David Gilmour’s Heil Talk Box and the Three Pigs in ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’

For the guitar solo in “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” David Gilmour used a Heil Talk Box — not a wah or a synth, but a tube that fed his guitar signal into his mouth so he could shape the sound with his lips and vocals. The Heil model was the standard road-talk box of the 1970s, and Gilmour’s use of it on that solo (especially on the Animals album) gave the pig character a snarling, human-like voice.

As for the three pigs Roger Waters was skewering: the first is a generic “big man” figure — a corrupt businessman or politician (often read as a stand-in for any capitalist pig). The second pig is moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, who campaigned against what she saw as obscenity in British media. The third is Margaret Thatcher, then a rising Conservative MP, years before she became Prime Minister. Waters later said Thatcher was the most obvious target, and the lyrics “you fucked up old hag” make that clear.