The Greatest Album Cover Backstory.

As far as I'm concerned, Pink Floyd is the world's weirdest band. Founded in 1965 at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), the band's output is baffling to non-fans. Twenty-minute prog-rock jams running an entire side of the vinyl? Philosophical concept albums joined together like an operatic theatre piece? Band members so devoid of personality that they never put their own faces on their albums? Definitely not normal, and that's just the music.

Weirder still are the band's adventures, like the time they accidentally shut down Heathrow airport with a rogue piece of touring equipment.

In December 1976, the band was putting the finishing touches on their latest album, Animals. Coming off the heels of the sublime Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, this newest album was, well, a weird animal. It was yet another concept album dreamed up by bassist (and increasingly dictatorial leader of the band) Roger Waters. The concept was simpler than their previous two efforts: Waters merely took the allegorical plot of George Orwell's Animal Farm and wrote songs about various animals standing in for certain classes of society. The difference was instead of writing a satirical takedown of communism, Waters penned a withering critique of capitalism. The Dogs were the ruthless businessmen stabbing each other in the back, the Pigs the various levels of corrupt authority, and the Sheep were the ordinary schmucks with nothing live for, at least until they overthrew the Dogs.

It was a bold concept, and the band utilized more straightforward instrumentation this time around. Guitarist David Gilmour's shrill guitar riffs were pushed up in the mix while keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason found their contributions muted a bit. Listeners would have plenty of time to notice this sonic change because the songs on Animals ran, in typical Pink Floyd fashion, between 10 and 17 minutes.

But as the band reached the end of the recording sessions, the problem of designing an album cover inevitably came up. Unusually for the time, Pink Floyd employed their own album designers, Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson who operated under the name 'Hipgnosis'. Being employed by the band rather than the record label meant Powell and Thorgerson could get away with some truly whacky schemes. The last album cover they turned in involved quite literally lighting a stuntman on fire to make a point about business deals 'burning' people.

For Animals, Hipgnosis's first ideas evidently didn't pay much attention to Waters' lyrics. The sample drawing for the album cover showed a young boy holding a teddy bear watching his parents have sex ('copulating like animals' as it were). The band sniffed at these tawdry suggestions and instead focused on something to do with flying pigs and a very special London landmark, Battersea Power Station.

At the time, Battersea Power Station was still actively generating electricity for London homes. The iconic Art Deco brick design with four chimneys on the station's corners was overseen by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of Liverpool Cathedral and the red telephone boxes so intimately associated with Britain. Roger Waters, who studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic, no doubt saw the building's appeal for Pink Floyd's latest album cover.

The idea that finally came together was trademark kookiness: the band would tie a giant balloon of a pig between two of the chimneys and photograph the iconic building with said pig prominently featured. But rather than simply insert a pig onto a picture of the power station, Waters insisted the band take an actual photograph of an actual pig balloon for greater authenticity. Pink Floyd being Pink Floyd, they had the resources to bring this half-baked idea into reality. A German balloon manufacturer would design the forty-foot pig, named 'Algie', which would indeed be hoisted all the way up between the chimneys and photographed. To prevent any mishaps during the photoshoot, a marksman and his rifle were on hand, ready to shoot the pig down should it break free.

On the first day, December 2nd, Algie refused to inflate and the weather was rubbish anyway, so the photoshoot was rescheduled. The following day, December 3rd, the band, Algie, and Hipgnosis were back at Battersea Power Station, but the marksman either did not turn up or was simply not hired for a second day.

It should surprise no-one what happened next. As dummer Nick Mason recounted in his memoir years later, "There was a sudden gust of wind, the steel hawser snapped, and Algie was off, ascending into the heavens at about two thousand feet a minute, a lot faster than the police chase helicopter scrambled to intercept it. This was not a deliberate stunt and we were well aware that apart from losing an expensive piece of kit we could cause a major aviation disaster. Lawyers were summoned, emergency plans mapped out, and scapegoats nominated." The pig initially drifted off towards the west and several pilots coming into Heathrow reported the flying pig to the control tower. Other pilots reportedly saw the pig but refused to say anything because they were worried they'd be written up for drinking on duty. The RAF was also despatched to find the pig, but were just as unsuccessful as the Metropolitan Police.

