Who are Pink Floyd talking about in ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’?

Off the enormous success of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, space rockers Pink Floyd had well and truly forged their own path after founding songwriter Syd Barrett’s departure, and had made millions in the process.

Yet bassist and emerging creative force in the band, Roger Waters, was angry, dissatisfied, and increasingly divorced from the fame they’d won. The rock world they were half-in, half-out of had grown stale, punk saw them as the old guard, and society was ebbing into a malaise ripe for right-wing exploitation.

Soaking up punk’s grit and pouring his simmering seethe into the next album, Waters borrowed a little of George Orwell‘s allegorical Animal Farm and swapped Stalinist critique for an excoriation of capitalist greed. Released during punk’s height in 1977, Animals titled each song after a sheep, dog, and various iterations of pig and cast a crude satirical lens on the era’s social strata and the types of animals pulling the political landscape’s levers and pullies.

Nestled between ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep’ is ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’, indicating the gluttonous swine that populates Animals‘ fetor of corruption takes on many forms. Sketched from lyrics furiously jotted down 18 months earlier, Waters took scabrous potshots at three different avatars of avarice and lofty power that embody the pig archetype. While one is explicitly named, the other two are subject to speculative intrigue.

“Pig stain on your fat chin / What do you hope to find / Down in the pig mine?” is generally read to be an attack on the capital class. If Waters was angry at the wealthy elites now, he’d find plenty of future thematic fuel to get riled about in the political sea change that awaited around the corner. Waters intuitively picked up on the financier scheming taking place among the shadow cabinet at the time.

“You like the feel of steel / You’re hot stuff with a hatpin / And good fun with a handgun” Waters snarls, disgusted and dismayed at the Conservative Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher’s betrayal of the post-war social contract.

It’s the third ‘pig’s identity that Waters ensures is exposed. “Hey you, Whitehouse / Ha-ha, charade you are / You, house-proud town mouse” targeted straight at moral crusader and religious puritan Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers And Listeners’ Association, firing complaints from the faintest whiff of sex, violence, and general fun on UK TV. “I was incensed by Mary Whitehouse, and people who foster sexual guilt and shame,” Waters later declared.

Whitehouse left a complicated legacy. While dripping with homophobia and rightly ridiculed for her excessive ‘tut-tutting’ at everything from Tom and Jerry to Doctor Who, her view that a pornography culture aimed at men and out of control will likely roll back the advancements gained by women’s liberation movements at the time feel more prescient in the age of unfiltered online access to porn and manosphere mind-warping, despite loathing feminism.

Strangulated domesticity and buttoned-up claustrophobia still emanate from Whitehouse’s cultural mark, however. “Gotta stem the evil tide / And keep it all on the inside” Waters sings on Animals‘ most stinging cut, lifting the veil on the psyche of moral crusaders who zealously seek to cleanse the world of ‘permissive’ decay and replace such perceived ills with a new kind of banal and cultureless horror.