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12:44 am: Par Riku Raitu
ok, jūs droši vien zināt, ka ilggadējais Pink Floyd taustiņnieks Riks Raits nesen nomira. Aiz kata lasāmi grupas dalībnieku dažādos laikos veiktie izteikumi par viņu + Raita intervija MOJO pagājušā gada oktobra numurā. Ja viss notiks saskaņā ar plānu, rīt roks.nemirst būs lasāms garāks gabals par viņu pašu, viņa lomu Pink Floyd u.t.t.


Nick Mason (no grāmatas Inside Out):

What history does record is that Rick had been born in Pinner, that his father Robert was the biochemist for Unigate Dairies, and that the family home was in Hatch End on the outskirts of London: from there Rick attended Haberdashers' Aske's Grammar School. Rick played trumpet as a schoolboy, and maintains that he played the piano before he could walk... but then adds tat he didn't walk until he was ten. In fact it was a broken leg at twelve years old - with two months spent in bed - that left him with a guitar for company but no tutor. Rick taught himself to play using his own fingering and later, encouraged by his Welsh mother Daisy, used the same approach for the piano. This teach-yourself method produced Rick's unique sound and style, and probably prevented him from ever making a living as a professor of techinque at a conservatoire.

After a brief flirtation with skiffle, Rick had succumbed to a trad jazz influence, playing the trombone, saxophone and piano. i'm sorry to say that he has also confessed to using a bowler hat as a mute for the trombone. He went to see Humphrey Lyttelton and Kenny Ball at Eel Pie Island, and Cyril Davies, one of the fathers British R&B, at the Railway Tavern in Harrow. He also hitched or cycled to Brighton at weekends before mods went on scooters and adopted the dress style of a raver (collarless shirt, waistcoat and, on the odd occasion, bowler hat). Before arriving at the Poly he had a brief stint as a Kodak delivery assistant, where work experience had been based on watching the drivers sidling off at midday to play golf before returning to the depot at eight o'clock in the evening to clock out and claim their overtime.

My impressions of Rick at college are of someone quiet, introverted, with a circle of friends outside the Poly. Jon Corpe remembers that 'Rick was the possessor of manly good looks, with long, luscious eyelashes that made the girls curious about him.'

Gilmour:

"During that early '80s moment it was easy to forget Rick's abilities because he forgot them himself. But he has come back out of his shell. Of course, Rick has always been a bit grumpy about things. He still says things like, "Well, that's not quite the musical direction I thought we should be going in." He's said that about every reord we've ever made. That's just Rick."

MOJO:

Today, the reclusive Wright cuts a wary, restless and somewhat lonely figure in his tidy if strangely sparse office in a quiet mews in west London. "[Piper at the Gates of Dawn was] much better than how I remembered it." Also in contrast to his colleague, Wright remembers being in a state of "absolute excitement" while making the record. His only real disappointment was hearing Pow R Toc H again.

Wright takes his music seriously and, evidently, much else too. Not for nothing did Nick Mason write in his Floyd memoir Inside Out that Wright spends his time "thinking about thinking". Well, I'm definitely, definitely melancholy," he says. So even in the relatively carefree days of Piper, was he always that way? "I guess so. I mean, I will go and sit at my piano and play all this rather sad sounding stuff. That's what I've always done. But I thinkRoger is melancholic too, in a sense, besides his obvious anger about the war. Even David is.

Rick, though, is the only group member who tells MOJO that his instrument is "my best friend", and though he quickly backtracks, it's clear that music is, and always has been, both a solace and a form of therapy for him. "I know that if you get really angry or frustrated, people say go and scream in a pillow, or see a counsellor or psychiatrist. But I head straight for my piano..."

He's been doing that for the best part of 60 years, ever since teaching himself to play at the age of four on the family upright. "I was fascinated by the piano," Wright remembers. "I'd just hit notes and work out the chords myself. nobody told me where to put the fingers. I went where it felt right. Of course, my technique is completely wrong. I still can't play a scale in the way that you're meant to play it." Given a second chance, he would opt for correct technique so he could sit legitimately at "a wonderful Steinway" and become a concert pianist. Fortunately for Pink Floyd, he brought his little idioscyncrasies to the fast-changing world of mid-'60s pop.

