Which one’s Pink, they used to ask. Sadly, it took the early death of their
keyboard player and co-founder to make people ask: which one’s Rick?
Richard Wright, who died on Monday at 65, was the mystery inside the enigma of
Pink Floyd. If his profile had been any lower, he could have been reported
missing. He was the unostentatious exception to the rule of rock stardom,
rarely recognised beyond the obsessive fan base of a group so huge that they
have sold three million albums in the UK this decade, without even making a
new album for 14 years. He liked that anonymity just fine.
Like Charlie Watts with the Stones, Rick Wright just turned up when he was
asked to and played brilliantly. To paraphrase Watts, one year’s playing and
39 years’ hanging about. Yet the outpouring of appreciation for him this
week has been intense. One message board contributor said: “I’ve never met
you, but you’ve been a huge part of my life for 40 years.”
Wright himself was baffled. “God, I don’t understand the whole cult of Floyd,”
he told me. “I think all you writers need to talk about that. I know we’ve
made some great songs and great music, but I can’t tell you why we’re so
popular.”
Guy Pratt, who in 1987 inherited Roger Waters’s bass part on stage after his
toxic departure from Floyd, says: “It took a while to get to know him, but
he did get very close to people, especially around the band.” Pratt would
later marry Gala, Wright’s daughter from the first of three marriages (to
Juliette Gale, whom he wed in 1964) before the group was formed.
“He was a very quiet man, he was happiest on his boat. That was the nicest
place to see him, because he was in charge there. Some bands spawn real
families around them and some don’t, and Floyd did. For me, that turned into
something else. It’s strange to think that I knew my father-in-law before I
knew my wife.”
In the summer of 2007 I went to Wright’s modest mews house in Kensington, at
the time of the 40th anniversary of Floyd’s first album, Piper at
the Gates of Dawn, for what turned out to be Wright’s last interview. A
slight figure, he had been grey for years so seemed not to have aged much
beyond a few more lines on his face. As I arrived he was playing the album
to himself, as if even he couldn’t quite believe that those were his
keyboards bringing a jazz sensibility to Britain’s most avant-garde new
scenesters of the day.
“Very interesting to listen to it,” he mused in his quiet, absent-mindedly
mischievous way. “Now I know why it had an influence on so many bands. I can
hear punk stuff going on in there.”
Wright may have seemed wary of the interview environment at first, but, having
committed to it, clearly wanted it to be as natural as possible. When his
publicist, keen to monitor the conversation for inadvertent controversies,
said she would sit out of the way in his kitchen, he said “Yes, but I’ll
still be able to see you,” and sent her out of the house altogether.
When Wright blew the dust off his memories of the pre-Floyd years, his future
role began to make perfect sense. “I’m trying to think how it all started,”
he said, as if the question had never been asked before. “Roger had his
guitar and wanted to become a musician, Nick Mason wanted to be an architect
but had played drums with various groups.”
As a child, he played trumpet, trombone and then guitar as well as piano.
“When I left school, my careers master said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I
said: ‘I have no idea, but I want to play music,’ and he said: ‘Well, you’re
pretty good at drawing, go to architecture school.’ So I went, but I wasn’t
interested in architecture at all. I was into forming shapes, but I wanted
to be a musician.
“So when I was at polytechnic, I went off and had private lessons in
composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, then I went to the London
School of Music; all this while I was studying architecture.
“The tutor came up to me and said: ‘You’re not into architecture, are you?’ I
said: ‘No.’ He said: ‘It’s a waste of time you coming; go off and be a
musician.’ But thank God I went there, because that’s where I met Roger and
Nick.”
Pratt says: “His playing was very structural, maybe because they were
architecture students. When he was on my bedroom wall in that 1970s age of
jazz-fusion and pointless virtuosity, his subtle injection of a few chords
made you see the relevance of jazz to one’s own musical world. He was
responsible for me and millions of people investigating Miles Davis.”
More than that, he smuggled Davis into the group. “There was a Making
of Dark Side of the Moon documentary,” Pratt goes on, “and he came up
with one little gem on there, that the chords for Breathe came from Kind
of Blue. Then you listened again and thought, ‘It’s true’.”
