Well I didn’t expect to be blogging about Pink Floyd or Richard Wright today. But the sudden and shocking death of the Pink Floyd keyboardist requires me to blog about my first love in music and one of my favourite bands in the most unfortunate fashion.
Richard Wright sadly passed away today, aged just 65, after a short struggle with Cancer. Often underappreciated in the shadow of the Waters-Gilmour writing partnership, it is easy to underestimate his influence on the sound of the band. His atmospheric and often stirring keys and synths created a stunning foundation on which the grandiose lyrics of Waters and the mindblowing guitar of Gilmour could flourish and succeed.
His most prominent compositions came in two of Dark Side Of the Moon’s finest songs, The Great Gig in the Sky and Us and Them. Both of which feature his evocative and plangent piano playing at the forefront and are made all the more perfect for it.
His other prominent writing credits, on songs such as Echoes, Interstellar Overdrive and Shine on you Crazy Diamond read out as a list of my personal favourites and only reinforced my affinity with his music, even if I didn’t know it explicitly at the time.
Without his compositions, without his work on keyboards, the extended instrumentals and psychedelic, mind bending sounds that Pink Floyd would become celebrated and renown for, inparticular in their earlier guises, would be so much poorer.
RIP, Richard.
MP3: Pink Floyd – The Great Gig in the Sky
MP3: Pink Floyd – Interstellar Overdrive
