Waters could see Battersea Power Station with its four fluted and curiously haunting chimneys from his flat. It is likely no mistake that Pink Floyd’s Animals album was a kind of vivisection of the darker side of humanity – or that it was heralded by the flying pig, although Algie himself seemed rather comic. Was it a protest against rich businessmen? Whatever it was, this childlike ditty was one of the songs that inspired Charles Manson, the American criminal, singer-songwriter and Haight-Ashbury cult leader, and his followers to murder actress Sharon Tate and eight other “piggies” in an orgy of savage killings in the summer of 1969. Later in 1968, George Harrison sang Piggies on the Beatles’ White Album. In the book’s famous last sentence, the humbled creatures of Animal Farm, standing outside the farmhouse where pigs and men were drinking together, “looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Orwell’s pigs were corrupt, venal, drunken, violent – and, in all too many ways, very much like us. Perhaps both songwriters were influenced by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the darkly satirical fable first published in 1945 that has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The back cover showed the pig’s tail.įor Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, as for George Harrison, pigs had a meaning of sorts. The memorable gatefold sleeve of the band’s first album, Ahead Rings Out, featured a bright pink pig’s head sporting sunglasses, headphones, a ring through its nose and a cigarette in its mouth. He solemnly intoned, “Thou shalt ever more be known as Blodwyn Pig”. When, the singer-songwriter-guitarist Mick Abrahams was looking for a name for his new band, pianist Graham Waller listened to the jazz-infused blues-rock band.
Pig references were common at the time in the world of rock music. It was Barrett, though, who had given Pink Floyd its first chart hit the previous year with the dippy-trippy song Arnold Layne. The members of Pink Floyd, however, were traumatised by the effect that LSD had on their colleague Syd Barrett, who was excluded from the group in April 1968 as he became catatonic and unable to perform. They symbolised the authorities that beat up protesting students in US university campuses and busted members of English rock bands, including The Beatles. ‘Pigs’ – as policemen, not the animal – had been an obsession for hippies and rock bands since at least 1967. The plastic pig took off, crash-landing in the River Plate. The famous slogan recalled the 30,000 people who were “disappeared” by their country’s brutal dictatorship between 19 when the military ‘pigs’ were forced from power following their humiliating defeat in the Falklands War.
This time, the inflatable pig read “Nunca Más”, or “never again”. That March, Waters had played two nights at a stadium in Buenos Aires.