Pink Floyd abruptly fled the scene, and the Met arrested Aubrey Powell in short order. Recovering the pig became the band's highest priority while Powell was quickly released. Radio stations throughout Britain urged listeners to be on the lookout for the pig and to call a special telephone number in case they spotted it. Naturally, prank calls from Pink Floyd's assorted audience of stoners and Bluto Blutarskies flooded the phone lines.

But at around 9PM that night, Aubrey Powell received a call from an angry farmer in the nearby county of Kent.

"Are you the guy looking for a pig?" the outraged voice ranted down the phone.

Powell confirmed that he was. The story the farmer relayed to the band went as follows: apparently his cows were simply minding their own business when suddenly a helium UFO shaped like a pig staged a landing on his farm! The cows understandably panicked and caused a great ruckus while the pig happily concluded his airborne adventure.

Algie was picked up (remarkably unharmed) from the furious farmer and his terrified cows that same night. Astonishingly, the band were given permission to take Algie back out to Battersea Power Station the following day, provided they actually bring the sharpshooter this time. This they did and the photoshoot went off without a hitch.

Ironically, Powell hated the results. The sky on the third day was clear and cloudless, extremely boring compared to the mix of clouds and colors found on the first day. So Powell did what Roger Waters wanted to avoid: he superimposed a picture of the pig from the third day onto a picture of the power station from the first day.

Animals was released in January 1977 to great anticipation and high sales; near aviation disasters made for great publicity. Soon, the band and Algie hit the road to promote the record.

The tour was a comedic disaster. Pink Floyd's popularity meant only stadiums could meet the demand, and the band simply could not cope with such large audiences. Their state-of-the-art quadrophonic speaker system was so complex that it never sounded right, and audiences were usually too wasted to appreciate the heavy philosophical lyrics on offer.

Other baroque mishaps involving pigs beset the band along the way. Nick Mason again: "In San Francisco, Bill Graham had organised a pen full of the animals backstage, and none of them seemed very happy to be there. David’s wife Ginger, who he had met on one of our US tours a couple of years earlier, was a strict vegetarian and animal lover, and she was aghast. She leapt into the pen demanding their freedom, and refused to leave until oaths had been sworn as to their future welfare.

"Marcel Avram, our long-time German promoter, presented us with a piglet in Munich. Once again a home had to be found for the new arrival, and with various apparently hungry Germans eyeing the piglet greedily, our tour manager Warwick McCredie was drafted in to take it back to the hotel for the night. We were staying at a particularly smart Hilton close to the venue, but Warwick managed to smuggle the piglet in without detection. The real problem was that Warwick’s room had mirrored walls, and the pig kept seeing a myriad of other pigs staring at him. He did not care for this. During the night the piglet cracked most of the glass at floor level, as well as spreading a film of excrement along every surface. The next morning I saw Steve [O'Rourke, their manager] peel off to the reception desk as we hurriedly left after surveying the full horror. I never could quite bring myself to ask him about the conversation that ensued.”

Even on the shows without livestock issues, Pink Floyd still suffered enormous problems due the ever-expanding list of special effects and balloon inflatables. In Cleveland, the band used their tour jet to buzz the stadium for an extra oomph, which quickly earned them a 1500 dollar fine for flying too close to the ground. In Milwaukee, the practice of blowing up cheaper pig balloons at the end of the song Pigs (Three Different Ones) was discontinued when the normal explosive mix of propane and helium was substituted for acetylene and oxygen. The resulting explosion was so powerful that chunks of burning pig rained onto the stage and nearby cars in the parking lot. As Mason wryly commented afterward, “[Tour designer]Mark Fisher’s ears still ring, not from the blast, but from the dressing-down he received from Steve O’Rourke.” Fans evidentially did not care about the many threats to their safety, seeing as how they often brought their own fireworks to the gigs.

The depressing denouement to this cowboy operation came on July 6th, 1977, the final date of the tour. Waters was so annoyed by another firework going off mid-song that he soon spat in the face of a noisy fan. Mason found this behavior utterly strange and out of character. Gilmour found the atmosphere so demoralizing that he sat out the encore in despair.   

Waters, meanwhile, realized just how alienating the stadium experience had been for him. He found himself wishing there was a literal wall between himself and the audience. After the tour, he began making a series of demos for a new Pink Floyd project.

He called it The Wall.