Newton JNU
Pink Floyd, sans Roger Waters, has reformed in support of Ukraine after 30 years without making new new songs.
To help the UN’s Ukraine Humanitarian Fund, guitarist and singer David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, bassist Guy Pratt, and songwriter Nitin Sawhney collaborated on “Hey Hey Rise Up.”
Gilmour was influenced by Ukrainian musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the band BoomBox, as per Guardian. While BoomBox was on tour in the United States in February, Khlyvnyuk abandoned the rock band to fight in Ukraine against Russia.
Gilmour was moved to act after seeing an Instagram video of a singer dressed in military uniform singing a protest song in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square.
“I thought: that is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” Gilmour told the Guardian. “I’ve got a big platform that [Pink Floyd] has worked on for all these years. It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation.
“The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the f–k can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”
So Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and half-Ukrainian grandkids, channeled his resentment into something good.
The band came together and recorded the song as well as a music video, which shows Mason on drums with a painting by Ukrainian artist Maria Primachenko on them. Waters, who quit the band in 1985, is said to have skipped the reunion. The song does, therefore, incorporate Khlyvnyuk’s voice from the video that first motivated Gilmour.
Khlyvnyu, who was hospitalized after suffering an injury during the incident, was contacted by Gilmour.
“The next time I saw him, he was in the hospital, having been injured by a mortar,” Gilmour said to the Guardian. “He showed me this tiny quarter-inch piece of shrapnel that had embedded itself in his cheek. He’d kept it in a plastic bag.”
Pink Floyd just declared that they had pulled all of their songs from Russian and Belarusian digital music distributors, in addition to the new song.
Gilmour expects that the song, which will be released on Friday, will have a significant impact on the people of Ukraine.
“I wouldn’t do this with many more things,” Gilmour said, “but it’s so vitally, vitally important that people understand what’s going on there and do everything within their power to change that situation.”
Pink Floyd was formed in London in the mid-1960s and helped to establish the UK psychedelic scene before producing seminal albums such as “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “The Wall” in the 1970s.
Waters left the band in 1985, and the other members of Pink Floyd didn’t record together again until 1994’s “The Division Bell.” Following the death of keyboardist Richard Wright in 2008, Gilmour stated that he worried Pink Floyd would ever perform together again.
Guy Pratt on bass and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards are also featured on “Hey Hey Rise Up.”
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