New song by Pink Floyd “Hey Hey Rise Up”: snowball effect – culture

At the beginning there is a choir that sounds like Cossack folklore and Black Sea sailors. Brief irritation. 16 seconds later, however, you realize who is actually playing here. The first drumbeats, swinging and pointed, executed with a slightly existential backhand, then the organ rolling heavily into the picture from the side. Everything: music-historical watermarks. Anyone who hears “Hey Hey Rise Up”, the song that appeared on the streaming and download platforms in the night from Thursday to Friday, should therefore notice what this is about without any special notice: a new piece by Pink Floyd, one of the greatest rock bands in history, defunct many years ago. Even if that’s not the whole truth.

Because the singer whose trembling tenor carries “Hey Hey Rise Up” through its three and a half minutes is Andriy Khlyvnyuk. He hails from Cherkasy, in central Ukraine on the Dnieper River, and has been the face of the band since 2004 BoomBoxwho are among the superstars in their home country. When the Russian army began the invasion in February, the group postponed their American and European concerts planned for March and April and – like many other local artists – joined forces to defend the country. On the fourth day of the war, as a kind of greeting from the front, Khlyvnyuk posted a short smartphone video on his Instagram account showing him in front of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. The spontaneously sung “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” (“The red snowball in the meadow”), a Ukrainian battle song from the First World War, spread quickly and widely on the Internet. Various musicians played music and made mash-up versions.

The usual snowball effect with such moving posts.

On the one hand, “Hey Hey Rise Up” is another version in which a band reinterprets the vocal track from Andriy Khlyvnyuk’s clip. In addition, guitarist and initiator David Gilmour conceived it as a sensational pop-cultural event. Pink Floyd, the great British epic poets and experimentalists, last released new music in 1994 and performed for the last time in a classical line-up in 2005. However, the death of keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008, as well as ongoing incompatibilities between Gilmour and original co-head Roger Waters, effectively closed the story. “The Pink Floyd brand is officially dead, dissolved, buried”, said Gilmour back in 2006.

So it’s actually more the brand, the characteristic Pink Floyd idea, than the actual band that he symbolically revived on the occasion of the war. The only other ex-group member on “Hey Hey Rise Up” is drummer Nick Mason. Friends and longtime collaborators Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney play the remaining instruments. Nevertheless, the musicians have managed to give the piece of Eastern European quasi-folklore, which is completely untypical for them, the atmosphere that is just as warm as it is ominously threatening of the great Floyd works. Including extensive guitar solo, the Gilmour in one current interview as his rock god moment – with enough explicit self-mockery to spark the grain of truth within. The piece will certainly never be considered a classic in the Pink Floyd canon, all the more reach it creates for the story behind it.

Roger Waters had also commented on the war: the exact, cold counterpart

Gilmour met the BoomBox musicians years ago at a concert in London. He also has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law himself. He wants to see “Hey Hey Rise Up” as a demonstrative statement against Russian aggression, and he praises all proceeds from the song as donations to humanitarian aid in the war-torn country. And doesn’t give the impression for a second that the solidarity campaign could be a permanent restart for Pink Floyd.

Incidentally, Roger Waters also spoke up with a Ukraine video at the beginning of March. In it, he responded to a 19-year-old Ukrainian fan’s call for help in a lengthy essay. While he condemned the Russian attack, he also stressed that Israel was committing similar crimes in Palestine and that there were indeed a lot of neo-fascist forces in Ukraine. You could say: the exact, cold counterpart to what his former bandmates have now brought to the world with “Hey Hey Rise Up”. In this life they will certainly not get together again.

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