Tomorrow Pink Floyd will release its first new track recorded together as a band since 1994’s “The Division Bell.” The group will release the single “Hey, Hey, Rise Up!” at midnight, with proceeds going to Ukrainian humanitarian relief.
David Gilmour and Nick Mason, apparently constituting the legal definition of Pink Floyd, are joined on the track by Guy Pratt on bass, and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards. Vocals are by Andriy Khlyvnyuk, frontman of Ukrainian rock band BoomBox.
Rick Wright’s daughter, Gala, attended the recording session.
Gilmour tells The Guardian, “I rang Nick up and said: ‘Listen, I want to do this thing for Ukraine. I’d be really happy if you played on it and I’d also be really happy if you’d agree to us putting it out as Pink Floyd.’ And he was absolutely on for that.”
The project began when Gilmour saw Khlyvnyuk singing the 1914 protest song “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow” on Instagram, and decided to build a song around it.
“Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.
From left: Nitin Sawhney, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Guy Pratt
Gilmour tells The Guardian, “I thought: That is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this. I’ve got a big platform that [Pink Floyd] have worked on for all these years. It’s a really difficult and frustrating thing to see this extraordinarily crazy, unjust attack by a major power on an independent, peaceful, democratic nation. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the fuck can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”
Gilmour’ explains his association with Khlyvnyuk goes back to 2015: “I played a show at Koko in London in support of the Belarus Free Theatre, whose members have been imprisoned. Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian band, Boombox, were also on the bill. They were supposed to do their own set, but their singer Andriy had visa problems, so the rest of the band backed me for my set. We played ‘Wish You Were Here’ for Andriy that night.”
The video for the song was shot by director Mat Whitecross on the same day the track was recorded, March 30. “We recorded the track and video in our barn where we did all our Von Trapped Family live streams during lockdown. It’s the same room that we did the ‘Barn Jams’ with Rick Wright back in 2007,” Gilmour explains. “Janina Pedan made the set in a day and we had Andriy singing on the screen while we played, so the four of us had a vocalist, albeit not one who was physically present with us.”
Artwork for the track features a painting of a sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine, by Cuban artist Yosan Leon. It’s a reference to the woman seen around the world giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and telling them to carry them in their pockets so when they die, sunflowers will grow.
