Pink Floyd's Rick Wright R.I.P.
 

Just found out about this (taken from Guardian site):


Founding member of Pink Floyd dies

 

Richard Wright, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, has died today following a struggle with cancer. He was 65.
Wright was the band's long-term keyboard player, as well as a songwriting contributor to classic albums such as Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. He also mastered a wide range of instruments including the synthesiser, saxophone and Farfisa organ, during the many years of Pink Floyd's career.
The band formed in the mid-60s, during which time Wright performed as a vocalist on many of the their songs. However, his preoccupation later on was with experimental compositions, a credit to the many instruments he played.
Wright released a solo record in 1978 called Wet Dream and went on to form pop group Zee in the 1980s, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, neither were quite as successful as his original band.
Wright performed with the surviving members of Pink Floyd in 2005 for Live 8.
Fellow founding member Syd Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in July 2006.

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Rest in peace, Rick - you were always a gentle soul, and you helped bring a lot of great music to this world.

I just heard about it five minutes ago. This is so beyond depressing. I'm at a loss for words (no Division Bell pun intended.)

Shine on, Rick. :7(

Oh dear. What a shame. I bumped into him about two years ago at a dingy working-men's club where he and David were practicing for their Albert Hall shows, we said hi to eachother briefly, but he looked and sounded ill even then.

Nice guy, even if he was the quiet one.

One of my favorite rock keyboardists.

That is truly sad news.

OH MY FUCKING GOD NO

coincidentally i was just listening to pink floyd in the car. "any colour you like" which has his best keyboard work on it.

okay i'm in mourning for the next ten years easily. i might actually cry.

fuck... this is terrible

i just played great gig

cheers dude, you will be missed

It's nothing worth crying about, I mean, he was just a guy who could play the piano pretty damned well.

but i loooooooove them

all of them

even waters, the smug bastard

I genuinely loved Syd. I really felt I had some sort of connection with guy, his music and his approach to life. So when he died it was a really tough blow. Wright, horrible as this may seem, was the remaining member of Pink Floyd who if he died would have the least effect on me. And it hasn't. But I still celebrate what he did and what he was bloody good at. As Pink Floyd are the most painfully English rock band ever, I intend to mourn him in a very English stiff upper lip way.

Yeah it's a shame. I guess this makes a Pink Floyd reunion tour that much more unlikely. Not that it would have ever happened anyway. Not only was he a great keyboard player, he was also a great singer. He added so much dimension to their music. Well, at least he got to play the Live 8 show and enjoy the tour with David Gilmour a couple years ago. Rest in peace Rick.

I always appreciated his overall peacefulness during the band's history. Even when Waters sacked him, he didn't make much of a stink about it. Very un-douchey member in a band full of (mostly) douches.

Bad news.
Take it easy Rick.

FUCK
HE WAS MY FAVORITE MEMBER!!!

FUCK.

:(

This sucks.

I see a Pink Floyd weekend coming up...

this is sad. I remember when Syd dies. I was depressed for like a week

Yeah, buy Syd was always kinda whacko. It was kind of forseen that he would die. But RICK?! He was only 65! And no one knew publicly that he had cancer! What the fuck.

nooo :(

Just watched the Arnold Layne video. Weird to think now only two of the guys in it are still alive now...

Because I can't bloody rep Cantankers (damn you Habib, damn you all to hell!), I'm going to join C and say that a) he'll be missed at Melly Towers too (listen to his playing on "Ummagumma and "Meddle" if ye believe me not), and b) "Great Gig" is possibly my fave Rick Wright moment - a genuinely beautiful and moving compostion, and THAT voice on top of it too. Simply gorgeous. That's all I can say, really. Bye bye Rick, hope they've got a good place for you sorted out in Rock Heaven.

65 is way too fucking young. Such a talented musician, and the peace-maker of the band from what I've read. Scares me, because my dad is his age.

When I first heard, the first thing I listened to was Great Gig. Oh god, every time I hear Echoes and Saucerful of Secrets and Us and Them I'm gonna be reminded. What a great loss to the world of music. He was so brilliant.

My fav wright moment is this incredible psychedelic echoey organ solo he does in the unreleased "scream thy last scream".You got to hear this if you havent already!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OPzPoSxha8

really, really bad news.. RIP

RIP Rick.

RIP

echos....R.I.P

thats sad. i was never a big PF fan but there is no denying his/their brilliance.
im listening to dark side of the moon for the first time in years. it realy is a masterpeice

"Dark Side..." is an incredible album all around, fugaizifan - I definitely am in agreement with all the "Dark Side..." lovers here.

