The other Quiet One

In the greater regard for Pink Floyd, a couple of things overshadow everything: firstly, The Dark Side Of The Moon and its enduring legacy, but secondly, Roger Waters’ relationships with guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright.

The dynamic between Waters and Gilmour, in particular, has become something of a pyschodrama, with the pair (and Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson) trading barbs via social media over, mostly, Waters’ politics. But while Waters has been courting the wrong kind of publicity for his provocative world view, Gilmour has edged into what feels like semi-retirement, and Mason has sought to protect the band’s heritage through his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit (playing the music of the early, pre-Dark Side Floyd albums), Wright has largely been forgotten. 

Today, his debut solo album, Wet Dream - recorded and released between the Floyd’s Animals in 1977 and The Wall in 1979 (and in the context of a band dynamic that was starting to collapse) - is being re-released, remixed by Steven Wilson and repackaged with a load of extras, providing an opportunity to reassess The Quiet One of Pink Floyd, whose influence on the band from its very beginning can often be forgotten under the weight of the egos and internecine battles that raged increasingly as commercial success in the 1970s gave way to Waters’ dramatic exit in 1985. 

When he succumbed to lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 65, Rick Wright was eulogised by Waters, Gilmour and Mason for having had a bigger part in their musical canon than he was ever given credit for when alive. “In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten,” David Gilmour wrote in an online tribute. “He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound.” Wright was irreplaceable, Gilmour wrote of his “musical partner and my friend.”

While these words might read like a carefully constructed ‘corporate’ statement, Gilmour had certainly remained close to Wright, having him play on his solo tour for the On An Island album. The Floyd-heavy set lists reminded audiences that Floyd hadn’t been just about Waters’ lyrical vision (or, in the early days, Syd Barrett’s flights of psychedelic fancy) or indeed Gilmour’s distinctly soaring guitar solos, but also of the melodic foundation that Wright brought to many of their songs from the off.

Richard Wright

Keyboard players tend to be cerebral introspectives, but also the most pivotal figures in a band, especially in the 1970s when guitar-based beat pop gave way to intricate, complex progressive rock. Tony Banks of Genesis, springs to mind here: hunched over his Mellotron, playing elaborate, classically-inspired solos, he was never the focal point (especially with Peter Gabriel charging about in his various costumes). Banks and Wright considered themselves songwriters first, and pop stars a very distant second. “Shy and unassuming” are also the mutually exclusive adjectives that sit before the words “keyboard player”, but if you were to analyse the contribution Wright and Banks’ multi-layered keyboard compositions made to the overall canons of their respective bands, I’d wager  they would outstrip the limelight chasers who sang or played the guitar solos. 

Wright’s “spacious, sombre, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects” were, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary, “an essential part of [Pink Floyd’s] musical identity. ” He was certainly responsible for some of the band’s signature moments: the epic Echoes, on the Meddle album, for example, but also the ambient, G-minor keyboard chord that heralds Shine On You Crazy Diamond at the beginning of Wish You Were Here. More significantly are two songs on The Dark Side Of The Moon: amid the album’s wiggy space rock and Waters’s jaded rumination about the human condition, the sonorous Us And Them and the mesmerising Great Gig In The Sky highlight Wright’s exquisite composition and piano work. 

“The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on Echoes,” Gilmour wrote in his tribute. “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.” 

Despite his indelible stamp on the canon, Wright was fired by Waters during the making of The Wall album in 1979. Despite having been college friends, tension had built over the preceding decade. “There has always been friction between me and Roger,” Wright once reflected. In 2000 he revealed to Classic Rock magazine how unhappy he’d been during The Wall sessions: “Both myself and Dave [Gilmour] had little to offer, through laziness or whatever. Looking back, although I didn’t realise it, I was depressed.” At the time, he was in the throes of divorce from his first wife, Juliette. 

With some sort of divine retribution, however, Wright was rehired – on wages – to play keyboards on The Wall’s outlandish, theatrical tour. Ironically, as a jobbing musician, he was the only original member of the Floyd to profit from The Wall Tour, such was its extravagant staging. 

Wright’s exile from the band was, though, relatively short-lived. After Waters himself formerly quit in 1982, Gilmour and Mason reconvened to record 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, with Wright effectively working as a session player. By 1994 he was fully back on board for Pink Floyd’s de facto final album, The Division Bell, on which Wright co-wrote several songs as well as contributed his own composition, the contemplative Wearing The Inside Out, a reflection of his experience of the band’s tensions prior to his original departure: “From morning to night, I stayed out of sight. Didn’t recognise what I’d become. No more than alive I’d barely survived. In a word – overrun”.