With a good head of silver hair, Wright hasn't changed much since the Dark Side days, a fact confirmed by a classic '70s era portrait of himself that sits in a frame in his otherwise memento-free room. Perhaps it's all those sailing holidays in he Mediterranean, his preferred pursuit ever since he took off to Greece in the mid '60s after a run-in with his college authorities. in fact, there's something perfectly fitting about Wright drifting aimlessly in the fat old Aegean sun. And that's not just because he's a self-confessed "lazy bastard", his way of explaining his dramatic descent down the Floyd pecking order at the end of the '70s. Think of Echoes un 'Meddle' for example, the pivotal cut in the Pink canon say the band, and the track that slammed the door on acid whimsy and opened up the most cherished chapter in their career. It's Wright's repeated, sub-aquatic, Leslie-speaker enhanced note that launches the piece, and his subtle, swelling chord progressions that give it so much of its oceanic power. "What Rick really does best is colour washes," explains Nick Mason. "And that's an important part of what makes Pink Floyd unique."

Unlike Syd, "a jack the lad, bopping around and getting all the pretty girls until he started to suffer from the symptoms of schizophrenia," according to Waters, Rick Wright has always been notoriously uptight. "I mean, we used to share a flat together in the early days," Waters continues, "and he used to lock his fucking cornflakes up in a cupboard with a padlock! How could there not be tension?" In turn, jazz buff Wright would be frustrated by his colleague's apparent lack of musicality. When Waters' bass needed tuning, which it often did during the early days of Pink Floyd, the London College of Music undergraduate was invariably there to sort it out. "I hated things being out of tune," he says, confirming his status as the only band member with anything remotely like musical training.

Roger Waters:

One thing about "being" in a group is that you have different elements and you give different things to it, and if two of you can sing, great. "Rick" used to sing too, you know. He used to sing harmonies, but rarely sang any lead on his own. So the three of us sang. That's what being in a group's about: You do all what you can for the greater good. That's the buzz, as anybody who's ever been in a group will tell you. Of "course" he had to sing my stuff, because he doesn't write....but that's okay. It's all right for somebody to write and several people to sing."

"When Rick was expelled in 1979," I said," the band dynamic changed; a rock quartet losing its keyboardist leaves a very crucial element of its sound to an outsider, like a session player. That alone is a real indication that you were effectively disbanding the group even then.

(very, very long pause)

I think you could say that 'Wish You Were Here' was written, partially specifically about Syd, but largely about my sense of the absence of one from another, and from the band. So as far as I'm concerned, "Wish You Were Here" was the last Pink Floyd album. "The Wall" was my record and so was "The Final Cut", and who played or didn't play on it - though I don't want to belittle Dave's contributions to "The Wall". He played some great stuff, and wrote a couple of great guitar riffs as well: 'Run Like Hell,' the intro to 'Young Lust.' But by and large, those records were nothing to do with anybody but me. And certainly Ezrin's contribution to "The Wall" was far greater than anybody in the band. He and I made the record together. And he was a great help. You know, Rick had drifted out of range by that point.

In 'Wish You Were Here,' we "weren't" there. All of us at different points had left, and I think in a way that's why it's a good record, because it honestly expresses that. The reason "The Wall" is a good record is because it's an honest autobiographical piece of writing of mine. And the machinery in place that enabled me to make that record was good. But it was only machinery by then; There was no question of there being a "group" anywhere. And the same with "The Final Cut". And with the next one. And clearly, the problem with the "next" one is that it's a lot easier to replace a keyboard player than a writer. And if you don't write, it's very hard to produce art. You can do it, but's "really" hard - you have to get "other" people to write it for you. And then it becomes really, really difficult. I "suspect". That's not something I've had to do, because I write. That's the only way I can answer this specific question about Rick. You know, Rick had left "long" before the summer of '79 - "long", long before. He was "gone". We split up years before. And it wasn't the unilateral and heinous, wicked thing that gets described in the "unofficial" histories."