The Great Pink Pig Escape: How the Animals Tour Inflatable Broke Free

On the first day of the 1977 Animals tour, the band unveiled a 30-foot inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station for the album cover shoot. The pig broke free from its moorings and drifted into the flight path of Heathrow Airport, forcing planes to divert. It eventually landed in a field in Kent, where a farmer reportedly found it and called the police, thinking it was a strange weather balloon.

The on-tour inflatable pig was even more cursed. At concerts, it was supposed to rise from behind the stage during “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” but it frequently got tangled in lighting rigs, burst from high winds, or simply refused to inflate. At one show in Montreal, the band abandoned the attempt entirely while Roger Waters yelled at the crew. The pig became a symbol of the tour’s bloated scale and the mounting tension that would soon explode into The Wall.