Richard Wright
“Pink Floyd have been in my blood since the early 1970s when my older brother played them to me. The keyboards were a huge, huge part of Pink Floyd. I always admired and loved the way Rick Wright played and jammed with the band. I think the Floyd sound was definitely, from the very beginning, massively to do with Rick Wright.
The way he adopted the space and the beauty of the sounds, it’s always blown me away. If you listen to the creativity of the sounds he was using and the way he was playing, you just can’t take it for granted that he was a huge part of it.
It’s amazing what he did, and the space he put in there, which is one of the most important things in music. He was a genius with it, and I’ve always loved and respected that.
“I was about eight when Wish You Were Here came out. I remember being
up in the Lake District camping some years later, having a few shandies, and driving through the mountains listening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond. That’s the moment that really hit me. There was this marriage between the music and nature, and it just blew my mind. From that point onwards it kind of came into my blood, and it’s been there forever.
“I think …Crazy Diamond part one and two are maybe my favourite pieces of music in the world, and obviously the keyboards are a massive part of that. The Great Gig In The Sky is a Rick Wright song, and what a tune that is. What I really love is the way he sat back off the keyboards. A lot of people were chasing a lot of notes, but Rick punctuated the songs with exactly what it needed – the emotion and the sound. The simplest things that you do are almost the most powerful things that you do, and they can be the hardest things to write and to perform.
“Rick Wright did say on Radio Two once that Mostly Autumn were an amazing band. That was like, ‘Wow.’ There was a rumour he actually came to a gig once, but I don’t know whether it was true or not.”