Mass aquatic manslaughter: The day Pink Floyd killed thousands of fish
There are some stories in music history that feel more like comedy sketches than true tales all thanks to their sheer ridiculousness. Pink Floyd has contributed to a few of them, with plenty of trippy theories or baffling anecdotes connected to the group.
There’s the time when their inflatable pig balloon was loose and tormented London. There’s the tale of their live album, recorded in front of no one but the ghosts of Pompeii. There’s even the story of how they became the first band to have their music played into the galaxies of space. But none of them are quite as stupid as the story of the day when Pink Floyd killed thousands of fish.
It was May 15th, 1971. Syd Barrett had left the band, and the new lineup was beginning to ramp up their sound, slowly moving towards the epic nature that would eventually reveal itself on Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973. But for now, they were touring and performing extensively, including this show at Crystal Palace Gardens, where a series of gigs was being put on for the countercultural crowd. Throughout the 1970s, the park hosted names like The Beach Boys, The Faces, Elton John, Lou Reed, Santana, Bob Marley, and Joe Cocker. However, none of their appearances became quite as infamous as Pink Floyd’s ecological disaster of a show.
The issues first arose thanks to a giant inflatable octopus. It seems that the band really had a penchant for blow-up animals, and for this gig, they installed a huge octopus on the pond, with its tentacles spread across the water. As the show continued, the octopus was supposed to inflate and grow thanks to underwater smoke flares. However, the thing with the turn-off, tune-in, drop-out crowd is that they’re not really ones for following health and safety rules. They wanted to get their tripping little mits on that mollusc, so before the show even began, their fans had torn holes in the prop.
This means that when the flares started, they were pumping gas directly into the water, slowly fumigating its peaceful population of fish.
But it gets worse. Pink Floyd were so set on creating an absolute sensory overload of a show, that they’d also come equipt with dry ice, orange smoke bombs and fireworks; all of which they’d also decided to simply dump into the pond. The cost of the spectacle was a mass aquatic slaughter as the fish were poisoned.
It goes even further, too. If all of that wasn’t ridiculous enough, the story goes that Pink Floyd’s wall of sound delivered the final blow. By this point, the band were using a huge quadraphonic sound system made up of surround sound speakers placed all around the venue. When the band took to the stage to play their set, the sheer power coming from their amps rattled through the ground, sending sound waves ripping through the pond. The sound levels hit 95 dB, which is loud by anyone’s standards. But if you’re a fish fighting for your life in a poisoned pond, watching your fish friends suffocate thanks to some rock band’s failed attempts at stagecraft, it’s not looking good for you.
In the end, there were no survivors. The park’s pond became a mass grave where apparently even the water lilies died.
To ramp up the stupidity of the story even more, Pink Floyd were then asked to cover the funeral costs. The band were hit with a bill from the council to repay the cost of the thousands of dead fish and restore marine life to the garden. They were blamed outright, found guilty of fish manslaughter with the exact death toll unknown.
