After nearly 30 years, Pink Floyd released a new track entitled “Hey Hey Rise Up!”, an appeal to cease the war which has been affecting Ukraine for the past two months. 

The new song, featuring Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk (Boombox) who sings the chorus refrain, is described by David Gilmour as “a show of anger at a superpower invading a peaceful nation.”

Apart from David Gilmour, two other members of the old date of the famous London band got on the project, namely bassist Guy Pratt and drummer Nick Mason. The three rockstars are accompanied by Nitin Shawney, a new entry who recently joined up with the keyboard.

The idea of creating such a song appeared in late February. Shortly after David Gilmour saw the singer of the Boombox band, Andriy Khlyvnyuk standing on Kyiv’s Sofia Square in a military outfit, ready to fight back the Russian forces.

The latter recorded an Instagram video of himself singing The “Red Viburnum In The Meadow”, a capella to rise the soldiers’ morale dating back to the First World War.

“It just struck me that, as it is a capella, one could turn this into a beautiful song […] I spoke to [Andriy Khlyvnyuk], actually, from his hospital bed, where he had a pretty minor injury from a mortar […] I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing,” Gilmour explained in an interview given to BBC 6.

Photo: Twitter @pinkfloyd

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen