The Pink Floyd album that Richard Wright almost abandoned: “It came very close”
If you want to live a nice, peaceful existence, free from conflict or an ever-mounting sense of tension, do not join a band and, in particular, do not join a band like Pink Floyd.
At virtually no point during the group’s illustrious history was it free from internal tensions, to the point where almost every member walked out at one point or another.
Pink Floyd set out their conflict-ridden quality fairly early on in their history. In the spring of 1968, only a year after the band had unleashed the psychedelic masterpiece that was their debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their bandleader and main songwriter, Syd Barrett, was unceremoniously ousted from the band as a result of his deteriorating mental health and unavoidable dependency on psychedelic substances.
When Barrett departed, not only did he leave Floyd without its key songwriter, but he also paved the way for decades of power struggle and division within the group. It was, after all, Roger Waters who took over Barrett’s mantle as bandleader, a decision which was almost immediately followed by a litany of increasingly intense arguments with guitarist David Gilmour – a feud which still burns bright to this very day.
Waters ruled over the band with something of an iron fist, which was perhaps only tolerated due to the fact that his time as leader also produced some of the band’s greatest material, including defining moments in the form of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, among others. At the same time, though, he routinely locked heads with his fellow band members, including keyboardist Richard Wright.
Following on from The Wall, that conflict between Wright and Waters came to a head when the keyboardist was, like Barrett before him, ousted from the group, but, unlike Barrett, he was retained as a kind of session musician, unable to make any creative choices within the band. That bizarre set-up continued even after Waters abandoned the group himself in 1985 and, understandably, was the root of mounting annoyance for Wright.
By the time the group came to record The Division Bell in 1993, in fact, Wright was rapidly approaching his breaking point.
Originally, Gilmour and the band each submitted their own ideas to be voted on by the other band members on whether they should be included in the final album or not. However, that system quickly broke down when Wright, frustrated at not having had a writing credit on a Pink Floyd release since Wish You Were Here, voted down everybody else’s ideas except his own.
“It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album, because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair,” the keyboardist later recalled, feeling as though his songwriting contributions were still being ignored by the band, despite the fact that Waters had left years prior.
Eventually, Wright was convinced to stay, and he was at long last reinstated in the band in a full capacity, which included gaining a few major songwriting credits on the 1994 album. The keyboardist had always been an essential part of the Pink Floyd sound, and his songwriting contributions to some of their earlier works had been utterly irreplaceable, so it is no surprise that Gilmour made an effort to try and keep him around.
