Richard Wright 1943-2008

So I was struggling through a really tough day on the dice table today and was definitely "off" my game. The players were really annoying and high maintenance, I kept screwing up little stuff, and my hands just didn't seem to work. When I returned from a break after grabbing a bite in the cafeteria, I tapped into stick and for some unknown reason I just started humming the repeating chord progression from Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' (the progression that Andrew Lloyd Webber plagiarized in Phantom of the Opera) over and over again in-between stick calls. I was kind of in my own little world and every time the dice hit the felt I was annoyed that I had to momentarily stop humming Echoes to actually do my job and make the call.

I have no idea exactly when during the day that Rick Wright passed away, but it would be kind of nice to believe that it was around that time.

I've heard that Rick was in the middle of producing some solo work at the time of his death. It's tough to think about what we will miss out on now that he is gone, and it is impossible and unimaginable to try to calculate the total sum of his contributions to the music world as a whole.

When I think of Richard Wright in context with the rest of Pink Floyd, I just think of him as the one member who always took a backseat to the rest of the band and whose contributions have always been overlooked and underestimated. He seemed like a gentle and quite genius who was modest to a fault, but was instrumental in making some of the Floyd's greatest works, such as Dark Side and Wish You Were Hear, the monumental successes that they have become.

Goodbye Rick, you'll be sorely missed!



No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend.

In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten.

He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound.
I have never played with anyone quite like him. The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on 'Echoes'. In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without 'Us and Them' and 'The Great Gig In The Sky', both of which he wrote, what would 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' have been? Without his quiet touch the Album 'Wish You Were Here' would not quite have worked.

In our middle years, for many reasons he lost his way for a while, but in the early Nineties, with 'The Division Bell', his vitality, spark and humour returned to him and then the audience reaction to his appearances on my tour in 2006 was hugely uplifting and it's a mark of his modesty that those standing ovations came as a huge surprise to him, (though not to the rest of us).

Like Rick, I don't find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.

David Gilmour
Monday 15th September 2008