Wright said at the time: “I don’t want to be the fastest pianist on the
planet, I don’t want to be Dizzy Gillespie, who could play a zillion notes a
bar, I’d like to be Miles, who can play one note a bar.”
Wright was as quick to apportion praise elsewhere as he was keen to deflect it
from himself. “I don’t remember the first time I met Syd Barrett. Roger knew
him from Cambridge. I do have memories of sitting down with him in Highgate
working out songs and being completely awe-struck by this personality that
was Syd.
“He was so vibrant. It’s hard to talk about Syd, but he was unique, he had an
incredible way of looking at things. One day he wrote a song in ten minutes.
Me, an aspiring songwriter, I couldn’t believe it.” He took Barrett’s
self-destruction and inevitable firing from the band particularly badly. “I
think he was being spiked, quite honestly, with too much acid. Syd was
obviously losing it, yet we all loved him dearly, and had so much respect
for what he’d done.
“That’s why David [Gilmour] came into the band, the idea being we’d have a
second guitarist and then do a Beach Boys thing and Syd could stay at home
[like Brian Wilson] and write songs, and we’d go out and play them. Didn’t
work, unfortunately. Very, very sad.
“But I remember when David Bowie came and guested when I was playing with
David. He was a huge fan, and said when he heard Syd, he realised it was OK
to sing in an English accent. Damon Albarn said the same thing.”
Wright kept his counsel about the infamous power struggle within Floyd, in
which Waters edged him out of the group, only for Gilmour to reinstate him
in the post-Roger years. Their reunion at Live 8 was a means to a charitable
end: enjoyable, but unrepeatable.
“It was wonderful that we did it, because of all the arguments and issues that
Roger’s had with me, and with David. But we did learn something. It would be
very hard for the four of us to go together and do a world tour, simply
because our ideas are so different musically.”
But he clearly loved playing on the guitarist’s later solo albums and tours,
and it was mutual, as shown on the Live in Gdansk album and DVD, out
next week and featuring them together on a roof-raising 25-minute version of Echoes.
“Musical telepathy,” Gilmour called it. “I’ve never played with anyone quite
like him,” he said. “In my view all the greatest Pink Floyd moments are the
ones where he’s in full flow. Without Us and Them and The
Great Gig in the Sky, both of which he wrote, what would Dark Side of
the Moon have been? And without his quiet touch, Wish You Were Here
wouldn’t quite have worked. It’s a mark of his modesty that those standing
ovations on my tour in 2006 came as a huge surprise to him, though not to
the rest of us.”
Pratt recalls: “David would pretend to forget to introduce him, and then when
he did the crowd would go bananas. It had us on the verge of tears every
night.”
Having dabbled in two solo albums, in 1978 and 1994, Wright was pottering with
new songs when we spoke, developing an instrumental album on the piano. When
his cancer was diagnosed in December, he spent more time on his boat, trying
to get well.
He’d also given up some time to one of the writing sessions organsed by Chris
Difford of Squeeze at Huntsham Hall in Devon. The English singer-songwriter
Helen Boulding met him there.
“Rick came down with Guy Pratt and being a Pink Floyd fan I was so excited to
meet him,” she says. “As it turned out, I was put with Rick and Chris on the
first day to write, which was very exciting and very daunting, but it was
one of the most relaxed writing experiences I’ve ever had. Rick was the most
gentle, humble, down-to-earth guy. I couldn’t believe that someone so
talented and so successful was so low-key and gracious.”
If Wright ever was recognised, it was for the right reasons. “I really
appreciate that I can walk around the streets of London or anywhere and
people come up and say 'Thank you for your music.' Not 'Can I have your
autograph?’ It's really nice,” he told me. “I don’t want to prove anything,
I don't need to go out and advertise myself. I don’t have the ego to do
that.”
As we shook hands and he went about his business, his expression betrayed just
a hint of relief that a rare moment under the microscope was over.
Rick Wright plays on David Gilmour’s Live in Gdansk CD and DVD, released on
Monday by EMI
