Rick Wright - The Pink Floyd sound

There have been a number of articles in the music press this past month paying tribute to Rick Wright, and rightly so, but I suppose none of them for me really touched the spot.

When I was 16 and mad about Pink Floyd, all their qualities seemed fine to me, the languid guitars, the strange lyrics on Piper, the wonderful voices, even Nick Mason's ancient drumming style. But the one thing that shone above all others was the organ playing.

You see, for me, the heart of Pink Floyd was the mysterious and delicate keyboard sound.
Given this was at a time when Mike Ratledge was the driving force behind Soft Machine and the "real" Dave Stewart was fronting the wonderful Egg, even when Dave Sinclair was playing beautiful organ on early Caravan, above all of them Rick Wright stood as the champion of keyboards.

So it happened that he dominated the Umagumma live album and the Live at Pompeii set. All the greatest Floyd tracks in the first (and best) two phases of their career were those with his dark and mysterious playing at the centre. "Set the Controls", "Careful with that axe", "Saucerful", "Cirrus Minor", all had that serene and otherworldy quality that simply nobody else could emulate. At times the playing sounded like some exotic ancient Egyptian jazz, other times like a science fiction score, but it wasn't just his playing but the sounds he managed to find, some so beautiful they seemed for all the world to perfectly capture a "Tales of the Riverbank" childhood. That Syd phrase from Matilda Mother "The dolls house darkness, old perfume" summed in one magical and yet slightly disturbing phrase the cracked childhood tones the band repeatedly evoked, and none more so than Rick.

I read recently an interview with Dave Gilmour who pointed out that Floyd's style of that time was largely the result of none of the group being particularly proficient on their instruments, and I have to say I found this a stunning observation. Almost that, as their playing became more confident and sophisticated, the music went downhill. Not that later Floyd albums don't have their qualities, but those earlier albums captured something they would never find again. On "More" or on "Ummagumma", they didn't sound like a band at all. Instead the music was so closely inhabiting another place that the records evoked a landscape or a place rather than standing particularly as musical artefacts.

The other shocking thing about Dave's remark was that it reminded me of Peter Buck's observation in "International Musician" sometime in the mid-80's when he confessed the first few REM albums sounded the way they did because he was "just learning" to play the guitar.

So for me Rick's keyboards weren't an instrument in a band, those chords and landscapes were Floyd. They defined the Floyd sound. A sound that was thrown away when "Dark Side" came along, of course, but to this day still the sound I think of when I hear about the group.

So I suppose it was the absence of this single fact, the defining nature of Rick's playing, that I missed in all the obituaries.

Of course, they all dutifully remembered the songs he wrote. And in this respect I think Rick had one wonderful and extraordinary song to celebrate, "Remember a day".

This song was almost the epitome of the songs about childhood that Floyd produced in those early days. Most, of course, were written by Syd, but in a way that's why "Remember a Day" stood out so clearly, because it was a truly reflective song, one that contemplated the transient nature of childhood with a longing that few have achieved in our little Rock world. It is a song that can still bring me to tears on occasion, I must admit, and to see Dave Gilmour and his band trying to do it justice on the TV a few weeks ago was especially moving.

As usual, I know nothing of Rick Wright the man. But perhaps he was a man who recognised the greatest loss of all as the loss of innocence.

And it is ok to know nothing of an artist, even at his death, why would I know? I absorbed his greatest gift, and that became part of who I am. When we adore a piece of music it gets stored, full hi-fidelity version, in the corpus collosum, or somewhere real close, so yes, biologically, it is part of me, but much more than that is the mystery, the Egyptian sci-fi Childhood Jazz of his playing that will live on in me. A sound that I search for in every album review, or every time I sit down at a keyboard.

November 2008