Aphrodite’s Child 666

Salvador Dalí was no stranger to the bizarre. The Spanish painter and self-appointed genius once appeared on the Tonight Show carrying a leather rhinoceros. Grasshoppers terrified the hell out of him. He routinely lugged around a piece of ‘lucky driftwood’ to ward off evil spirits. At a party in New York, he offered to pleasure Cher with an oddly shaped dildo. Yet all of this seems like Surrealist foreplay compared to his grand scheme to accompany the release of 666, the 1972 album from Greek quartet, Aphrodite’s Child.

Dalí’s plan was to stage a ‘happening’ in Barcelona, witnessed only by a couple of local shepherds, who would later relay the wonder of it all to the people. There were to be loudspeakers in the streets, blaring out for 24 hours, accompanied by marching soldiers in Nazi uniforms. Hundreds of live swans were to flock before Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia, sticks of dynamite sewn into their bellies, set to explode in ‘slow motion by special effects’. Navy planes were to roar overhead, their pilots instructed to dump their munitions on the great cathedral. No bombs, though. Instead they were to bombard the building with elephants, hippos, whales