After 28 years, Pink Floyd returns to denounce the war in Ukraine

After almost three decades without creating new original music, the legendary British rock band Pink Floyd has reunited to support Ukraine. Of course, without their original bassist Roger Watters, with whom they haven't played since Live 8 in 2005.

The guitarist, singer and leader of the band, David Gilmour, managed to meet with drummer Nick Mason, the other living original member of Pink Floyd, and finish forming the ensemble with bassist Guy Pratt and composer Nitin Sawhney, to create the song “Hey Hey Rise Up”, whose royalties will be donated to the Ukrainian Humanitarian Fund of Ukraine. the UN.

According to The Guardian, Gilmour was inspired by Ukrainian musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk from the band BoomBox, who left his rock group then on tour in the United States in February to go to Ukraine to fight against the invading forces of Russia.

Gilmour saw an Instagram video of the musician in military clothing singing a protest song in Kiev's Sofiyskaya Square and then felt inspired to do something about it.

“I thought: that's pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” Gilmour told The Guardian. “I have a great platform that Pink Floyd has worked on for all these years. It is really difficult and frustrating to see this extraordinarily crazy and unjust attack by a great power against an independent, peaceful and democratic nation.”

“The frustration of seeing that and thinking 'what the hell can I do? ' is something unbearable,” added the musician.

So Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren who are half Ukrainian, removed that frustration and turned it into something productive.

The group got together and recorded the song and a music video, which shows Mason playing a drums that has a painting by Ukrainian artist Maria Primachenko. Waters, who left the group in 1985, reportedly did not return for the meeting. However, the song features Khlyvnyuk's voice from the video that inspired Gilmour to begin with.

Gilmour approached Khlyvnyu, who was hospitalized for an injury in the conflict.

“The next time I saw him, he was in the hospital, wounded by a mortar,” Gilmour told The Guardian. “He showed me this little quarter-inch piece of shrapnel that had been embedded in his cheek. I had kept it in a plastic bag.”

Along with the new song, Pink Floyd also recently announced that they removed all their music from Russian and Belarusian digital music providers.

Gilmour hopes that the song, which is released on Friday, will serve an important purpose for the people of Ukraine.

“I wouldn't do this with much else,” Gilmour said, “but it's vitally important that people understand what's going on there and do everything in their power to change that situation.”

It should be noted that Pink Floyd suffered the departure of Roger Waters in 1985 due to creative differences with the other members of the band, who took the rights to the name and continued to tour and release studio albums until the death of keyboard player Richard Wright in September 2008 when Gilmour and Mason were left as the active members of the band.

The last time the four members of Pink Floyd shared the stage was during the Live 8 benefit concert on the London stage.

The last original material recorded by Pink Floyd were the sessions from which the album “The Division Bell” released in 1994 and “The Endless River”, which was released in 2014, would emerge.

This song marks the first time in 28 years that Gilmour and Mason have released unreleased material under the name Pink Floyd.

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