A huge flying pig crossed the skies over London on December 2, 1976. The incident was serious, as the control tower believed that the pilot of the plane who reported it was hallucinating. But it was real. A giant inflatable pig, representing the oppressing class in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, has broken loose from its rope. The idea came from Roger Waters, who wanted to photograph him flying over the four towers of Battersea Thermal Power Station, to be the cover of the Animals album. It was found three days later in Kent, when it spooked a farmer’s cows when it landed. His name was Algie.

Between the genius and misery of Roger Waters

On the night of Saturday, December 9, 2023, on the lawn of the legendary Atahualpa Olympic Stadium in Quito, a pig appeared. Also the lamb that represents the oppressed class in Orwell’s work, the one that must rebel and disrupt the unjust order of things. And there was Roger Waters, 80 years old, singing with the same emotion as when he met Syd Barrett as a teenager from Cambridge, like an opportunity that changed his life. And together they dreamed of a rock band. And they travel the world with him.

At the time, neither of them knew that Syd Barret would lose himself or that his breakup would be a trauma that would mark the aesthetic vision of Pink Floyd until it led to the construction of their best albums: The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Perhaps because we hope that music, in some strange way, offers us a meaning that the world does not have, it is feasible to say that Barret is present in the work of this band, with which Roger Waters, its overwhelming historical leader, broke up in 1985 to start in his solo career and through lawsuits and settlements he regained the rights to the songs he designed and wrote.

I need not dwell on his contradictions. His voice, like David Gilmour’s voice, followed me in solitude…

I never imagined that I would be able to see and hear Roger Waters, nor that his concert would include the return of Syd Barrett, who died in 2006, a prisoner of chronic diabetes and pancreatic cancer. He was never able to return to music, although he tried to paint. Waters achieved fame and contradiction, was able to reinvent himself several times and perhaps realized that life is not a simulacrum. Pink Floyd, while it lasted, became one of the most beautiful bands in the history of music. The wall, which was present in Quito, tells us about the walls that we build for ourselves and that isolate us from our own balance. It is a powerfully intimate interpellation.

In those stands, I saw some of the matches that led Ecuador to its first World Cup. Roger Waters arrived in my childhood neighborhood, with all his pyrotechnics and a body capable, despite his years, of singing apocalypse and relief.

‘Stop genocide’, Roger Waters’ message against the Israeli occupation of Palestine during his concert in Chile

I need not dwell on his contradictions. His voice, like that of David Gilmour, accompanied me in the loneliness of writing and the need to travel. In doubts and in memory. At the beginning of his life, he lost his father in the Second World War. But he preferred to leave his aquarium, year after year, running the same old ground. (OR)