Rick Wright in David Gilmour's Remember That Night

In Mark Blake’s Pink Floyd biography Pigs Might Fly, Division Bell producer Bob Erin said of Wright’s composition: “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there. Fans pick up on the sad, vulnerable side to Rick.” In reality, the words came from former Slapp Happy keyboard player Anthony Moore, working with Wright, but there’s no doubt they came from a very personal place. Moore “had to climb inside Rick’s head to get the words out”, a band insider told Blake.

Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was released in August 1967. While Syd Barrett was seen as the band’s prime creative force, he and Wright, in particular, had formed a particularly fruitful partnership - Wright’s melodicism acting as a counterweight to Barrett’s eccentric whimsy (they co-wrote Astronomy Domine and both provided vocals for the track Mathilda Mother). But as Barrett’s use of LSD intensified towards the end of 1967, leading to increasing psychosis and his firing, the band’s centre of gravity started to shift. Gilmour - an old cohort of the band from their teenage years in Cambridge - was brought in to, initially, augment Barrett, before his eventual exit. Gilmour’s appointment as the band’s lead guitarist set in train the band’s imperious phase, evolving from London underground darlings to the stadium behemoths that The Wall somewhat self-satirised a full decade later. 

This period also became the creative arena for Waters’ concepts, with Gilmour and Wright, in particular, providing the instrumental flourishes. However, Wright’s clearly more diffident personality would never get a look in as the band became an increasing power struggle between Waters and Gilmour. As so often is the case (Steve Hackett, again of Genesis, comes to mind), solo projects become an outlet when breaking open an established hierarchy proves impossible, Hence 1978’s Wet Dream and Broken China in 1986. Both were well received, but commercially underwhelming. Wright was said to be working on a new project at the time of his death, though there is no known plan for them ever to be released posthumously. 

Today, however, on what would have been Wright’s 80th birthday, Wet Dream is being reissued as an expanded edition, with Wilson - now the go-to-master of classic album reinventions - producing new stereo and multi-channel remixes. “Most people know that Pink Floyd have always been my favourite band,” he tweeted, “so it was a real honour to be commissioned by Richard’s children Gala and Jamie Wright to remix this relatively underrated and beautiful entry in the Floyd canon. For anyone hearing the album for the first time it will become apparent just how much of Richard’s DNA runs through Pink Floyd. His distinctive rhythm patterns, signature keyboard sounds, vocals, jazz influences, and style of play exude throughout.” A vinyl version of the reissue along with a Blu-ray Disc package will be released later in the summer.

At the time of its original release Wet Dream - self-produced by Wright and featuring all of his own songs - largely flew under the radar, a symbolic reflection of his under-appreciation within Pink Floyd. Roger Waters has somewhat vacillated over his former friend’s legacy: “It is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the ’60s and ’70s,” he said in a similar statement to Gilmour’s after Wright’s death in 2008. But in an interview with the Telegraph earlier this year, Waters in more vituperative form said: “David Gilmour and Rick Wright? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say,” maintaining that his self-ascribed role as Pink Floyd’s creative centre after Barrett “went loopy” was that none of the others had any ideas. “Nick [Mason] never pretended,” he said adding that Gilmour and Wright weren’t artists. ”They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”No wonder Wright once said: “I think, ‘Why do you have to say these things?’”.  

When Pink Floyd reformed for the one-off Live 8 charity concert in 2005 there was a visible unease on stage between Waters and Gilmour, in particular. That, though, didn’t stop the clamour for the band to fully get back together. “Everyone who loves Pink Floyd wants it to happen,” said Wright at the time. “But I don’t feel I need it, not musically and not personally,” adding, cuttingly, “Maybe if Roger comes back as a different person – charming and nice, with really good ideas.”  

While Live 8 marked the final time all four members of Pink Floyd’s ‘classic’ line-up would share a stage. Wright’s role would be further extended by the release of their final record, The Endless River, which featured unused music from the Division Bell sessions. Released in November 2014, it was positioned as a tribute to Wright, featuring Gilmour, Wright and Mason seemingly improvising on what could be described as archetypal Pink Floyd songs – in particular built-out blues jams – that all featured Rick’s hallmark keyboard infusion. “I think this record is a good way of recognising a lot of what [Rick] does and how his playing was at the heart of the Pink Floyd sound,” Mason said at the time of the album’s release. “Listening back to the sessions, it really brought home to me what a special player he was.” 

In September 2007, a year before he died, Wright performed for the last time, joining Gilmour for an unexpected jam at a cinema in London’s Leicester Square at the premiere of Gilmour’s Remember That Night film, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during the tour for his On An Island album. The tour had, in Wright’s own words, been the “happiest” he’d “ever been on”. 

