AUSTIN SCAGGSPosted May 29, 2008 8:30 AM
Photo: Getty Images
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In Issue 1053, Rolling Stone tracks the story of perhaps the most famous prop in the history of rock & roll: Pink Floyd's inflatable pig. From the hog's humble beginnings on the cover of Floyd's 1977 album Animals to its recent unpiloted escape from Coachella, the creature has become a pop-culture icon (it even merited a reference on an episode of The Simpsons). The man who dreamed up the floating swine, Roger Waters, shared the tale behind the pig, from its origins in the late Seventies to its future plans.
Let's talk about the pig's beginnings. The first one was built in December 1976, and its name was Algie?
That's quite possible. The first pig was actually about eight feet long. It was a prototype that I had made in order to make a mock-up of the idea of the album cover to show to the rest of the boys in the band. I had this plastic pig made and sort of held it up in front of them on a piece of bamboo to express the idea of an inflatable pig in a power station.
When did you come up with that image?
Storm [Thorgerson] and [Aubrey] Powell from Hipgnosis had done all of our covers to date, and had come up with a bunch of ideas for Animals. We had the usual meeting and there wasn't a huge amount of enthusiasm for any of [the designs]. So I said, "Hey, let me have a think about it, and see if I can come up with an idea." I'd always loved Battersea Power Station, just as a piece of architecture. And I thought it had some good symbolic connections with Pink Floyd as it was at that point. A) I thought it was a power station, that's pretty obvious. And B) that it had four legs. If you inverted it, it was like a table. And there were four bits to it, representing the four members of the band. But it was upside down, so it was like a tortoise on its back — not going anywhere, really. I had already started thinking about using inflatables during a live show. Parachuting sheep and floating pigs and all of that. And so I thought why not combine the ideas for the live show with this symbol of a decaying rock group, and put them together? Added to all that, kind of simple stuff about pigs flying, the unlikely nature of that. I did this mock-up and I took it to the band and the band all went, "Yeah, that's really good. Let's do that." So we had a big pig made and spent a few days at Battersea Power Station waiting for the right conditions to take the right photograph.
And you wound up having to assemble the photograph piece by piece?
The first day was that beautiful sky, but the pig escaped. The rope broke and it drifted off, up into the flight path at Heathrow. Then the next day, we flew another pig, and it was a bright blue sky, and so the photographs weren't nearly as interesting as they had been from the day before. So in fact we stripped the pig from the second day into the photograph from the first day that didn't have a pig in it because it had already escaped. And that is what appeared on the album cover.
How many pigs went on tour?
There were multiple pigs because on the Animals tour, I used a lot of inflatables. It was an inflatable family, a man and a woman and two and a half children. There was a refrigerator that was inflatable, and a giant Cadillac. And then there was the pig. And the pig would be tethered above the stage, and he had helium in his body and propane in his legs. Then we'd light the propane. So the pig came down in flames every night, which is quite dramatic. And helium as you know is an inert gas, it doesn't burn at all, but the propane went off nicely and so it provided a nice, but kind of controlled fireball at a certain point in the show. So we used one pig every night for Animals.
A Pig's Tale: Roger Waters Traces the History of Rock's Most Famous Prop
A Pig's Tale: Roger Waters Traces the History of Rock's Most Famous Prop : Rolling Stone
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