A Pig's Tale: Roger Waters Traces the History of Rock's Most Famous Prop

How much did a pig cost?
I haven't any idea at all. I don't even know what they cost now. All that stuff that one does to increase the theatricality of the rock & roll show ? It's all quite expensive. And we used to have quite heated discussions, shall we say, about that. Some of us didn't want to spend any money on any of that stuff. And some of us did. So it was always a cause for contention. Anyway the pig enjoyed that tour and that tour spawned The Wall. So the pig then became part of The Wall shows. It turned from pink to black and developed a cross-hammer insignia on it. So it became more malevolent and much more representative of the forces of darkness, and it developed red eyes and a track so that it could go on a little sojourn out in the audience, I think during "Run Like Hell." Then, I suppose he had a bit of a rest: I didn't use a pig in Pros and Cons or Radio Chaos [tours]. Then he was resurrected: I think it was officially known as Pink Floyd 1987 Limited. They used a pig in 1987 on that tour and they went to great pains not to be sued by me [Waters parted from Floyd in '85, training his rights to the pig].

By putting balls on the pig.
They added balls to it apparently. I'm told. I never actually saw this pig but they thought that meant I couldn't sue them for stealing my ideas and designs. Anyway, whatever. So piggy apparently did that tour which I never saw.

So you brought it out again in 1990?
I think. Or Berlin [1990's The Wall: Live in Berlin], where we produced half a pig. He was built on a top of some scaffolding at the back of the Wall in Berlin. I think the scaffolding was like 60 feet square or something. It was absolutely fucking enormous. He was blown up from underneath by huge fans and he was just the head of a pig. But he was so big that he knocked a ton of bricks off the top of the Wall when he inflated. Actually, it was a very, very impressive piece of engineering by Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park. So that was the next incarnation. He never escaped because he had no ass. He was just a head and shoulders. So he had no chance to fly, sadly.

Did you consider bringing out the pig at Live 8 when Pink Floyd reunited?
I wanted to use him again because he's still in a box somewhere, but that idea was slightly pooh-poohed and probably wouldn't have been a great idea anyway. Even before Live 8, when I started doing these shows that I've been doing for nearly 10 years now on and off, I started using inflatable pigs again. I thought to myself, "Well I should write something on the pig," so I would get to the gig, do the sound check, put on some rubber gloves and spray paint whatever I wanted to on the side of the pig, which I did personally for about 10 gigs. I have a strange memory of doing one the first time in Camden, New Jersey, which is also the first time we did "Leaving Beirut." I was doing my own graffiti and I thought this was absurd because there are people that are actually good at this, so I started looking for graffiti artists in every town we went to, and bringing them in. And not just bringing them in to write what I wanted to write on the pig, but getting them to write whatever they wanted to write on the pig. We were in New Zealand, it was covered in merry resistance talk and beautiful drawings and talk of indigenous people and how badly they had been treated.