Richard Wright (musician) - Death - Tributes

Tributes

Bandmate David Gilmour said:

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.

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason told Entertainment Weekly:

Like any band, you can never quite quantify who does what. But Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been Pink Floyd if hadn't had Rick. I think there’s a feeling now – particularly after all the warfare that went on with Roger and David trying to make clear what their contribution was – that perhaps Rick rather got pushed into the background. Because the sound of Pink Floyd is more than the guitar, bass, and drum thing. Rick was the sound that knitted it all together... He was by far the quietest of the band, right from day one. And, I think, probably harder to get to know than the rest of us... It's almost that George Harrison thing. You sort of forget that they did a lot more than perhaps they’re given credit for.

Former bandmate Roger Waters' website was replaced with a photograph of an array of candles and poppies against a black background; one of the screen images used for the song "Wish You Were Here" in his "Dark Side of the Moon Live" Tour.

Waters issued a statement:

I was very sad to hear of Rick's premature death, I knew he had been ill, but the end came suddenly and shockingly. My thoughts are with his family, particularly Jamie and Gala and their mum Juliet, who I knew very well in the old days, and always liked very much and greatly admired. As for the man and his work, it is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the '60s and '70s. The intriguing, jazz influenced, modulations and voicings so familiar in 'Us and Them' and 'Great Gig in the Sky,' which lent those compositions both their extraordinary humanity and their majesty, are omnipresent in all the collaborative work the four of us did in those times. Rick's ear for harmonic progression was our bedrock. I am very grateful for the opportunity that Live 8 afforded me to engage with him and David and Nick that one last time. I wish there had been more.

On 23 September 2008, David Gilmour performed "Remember a Day", a Wright composition from Pink Floyd's second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), on a live broadcast of Later... with Jools Holland on BBC Two as a tribute to Wright. In an interview later on in the show, Gilmour had said that Wright had intended to perform with him that day, but had sent Gilmour an SMS message a couple of weeks before his death to advise him that he would not be well enough to attend. This was the first live performance of the song by any member of the band.

On 15 September 2008, Elton John, while playing a concert in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan dedicated the song "Believe" to Wright who had died earlier that day.