Obituaries - Richard Wright (1943 - 2008)

Pink Floyd's Keyboard Player Passes Away

It's a real drag when a rock star dies. Even if it's a a guy who is much older than 27 - in this case a still-spritely 65. Intimations of mortality abound. Can't say I was much of Pink Floyd fan back in High School, but Walk-off HBP was big on them; pharmakeus and his guitar identity was practically born out of them; and when I got to University, I was surrounded by quite a number of people who just loved 'The Wall'. It was all part of the canon of rock you had to know when you were a teen in the late 1970s through to the 1980s.

To this day, my favorite Pink Floyd album is 'Animals', partly because it is a total Gilmour-Guitar-fest, partly because it has the word 'animal' in the title, partly because it's a cynical nasty album, but also because the keyboard work makes for such a beautiful backdrop for all the guitar heroics. I also love Wright's understated playing on 'Dark Side of the Moon', which forms the vast majority of the harmonic information on that album. 'Great Gig in the Sky' is Richard Wright.

I'll never forget the time a fellow student in Med School gave me a cassette with 'The Wall' on it as a gift because he felt it expressed how he felt about the world. I listened earnestly for about a fortnight on my walkman because he kept asking me if I felt that way about life; and I had to say no, I felt more like Jimmy Cooper, the four-personality mod in 'Quadrophenia', than the protagonist in 'The Wall'. I think I let him down really badly.
It kind of scares me to think that person is out there now practising medicine, along with all the other emotionally stunted people from Med School.

Yet there was a lot of it going around, and I think that people *got* the mood of that album because of Richard Wright's tremendous moody playing. After all, it's not like it's (pardon the pun once again) wall-to-wall guitar heroics on that album.

'Wish You Were Here' is another album that defines keyboard atmospherics at their best. It's hard to imagine it now but there was a time when the album defined lush keyboard production value. Still, being a guitar more of a guitar kind of dude, I tended to hang for the lead breaks, but what makes Pink Floyd so compelling is in Wright's work.

All the while we kept hearing stories about how unwanted and unloved he was by Roger Waters through the years and it seems hardly possible. how could he level so much venom against the musician that gave so much style and substance to his largely bellicose lyrics? It's all very odd.
One thing is for sure - Richard Wright will be sorely missed.