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Fact #131155

When:

Short story:

A 40-ft pink inflatable pig, being used by Pink Floyd in the creation of their Animals album cover, breaks loose from its moorings near Battersea Power Station and drifts across London, England, UK. At one point in its drift, it is allegedly rfused permission to land at Heathrow Airport.

Full article:

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) : The company that did all our album covers, Hipgnosis, they’d come up with some ideas for the cover of Animals that I thought were useless. So Dave, being Dave, said, ‘Well, if you think you could come up with something better…” And me, being me, said, “Well, I think I could…”

I’ve heard it said that I cycled to Battersea on my bike and got the idea for the cover that way … I did have a bike in those days, but I really don’t know if I used it to cycle round to Battersea. I’ve no memory of that. I did go to the power station to look at it as a potential site, but I can’t remember cycling around.

I don’t have a bike any more. I wouldn’t dream of trying to ride a bike along an English country lane, certainly not around here (Hampshire, UK) where people drive like lunatics

And then I had the inflatable pig idea. I was already thinking about doing the live show by that point. We would have these wonderful ideas, and then we had to get designers and craftsmen in to see if they could really be done. Like the sheep. We managed to get these sort of Chinese cannons that fired out these sheets of tissue paper weighted with lead. So they were shot into the air and they were dragged down by the lead weights which were attached to the legs so they opened up as they descended, and it was like a flock of sheep drifting down from the sky. That’s how I met Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, doing the Animals show. Mark was an architect and Jonathan was doing … I don’t remember what.