Legend has it that the inflatable pig that Pink Floyd flew over Battersea Power Station during a 1976 photo shoot broke free, wreaking havoc with British airspace before landing comfortably numb in rural Kent.
A mishap? Publicity stunt? Eccentric Floydian Spectacle?
Whatever the intention, Pink Floyd came away with one of the most iconic album covers of their career, forever linking the band with the crumbling power station in South London. Abandoned since 1983, it stands as a surreal memory of when floating pigs ruled the sky and The Floyd subverted the airwaves.
Photographs from the December 1976 photo shoot for Pink Floyd’s Animals:
And a sketch for the original cover concept:
therockfile.wordpress.com 
It was _Animals_ day in “Syncopated Pandemonium” (my Pink Floyd graduate seminar) this past week, and man do I still love this album! I’d put “Dogs” as one of my top five songs of all time. Some of my students see it as the start of _The Wall_ era, but I read it as the end of their amazing middle period, the three albums 73-77.
Trivia item: Gilmour’s amazing work on “Dogs” is a redo. He already recorded what he describes as awesome tracks, but they were accidentally erased the next day, so the version we know is a repair job! It’s their “fish that got away” moment.
Thanks for the comment Shaugn. The next time you host an Animals Appreciation Day, be sure to invite The Rock File. My favorite Floyd album, bar none. The fact that Gilmore had to re-record accidentally erased tracks is mind blowing. I spent my morning explaining to my four year old son why Gilmore’s tonal guitar shifts are some of the best in the rock canon. “You gotta be crazy…”
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