement of a pair of puppet-like dancers suggest the contradictory nature of the title and the nonmotile nature of Pink Floyd`s music dutifully.

The greatness of the music presented here notwithstanding, which is arguably the most accessible material put out by the band in the seventies, this anthology is a proverbial slap in the face to loyal Pink floyd fans who would have had all the albums from which the material is drawn anyway. At best it is reserved for the uninitiated masses who just have to have something by the greatest rock band in the universe to gather dust amongst the ABBA and Elton John albums in their record collections in 1981.