Roger Waters’ one ‘pathetic victory’ with Pink Floyd’s infamous Animals cover photograph

The cover photograph of legendary band Pink Floyd‘s Animals was a “pathetic victory” for bassist and songwriter Roger Waters.

Waters, who would leave the band after their work on The Final Cut in 1983, confirmed in an interview his slight win in orchestrating the now infamous cover for Animals. Battersea Power Station’s floating pig is one of the most recognisable album covers of all time, and the fallout between members appears to have affected later releases of the album. Waters, speaking in an interview with Natalie Lyons of Q Magazine back in 1992, confirmed the slight change he had made to the pig as a way of one-upping his estranged bandmates.

In the interview, Waters confirmed there remained an animosity between members and that he had managed to get his own back, slightly, with a revision made to the Animals cover. He explained: “When those people went out calling themselves Pink Floyd, it made me very, very gloomy. And it made them very happy. Well, I don’t know if it did make them happy. I don’t think they are happy, actually.

“They have to bear the cross of that betrayal. They have to live with the denial of what the work was about. But when all that nonsense started, it made me fucking gloomy. I stood by a river and stared at myself in the water. Pathetic, I said. They despoiled my creations and there was nothing I could do about it.

“My one pathetic victory was that they had to put testicles on the pig (ie the blow-up pig he designed for the cover of the Animals LP, the pig that broke loose from its moorings at Battersea power station and ran amok through the Home Counties’ skies). If the pig had been exactly the same as the pig that I designed, I could have stopped them using it in their shows. So they put balls on my pig. Fuck them. Gilmour and Mason now own the name Pink Floyd. They keep it in a box.”

The band has reunited for just one show in the years following the release of The Final Cut, a twenty-minute set for Live8. Animosity between Waters and guitarist David Gilmour does not appear to have resolved itself, either, with the latter releasing his Luck and Strange album on Waters’ birthday.

Fans of Pink Floyd picked up on the detail and were delighted by the September 6 date chosen for the release of Luck and Strange last year. Fans have since pointed to previous birthday wishes sent by the Pink Floyd Instagram account to Waters as examples of Gilmour’s alleged trolling. The songwriter behind albums like About Face and Luck and Strange was praised by fans for his tongue-in-cheek efforts.

One user wrote: “David Gilmour has been trolling Roger on his birthday the last four years.” Another user replied with screenshots of Pink Floyd posts on social media, which wish their former band member “peace and enlightenment” on his birthday.

But some were unconvinced by the theory that Gilmour had chosen the date of release to poke fun at Waters. One fan wrote: “The date was probably decided by the record company and they probably had no clue it was his birthday. Still ironic and awesome though.” Others disagreed, though, and some fans maintain it is a “delicious” joke from Gilmour.