A large inflatable pig flew above London’s Battersea power station yesterday in a stunt designed to mark the reissue of British band Pink Floyd’s 14 studio albums by record label EMI Music.
The animal, measuring 30ft long and 15ft high, was inflated with helium at dawn for the event, held 35 years after the making of the iconic album cover for Animals, featuring a similar flying pig.
EMI had planned to use the same inflatable which had been kept at a workshop since the original shoot, but two weeks ago it was deemed not to be airworthy and a replica was made.
The artwork on the Animals album was a combination of the background of Battersea power station taken on December 2nd, 1976, and the pig, photographed on December 4th.
On December 3rd that year, the pig slipped its moorings and floated into the Heathrow airport flight path before being recovered by a farmer in Kent in southeast England.
Under the banner “Why Pink Floyd . . . ?”, EMI Music is releasing all 14 Pink Floyd studio albums remastered and available digitally. They are also available as one Discovery box set.
Also on sale from yesterday are special editions of one of the band’s most acclaimed albums, The Dark Side of The Moon, extended to feature unreleased music from Pink Floyd archives.
Pink Floyd, behind seminal albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, is one of the most successful rock bands of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million albums worldwide.
Also famous for its acrimonious split and one-off reunion at charity concert Live 8 in 2005, Pink Floyd re-signed to long-time record label EMI in January in a five-year deal.
The agreement also brought to an end a legal dispute between the sides over EMI’s right to “unbundle” the band’s records and sell individual tracks online.