Song of the Day 4/8: Pink Floyd and Andriy Khlyvnyuk, “Hey Hey Rise Up”

Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine has brought about many unexpected changes. This one is minor, but it made news in the music media: It prompted Pink Floyd to record its first new song in 28 years. Well, not all of Pink Floyd — Richard Wright is dead, and Roger Waters is still, well, Roger Waters,* so it’s just David Gilmour and Nick Mason (along with Guy Pratt, who has played bass for what’s called Pink Floyd since Waters’ departure in 1985).

The Urkainian band BoomBox was on tour in the US when the war erupted. They suspended the tour and returned to Ukraine, where lead singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk joined the army and recorded himself singing a folk song, “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” in Sophia Square in Kyiv.

Gilmour, who has Ukrainian grandchildren, said,

In 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.

Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defence.

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.

He built the song around Khlyvnyuk’s vocal, and added a 90-second guitar solo that makes it sound like classic Pink Floyd.

*Before the invasion began, Waters spent a lot of time on social media maintaining that Vladimir Putin was being framed by Western warmongers. Though he’s backed off absolving Putin, he has continued his criticism, claiming that a “diplomatic solution” should be sought (as if one weren’t being sought).

Waters has long been an anti-war activist, but he apparently can’t see that he’s reached the endpoint in an exercise of reductio ad absurdum for the statement “War is always wrong.” This shouldn’t surprise anyone — it took him almost 30 years to accept his own share of responsibility for the decades of bad feelings that have embroiled the band.