RIP Richard Wright of Pink Floyd
I could, I suppose, have written on this earlier, but somehow that just didn’t seem right. I needed to have some music to go with it, and while I could have just gone and scrounged something up on YouTube or the like, it seemed more appropriate to write about this at home, sitting at the same desk I did when I first heard Pink Floyd in any detail back in 1987 or so.
So with the haunted-house shuffle weirdness of “Remember a Day” playing now, as deft a garage/psych number from the late sixties as any of the more famous ones out there — and Wright’s piano work providing both an elegance and an isolated feeling not often heard on such pieces, his soft vocals emerging from one speaker and then another, some reflections.
Earlier this year Norman Smith, the EMI studio legend who signed and produced Pink Floyd on their earliest efforts during the Syd Barrett years, passed on, and my blog post on him contains my memories on when and where I first got into Pink Floyd, so I won’t repeat myself there. I suppose I didn’t have any expectation that I would be writing about the passing of anyone else involved with that band any time soon, much less one of its members, but then again, after the passing of Barrett himself the other year, it shouldn’t be so surprising, this news that we heard today.
My immediate thought lay in the unfairness of it. Death is of course unfair, but that’s well trodden ground. But you listen to some of these other Wright-led songs from Pink Floyd — “Paintbox” and its gentle but not hamhanded jollity, the swooping grandeur of “It Would Be So Nice,” guitars not so much played as somehow inflating and deflating, like massive walls of electronic accordions, again his gentle vocals shifting from music-hall-tinged singalongs somewhere between the Kinks, the Beach Boys and Queen at their most vaudeville to aspirational reach — and you think to yourself, “Wait, maybe this was what XTC was really trying to be all along in the end. Definitely seems like this is what Captain Sensible was trying for on his songs with the Damned.” There’s an unfairness in this not immediately being apparent to others, or even yourself.
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