Watch Pink Floyd’s touching final performance of ‘Echoes’ with Richard Wright
When asked to sum up his relationship with Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, David Gilmour opted for “telepathic”. Watching this stunning footage of the pair performing ‘Echoes’ for the last time, it’s easy to see where the guitarist was coming from.
Wright joined Pink Floyd in 1964 and stayed with them until the very end, helping define the sound of their most beloved albums and writing some of their biggest hits. He was George Harrison and George Martin rolled into one: a painfully shy, classically-trained virtuoso with a knack for harmony. Without him, Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been the same.
Though one of the least confrontational members of the band, Wright often took the lead in the studio. When Pink Floyd recorded their 1967 debut album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Wright’s classical training gave him a surprising amount of control over the group’s sound, with Wright arranging harmonies and instructing everyone what to sing. Syd Barrett may have lent Pink Floyd a certain charisma, but Wright was the brains behind the operation.
As Nick Mason told Melody Maker in 2008, Wright was the ideal collaborator. “Rick Liked melody,” he began, “But he wasn’t resistant to the other things we did. Listen to the start of ‘Astronomy Domine’ or ‘Interstellar Overdrive‘. He never had any preconceptions about how keyboards should be used. That attitude didn’t get knocked out of him at music college.”
In fact, Wright’s willful ignorance of musical hierarchies is arguably what defined his playing on ‘Echoes’. As you can hear in the footage below, there is something of the baroque in his neat, metrical melodies emanating from his beloved Farsifa synthesizer.
Wright leads the way on this particular rendition, which is only right considering the song is almost entirely his work. Of course, Wright was rarely one to bask in his own talent. ‘Echoes’ is, above all, an opportunity for Gilmour to showcase his scintillating fretwork. It is the perfect union of the two musician’s respective talents, which is perhaps why Gilmour refused to play the song following Wright’s death, the keyboardist having succumbed to cancer two years after this performance at Gdańsk Shipyard, Poland, where Pink Floyd closed their set with a 20-minute rendition of the Meddle classic.
