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syd and rick have the best eyes istg

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I often think about how lonely and isolated Richard must have felt in the band at some points.

At first Syd was there, and they played and worked a lot together —as we can see in ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’— but once Syd left Rick was on his own, both on a musical and on a personal level. Rick was the one who wrote the most after Syd in the early days, and he was expected to take Syd’s place as the band leader but that wasn’t who he was and instead he retreated to the shadows and let others take the spotlight while he continued to give his special touch to the music. I’m sure Rick felt Syd’s absence very keenly, even though he probably never expressed it out loud.

The band achieved success and they worked together reasonably well for some years, but Rick never seemed to be fully integrated with his bandmates. Outsiders to the band like Adrian Maben and Gerald Scarfe noticed it, and even David Gilmour himself said that the band was never a bunch of jolly friends despite all the time they spent together. There is an anecdote in which the band was supposed to attend a press reception for the release of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ in 1973 but they decided to boycott the event and not attend because they didn’t like the sound system installed by the record company. The thing is, they didn’t bother to tell Rick about this and he was the only one who appeared at the press conference, only to realise he was there alone. He left after that, but I can only imagine how he must have felt knowing no one had the delicacy of telling him what they were planning to do.

Their working relationship between the band members worsened more and more at the same time that Rick had personal issues of his own, and it all ended dramatically after ‘The Wall’ was released, when his lifelong personality clash with Roger reached a point of no return. Rick didn’t fight, as Roger had predicted, and was fired from his own band. Years later he would admit he was very angry and, more than likely, quite depressed about it. All the events that led to his firing from the band damaged his already fragile self-confidence and he retreated into himself for years, taking a series of bad decisions that showed how lost in life he was for a while.

Once the relationship between Roger and David soured as well, David decided to show the world the band could go on without Roger and started working on a new album, ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’. When Rick learnt about it, he contacted the band and after several difficulties due to the conditions Roger had set when he had fired Rick, he was eventually rehired as a touring member, but truly the only reason for his return was that it made the band look stronger from a legal point of view, as David himself admitted so — Rick was valued for what he represented, not for what he was. Rick had little to do with that new album and he wasn’t particularly close to his bandmates yet, but he looked quite happy touring and that was a huge step in his recovery.

‘The Division Bell’ is an album in which Rick finally rose from his ashes, writing and singing again after a long time. The album flows very well and it’s pretty clear that the working relationship he had with David was once again very good, and a personal friendship that hadn’t existed in the past developed during the making of that album. But as nice as everything seemed to be, there were some difficulties too, mainly regarding Rick’s confidence issues. The ‘voting fraud’ Rick committed, in which he voted for his own songs to be included in the album regardless of what his bandmates were bringing up, seems to be simply a funny story to many people but I interpret it in a different way. I’m not saying my opinion is correct and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’ve always thought that was his fear of being excluded showing up again. He wanted to be taken into account, and he did what he could to ensure he wasn’t left out.

Despite being crucial to the band’s characteristic sound, Rick was always underestimated and seen as disposable, and his wonderful contributions only got real recognition in his final years and after his early death in 2008. I’m glad Rick got a successful final tour with David, in which he looked extremely happy and loved by those surrounding him, but I’m frustrated by the fact that he could barely enjoy the praise he always deserved and left a lot of things unfinished. He deserved more time in this world to keep creating music but life was always unfair to him in one way or another, and he was forced to leave too soon.

This ended up being long and rather incoherent but it’s something I’ve always wanted to write down and this was my best attempt at it. I will probably change it and add more things if I can organise my thoughts.

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Nosie

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when u dont like ur art take a deep breath and remember u created it from nothing, like a god

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_Rick Wright; Pink Floyd; England/Inglaterra; London/Londres; Britannia Row Studios; The Wall; Wet Dream; Melody Maker (https://kdarchive.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/november-4-1978-pink-floyd-rick-wright-interview/); November 4th 1978/4 de novembro de 1978.

_Photo/Foto: Barry Plummer.

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Another wallpaper.

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SYD BARRETT

photographed by Mick Rock

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Listening to Richard’s music on a sunny Sunday morning.

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I’m afraid my Twitter isn’t very different from my Tumblr.

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i think standing at the edge of the ocean with the breeze blowing through my hair would heal at least a little piece of me right now