Pigs (Three Different Ones)

When Pink Floyd recorded Pigs (Three Different Ones) in 1976, they weren’t just composing a song: they were building an uncomfortable mirror for 1970s British society. On the album Animals, the band divided the world into three groups —dogs, pigs, and sheep— and the pigs, in this case, were those wielding power from the shadows. The song doesn’t refer to just one type of pig, but three: the first is a general critique of businessmen who exploit others to enrich themselves; the second directly targets Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the opposition, portrayed ironically as someone firing a toy gun; and the third mocks Mary Whitehouse, a moralistic activist described as a "city mouse with a housewife complex", obsessed with controlling what others do in private. What’s most striking isn’t just the lyrics, but how the band translated that critique into sound: David Gilmour used a *talk box* on a guitar for the first time to mimic the pigs’ grunts, a technique that would later become iconic in his style. But the oddities don’t end there: Gilmour also played bass with a pick and dared to include two brief, syncopated solos, something unusual for a guitarist who usually focuses on the six strings.

The recording of Pigs (Three Different Ones) took place between April and May 1976 at the newly opened Britannia Row Studios in London, where the band produced the album almost like a live experiment. The result was a song that, in its album version, lasts 11 minutes and 28 seconds, but during the 1977 tour concerts stretched to 17 or even 20 minutes, with notable changes: they added an extra guitar solo after the second verse, replaced the *talk box* with a *Minimoog* solo, and ended with a Hammond organ segment that faded into an aggressive drum crescendo. Waters, who normally played bass, switched to rhythm guitar here, while Snowy White handled the bass live. The curious thing is that during those concerts, Waters would shout a different number each night, something rumored to help identify bootleg recordings. The song even had a promotional release in Brazil, edited to just four minutes and five seconds, and in some U.S. cassette editions, it was split into two parts to fit the tape format. Beyond its length, what’s clear is that Pigs (Three Different Ones) wasn’t just music: it was an exercise in sonic and lyrical provocation, where every detail —from the *talk box* grunt to the time changes— served to reinforce the idea of a rotten system.