Pigs (Three Different Ones)

What happened next became part of Pink Floyd legend. To bring Waters’s idea to life, On a December day in 1976, Hipgnosis arranged for a photo shoot featuring a 40-foot long inflatable pig floating in the sky above the Battersea plant. The moody sky was full of billowing clouds that made for a dramatic backdrop, which Hipgnosis cofounder Aubrey Powell captured on film. The pig was attached to the ground by a cable. Sharpshooters were positioned to take it down should the pig break free from its moorings. But the pig malfunctioned and never took flight. So the shoot was rescheduled for another day. The Higpnosis crew returned the next day for Take Two, but Higpnosis had forgotten to ask the police sharpshooters to come back. Big mistake. This time around, the pig successfully took flight. And as Powell remembers in For the Love of Vinyl, “Suddenly there was a communal gasp. The cable had snapped in a fierce gust of wind and the Pig drifted up and away into the flight path to Heathrow airport. It finally disappeared from view at 30,000 feet.”