Today in 1976, Pink Floyd was working on one of the most iconic album covers of all time… only the situation literally got out of hand.
This was for the album “Animals,” which is a musically complex and lyrically bleak album that classifies people as dogs, pigs or sheep (none of which are compliments).
By this point Pink Floyd was known for its eye-catching album covers as well as the music.
The cover of the band’s previous album, “Wish You Were Here,” showed two men shaking hands, and one of them was on fire.
Before that, they had the iconic prism on the cover of “The Dark Side Of The Moon.”
“Animals” was going to be another stunner: bassist/songwriter Roger Waters and artist Aubrey Powell of the art group Hipgnosis came up with a cover that would show a pig flying over the ominously industrial Battersea Power Station in London.
They had a 40 foot inflatable pig made named Algie, and on December 2, they tried to fly it over the power plant so a photographer could capture the moment.
They also had a sharpshooter on hand just in case the pig got loose.
The weather didn’t cooperate, so they came back the next day to try again.
This time, the pig didn’t cooperate, breaking loose from its moorings and flying way up and off into the distance.
And for whatever reason, that sharpshooter wasn’t on hand for the second day, so there was no way to bring it down.
Pink Floyd’s people had to alert the authorities that a giant pig was now flying around London and could potentially cause problems for airplanes coming in and out of Heathrow.
The wayward pig caused flights to be grounded and made national news; Powell ended up in police custody, at least until someone called and asked “are you the guy looking for a pig? It’s scaring my cows to death in my field.”
Eventually the art team took a studio photo of Algie the pig and pasted that onto another photo of the power station; that composite image became the cover.
Later, Pink Floyd famously flew an inflatable pig over some of their concerts, hopefully with someone on hand to keep it from flying off to who knows where.
Today in 1971, the release of the debut album by the Electric Light Orchestra.
When the record company called to ask the band what the album should be called, they didn’t get through, so a staffer wrote down “no answer.”
The label misunderstood what had happened, and released the album under what they thought was supposed to be the title, “No Answer.”
A few months later they re-released it as a self-titled album.
Pink Floyd’s Pig Gets Loose (Songfacts)
Electric Light Orchestra’s No Answer
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