A couple of months before he died, on 15 September 2008, there was talk of Pink Floyd reforming to play Glastonbury. It had transpired that Gilmour had enquired about the possibility of playing as an opportunity for one last show with Wright, knowing that he was ill. The idea never came off. Glastonbury founder was edging towards acts with a younger profile and appeal. Pink Floyd - easily, in the context of contemporary Glastos, would have been perfect for the ‘heritage slot’.

You could argue that without Rick Wright I might never have found Pink Floyd. Like many of my contemporaries, Another Brick In The Wall (Part 3) was probably my first conscious exposure, appearing at the end of my first term of secondary school, with that grammar police-baiting “we don’t need no education” refrain offering a note of pre-pubescent revolution. It would be later in my school career when my curiosity would be fully triggered. During an English Literature lesson, we were forced to listen to a Richard Burton-narrated BBC radio production of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. It began with that opening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond before the Welshman intones: “It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three…”. 

I was captured. I asked my English teacher if he knew what the music was. “It’s Pink Floyd,” he told me. “Opening track of the Wish You Were Here album.” By chance, my brother had a copy, which I feverishly taped as soon as I got home from school. Inevitably, my interest would be piqued by Gilmour’s signature four-note motif two minutes into Shine On. But as I replayed that tape over and over again, before exploring Wish You Were Here’s more venerated predecessor, The Dark Side Of The Moon, it became apparent there was a lot more to Pink Floyd than their lyrical narratives, soundscapes and iconic guitar solos, but also the textures and colour palettes their classically-trained keyboard player was responsible for. Quiet, he may have been, but sometimes loudness isn’t just a matter of volume.

Pigs might fly

Roger Waters is a miserable bugger. That much has been perennially true. The founder member of Pink Floyd has recently been resolutely ignoring the generally wise advice that when one finds oneself in a hole, stop digging. Having railed, in recent years, against everything and everyone from Israel to Donald Trump, the 79-year-old has recently dismissed claims of war crimes in Ukraine by Russia as “lies”, and wrote an open letter to Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, calling on her husband Volodymyr Zelensky to reach a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. No wonder the good people of Poland have called off Waters’ tour dates there next year.

As much as I hold my hat high to the work of the Floyd, Waters’ relentless misanthropy is exhausting. In 1977 he was just as splenetic. In fact, he has long maintained that by the time Pink Floyd’s album Animals came out that year, the band was already in decline, having peaked with the juggernaut that The Dark Side Of The Moon became, and capitalised on with its reflective follow-up, Wish You Were Here.

Animals, however, was certainly not a happy record. Loosely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm - itself a statement about Stalinism - Waters used the album to lay in to the perils of being a fabulously wealthy rock star, something he has continued to do into his eighth decade while continuing to be...er...a fabulously wealthy rock star. It was in Montreal, on the Animals tour in 1977, that during a performance of the album’s Pigs, Waters spat at an over-exuberant fan, leading to his feelings of alienation in the spotlight, which part-inspired the cheerful narrative of The Wall in 1980. Animals is not a bad album, by the way. Part of my musical upbringing, in fact. It has also just been re-released with the usual super-deluxe package of remixes and surround sound goodies. 

But that isn’t, you might be surprised to learn, the point of this post. Animals’ cover art remains distinctive, in the great gallery of 1970s albums, for its depiction of Battersea Power Station with a pig flying above it (geddit?). It was Waters’ idea to use the distinctive Grade II listed building, dating back to the 1930s, as he used to drive past it on the way to his-then Clapham home. Hipgnosis - Floyd cohort Storm Thorgerson and partner Aubrey Powell’s legendary design studio - developed the concept further. With the inflatable pig, Algie, still aloft for a second day’s photography it slipped its moorings and floated off, first interfering with incoming flights to Heathrow Airport before veering south-east to land in Kent. There is a story that Floyd’s management had hired a marksman to take out the pig had it had been necessary, but that he didn’t turn up for that fateful second day of pictures, allowing Algie to escape.

Picture: Battersea Power Station Lrd

Today it is the power station itself, not Algie, that is returning to prominence, with the formal reopening of the complex as a retail, hospitality, residential and office working venue, following a £9 billion, ten-year project to transform the art deco building and its surrounding site. At its peak of operations it supplied a fifth of London’s electricity before being shut down permanently in 1983, laying idle beside the Thames for commuters to glance at out of their train windows as they make their way into Waterloo Station. Various ideas were floated as to what to do with it including, at one point, a plan for Chelsea to build a new stadium on the site, clearly on the opposite bank of the Thames to the club’s Stamford Bridge ground today. 