The Guardian have printed the below obituary of Rick Wright today:

Richard Wright

Keyboard player and founder member of Pink Floyd



Though Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 in July 2005 prompted speculation about a more permanent reunion, the death from cancer of the band's keyboard player Rick Wright, at the age of 65, puts paid to the notion. Though Wright was even more publicity-averse than the rest of the Floyd, he was one of the group's founding members and, particularly in the early years, was regarded as one of its creative powerhouses, even if the spotlight tended to follow the erratically brilliant Syd Barrett.
Wright was born in north-west London, and after attending the independent Haberdashers' Aske's school, he met future bandmates Nick Mason and Roger Waters while studying architecture at what was then the Regent Street Polytechnic. Hence the first band they formed was named the Architectural Abdabs (having briefly been Sigma 6), though the addition of Camberwell Art School student Barrett prompted a name-change to the Pink Floyd Sound, in honour of American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. This changed into Pink Floyd.
Barrett's singular compositions such as See Emily Play and Arnold Layne became the Floyd's calling cards, and he wrote 10 of the 11 songs on their 1967 debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but Wright sang lead on some tracks and felt inspired by Barrett's influence on the music. "It became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards," he recalled. "Roger started playing the bass as a lead instrument and I started to introduce more of my classical feel."
Barrett was eased out of the band in 1968 following an alarming deterioration in his mental state, with guitarist David Gilmour being drafted in as replacement. The Floyd's music began to move away from conventional pop-song structure towards extended instrumental pieces, with Wright co-composing the 12-minute title track of their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), as well as chipping in a couple of other songs. "Everyone assumed we were doing drugs, but that wasn't the case," Wright observed. "It's a mistake thinking that drugs supplied Pink Floyd with the inspiration. The ones who took drugs were the ones who came to see the shows."
For 1969's Ummagumma, Wright devised the four-part instrumental piece Sysyphus, which suggested he had been listening to Stockhausen and other avant-garde composers. He remained prominent among the songwriting credits for Atom Heart Mother and 1971's Meddle, co-writing the latter's prog-rock epic Echoes, which filled the disc's second side. He was also in his element when the group were commissioned to write the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder's film Obscured By Clouds, their recording of which went to No 6 in the UK charts and cracked the American Top 50 in 1972. However, the Floyd were now moving into the Waters era, which brought them phenomenal commercial success at the expense of prolonged internal strife. The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) showcased Waters' lyrics set to music by various combinations of band-members - Wright composed The Great Gig in the Sky and Us and Them - and went on to sell 20m copies and spent an absurd 741 weeks in the American charts.
Wright contributed significantly to the band's elegy to Syd Barrett, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, from Wish You Were Here (1975), but his relationship with Waters hit rock bottom during sessions for Waters' most bombastic brainchild, The Wall. Waters threatened to scrap the entire project if Wright stayed in the band, and when the Floyd toured The Wall in 1980-81, Wright was onstage merely as a salaried session musician. Ironically, this meant that Wright was the only one to turn a profit, since the shows were ruinously expensive to stage and the losses were born by the three full band-members.
Waters and the other members parted company after The Final Cut (1983), on which Wright did not appear, but he was back behind the keyboards for the band's first Waters-less album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987). Wright had been pursing some extracurricular work, notably his 1978 solo album Wet Dream and a somewhat improbable collaboration called Zee with Dave Harris, from the New Romantic band Fashion, which resulted in an unsuccessful album, Identity. However, he clearly felt more comfortable in the Pink Floyd environment, and co-wrote five songs from The Division Bell (1995).
In 1996 the group were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, the same year that Wright released his second solo album Broken China, featuring vocals by Sinead O'Connor and lyrics by Anthony Moore, formerly with avant-gardists Slapp Happy. "I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words," said Wright, admitting to being a nervous singer. "Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics." The album was dedicated to his third wife, Millie, whom he had helped through a nervous breakdown.
Wright followed his appearance with Pink Floyd at Live 8 by playing on Gilmour's solo album, On an Island (2006), and he toured Europe and America with Gilmour's band that year, contributing vocals as well as keyboards. The concerts generated spin-off CD and DVD packages recorded at London's Royal Albert Hall and in Gdansk, Poland. At the time of his death, Wright had been working on a new solo album, which was thought to comprise a series of instrumental pieces. "He was such a lovely, gentle, genuine man and will be missed terribly by so many who loved him," said Gilmour.
Wright is survived by Millie and their son Ben. He also had two children with his first wife, Juliette Gale. He divorced his second wife Franka in 1994.
· Richard William Wright, musician, born July 28 1943; died September 15 2008

real sad about rick. i always got the impression he was one of the nice guys in the world.....

i didnt even know he was ill...... very sad....

Paulybee - yes, I felt that he was a really sweet guy, who bore no malice to anyone, not even Roger Waters. If only there were more people like him in the world in general.

Just a couple of days ago I listened to Summer '68 and thought about how beautiful it still sounds... this is really sad

i just heard like ten minutes ago, my mom told me and then i read cantankerous say she was playing pf because of rick's passing.

this sucks!! i'll play meddle or something later today. probably one of my bootlegs of pre-dark side shit.