Pink Floyd
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bit but he wasn't really there." He had changed in appearance, and the band did not initially recognise him. Waters was reportedly deeply upset by the experience. Barrett eventually left without saying goodbye, and none of the band members ever saw him again. Storm Thorgerson concealed the album artwork with a dark-coloured shrink-wrap. Inside, the cover image was inspired by the idea that people tend to conceal their true feelings, for fear of "getting burned", and thus two businessmen were pictured shaking hands, one man on fire. Much of Wish You Were Here was premièred on 5 July 1975 at an open-air music festival at Knebworth, before being released in September that year. It reached number one in Britain and the US, along with positive reviews; Robert Christgau wrote: "... the music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer
used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that The Dark Side of the Moon simulated so ponderously." Following the Knebworth concert, the band bought a three-storey block of church halls at 35 Britannia Row in Islington. Their deal with EMI for unlimited studio time in return for a reduced percentage of sales had expired, and they set about converting the building into a recording studio and storage facility. The studio would be on the ground floor, with the storage facility above, with a hoist to move the band's equipment in and out of the building. The top floor became an office, equipped with a pool table. The band also envisaged hiring their equipment out, but the hire business was unsuccessful and would later be taken over by Brian Grant and Robbie Williams. The studio was more successful. Its construction took up most of 1975, and in 1976 the band recorded their eighth studio album, Animals, at the new facility. Animals was born from another Waters concept, borrowed from George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the human race was reduced to dogs, pigs, and sheep. Brian Humphries was again called upon to engineer the album, which was completed in December 1976. Hipgnosis took responsibility for the packaging, and offered three ideas, but unusually the final concept was designed by Waters. For the subject of the cover image, he chose Battersea Power Station, by then approaching the end of its useful life. The band commissioned a 30 feet (9.1 m) pig-shaped balloon (known as Algie), and photography began on 2 December, with a