Picture: Battersea Power Station Ltd

Ten years ago a Malaysian property developer plunged in, launching an ambitious plan to repurpose the distinctive structure - one of Europe’s largest brick buildings - hollowing out the main turbine hall and, over six floors, installing offices (including Apple’s new UK headquarters over six floors), flats, restaurants and shops belonging to brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Nike, Mulberry, Uniqlo, Mango, Superdry and Levi’s. It’s not the first time a sizeable Thameside industrial property has been reborn like this: the former Bankside Power Station in Southwark became the Tate Modern. But thanks to Battersea’s prominence on the London skyline it has, for its 80-odd years, been one of the most recognisable fixtures of the capital’s topography. Helped in no small measure by Pink Floyd, it even worked its way into the celebrations of London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

While it may not be a landmark in the same realm of architectural marvel as the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral or Buckingham Palace, the Malaysian investors clearly saw Battersea’s potential, prompting a daily outlay of £2 million at the height of construction work. When architects WilkinsonEyre got to work in 2012, the main building was lacking a roof and grass was growing on its floor. It was a mouth-watering creative challenge. “We were stunned by the scale of the building,” project director Sebastien Ricard told The Guardian. “We wanted to retain it. We didn’t want to over-restore it.

The mammoth nature of the project also involved extending the London Underground’s Northern Line to a new, dedicated station serving the site. This was key to the project’s evolution, says Simon Murphy, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company. “Without [the Tube station] we wouldn’t have brought our office occupiers, we wouldn’t have brought the retailers. Neither project could survive without the other.” The station also serves the vast new American embassy less than a mile further along Nine Elms Lane, along with the forest of new residential towers that have sprung up in the area.

So, what can the visitor expect from today? Journalists have compared the reborn power station to a cross between a Westfield shopping mall and the aforementioned Tate Modern, but along with the shops and restaurants there’s a much more on offer, including a cinema and a theatre, a gym and a health club. On 11 November (my birthday folks!) a 1200 square metre ice rink will open in time for the Christmas season. There is even a glass lift that’s been built into one of the power station’s four iconic chimneys, which takes visitors up 109 metres to a 360-degree viewing platform.

Some of the original power station’s original spaces have been cleverly repurposed, such as the art deco Control Room A, which is available to hire for events (and has already been used for the film The King’s Speech), while other features and even machinery of the once-working facility have been kept intact to enhance the industrial appeal of the building. Control Room B has been turned into a very cool bar, making good use of the stainless steel control panels and instrument panels. Elsewhere there are art deco designs and traces of 1950s functional industrial chic.

© Simon Poulter 2022

When my wife and I visited the site in April - with the power station’s main building not yet reopened - it was clear that it was a ‘destination’ in the making. The few riverside cafes already open on the site were still getting used to business. There is, though, already, a sizeable number of people living in the development. “In the past 18 months we’ve sold over £600 million of residential [properties], largely to Brits,” Simon Murphy told journalists, explaining that the first of the entire power station site’s 4,000 homes was occupied in May last year. Filling all of them, with prices starting at just over £800,000, is going to be a challenge given the cost of living crisis, inflation and an expected pressure on the housing market. 

Indeed, as so often is the case with modern developments, there is little at Battersea to address the lack of affordable housing in London, although the developers have promised 386 such homes, representign less than a tenth of the project’s total residential stock. “The number of affordable homes in the plan had to be revised down because of the massive cost of restoration and because the developer was expected to provide the infrastructure,” Patricia Brown of the British Property Federation told the Evening Standard. But, she added: “This project has had so many false dawns. It is a brilliant addition to London and in a few years’ time people will be flocking there.”

A large part of that attraction will be the retailing operation, with the dizzying array of brands moving in. That, though, provides a further challenge to the site’s operator, given the rate of shop closures on our high streets and the looming recession. That said, the developers are hoping to attract up to 30 million visitors a year. It’s a gamble, for sure, but while you can surely question the wisdom of such an ambitious and expensive project - especially through the current economic despair - you do wonder whether a white elephant, and not a giant inflatable pig, has been installed on the Wandsworth stretch of the River Thames.

Picture: PinkFloyd.com

Perhaps prophetically, Pink Floyd returned to Battersea Power Station for the reissue of their album Animals. Designer Aubrey Powell took new shots of the complex, including the cranes of urban development that weren’t there in December 1976 when the original cover art was captured. “With the original album cover being such an iconic piece of stand-alone art, I had the chance to update it, which was a rather daunting task,” Powell said recently, adding that the new photography allowed him to reflect a changing world.“By using modern digital colouring techniques I kept Pink Floyd’s rather bleak message of moral decay using the Orwellian themes of animals, the pig ‘Algie’, faithful to the message of the album.” A somewhat miserable thought, given the regeneration of Battersea Power Station that has been achieved. Roger Waters would surely approve of that sentiment.