The poignant reason Roger Waters always travels with an inflatable pig: “It’s a habit”
The pig has remained an enduring and adaptable symbol of the darker side of politics, both in Roger Waters’ solo work and throughout Pink Floyd’s legacy.
It was a perfect symbol for Animals’ thematic seethe. Dropped in 1977 amid the era’s social ennui and punk’s insurrectionary fervour, Waters could spot the political scheming at play behind closed doors, the post-war big statism he cherished ready for the economic bonfire at the hands of the day’s then Tory shadow cabinet.
Taking a lyrical potshot at both future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the broader capitalist system on the album’s ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’, Pink Floyd and the Hipgnosis design team dreamed up the perfectly nightmarish illustration of the finance class’s market plans for society, the pink swine floating above the deindustrialising Battersea Power Station with pertinent surrealism.
During the shoot, the helium-filled pig named ‘Algie’ in fact was accidentally set loose and lost to the UK skies, reportedly spotted by airline pilots at a height of 30,000 ft and causing minor chaos at Heathrow airport’s scheduling. ‘Algie’ was eventually found on Kent farmland, but the floating pig could just as easily drifted into some new realm of political immortality, to this day wielded by both Waters and Pink Floyd’s post-1985 split from their original bassist and conceptual captain.
It’s Waters’ tours that have ensured the pig’s political bite is ever-sharpened, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour claiming their use of the Waters’ image rights skirted by adding giant testicles to their own swine props.
As well as projecting images of Donald Trump on the porcine menace and branding images of US imperialism all over the piggy balloon, Waters also keeps an ear to the ground for the political salience of the cities he tours through, asking the locals about the domestic issues ready to emblazon his pig’s dark message for the evening’s show.
“It’s a habit I got into years ago when I used to travel quite a bit,” Waters told The Talks in 2019.
“I still travel with an inflatable pig!”
“For years, when I did shows, I would always write something on the pig, usually something local. It started off with me writing things; I’d get up on a scaffolding, and I would graffiti the pig before the show. And then I started asking the driver of the cab: ‘We are playing tonight in Stadio Nacional, what should we write on the pig?’”
The pig then unmoors itself from a pure illustration of corporate greed and political failure, but a set of treacherous trotters stamping on the little guys across all the disparate corners of the world, be it Argentina’s “Nunca Más” to its former military dictatorship in Buenos Aires’ 2007 Estadio River Plate show, to the Colombian taxi driver who passed on his “El Pedron Bush Visita el Rancho Colombia” in Bogotá, a protest to then President George Bush’s “landowner” visit to the ‘Latin backyard’ in 2007.
While Pink Floyd’s use of the pig dwells firmly in the Animals lore, Waters has evolved the ‘Algie’ insignia to reflect the political decline gnawing at the world he so abjectly predicted nearly 50 years ago, a glaring image of avarice and greedy destruction that may well float beyond the band’s dazzling songbook as the old progressive giants’ most long-lasting cultural legacy.
