Richard Wright

Musician and keyboard player for Pink Floyd

Born: 28 July, 1943, in London.

Died: 15 September, 2008, in London, aged 65.

RICHARD Wright was the keyboard player whose sombre, monumental sounds were at the core of Pink Floyd's art-rock, which has sold millions of albums worldwide.

Wright was a founding member of Pink Floyd, and his spacious, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects were an essential part of the group's musical identity.

Though Syd Barrett and then Roger Waters wrote most of Pink Floyd's songs, Wright shares credit on the improvisatory psychedelic studio works the band composed collectively, and he sang a few lead vocals, including on Astronomy Domine from the band's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Wright was the sole songwriter on The Great Gig in the Sky, a hymnlike track with a soaring, wordless female vocal at the centre of The Dark Side of the Moon, the blockbuster 1973 album that has sold some 40 million copies.

David Gilmour, Pink Floyd's guitarist and singer, said: "In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming and private, but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound."

Wright was born in London in 1943 and taught himself to play keyboards, developing an early interest in jazz. He attended the independent Haberdasher's Aske school in Hertfordshire then studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

With fellow students – Waters on guitar or bass and Nick Mason on drums – he started a group, at first playing American rhythm-and-blues songs. Barrett joined them in 1965, reshaping the music and naming the band The Pink Floyd Sound, after the American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Barrett's whimsical, asymmetrical songs and the band's fondness for experimental sounds placed the group at the centre of London's underground psychedelic movement in the mid-1960s. "Music was our drug," Wright once told an interviewer.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in 1967 and yielded pop hits in England, but LSD use and mental illness left Barrett so unstable that was edged out of Pink Floyd in 1968. He recorded two solo albums; Wright and Gilmour produced the second one, Barrett, in 1970. Barrett died in 2006, at the age of 60.

Pink Floyd's late-1960s and early-70s albums mingled pop songs with extended pieces, such as the 23-minute Echoes, which begins with single notes from Wright's keyboard, on 1971's Meddle.

On the 1969 album Ummagumma, which includes solo studio recordings by each band member, Wright's four-part Sisyphus encompasses a majestic dirge with tympani, a piano piece that moves from rippling impressionism to crashing free jazz, a clattery interlude for keyboards and percussion and a mostly elegiac improvisation with organ, guitar, tape effects and birdcalls.

With The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd reined in its improvisation, came up with a concept album about workaday pressures and insanity and established itself as an arena-rock staple. The album stayed in the US top 200 album chart for 741 weeks. Pink Floyd continued to thrive through the 1970s, and Wright released his first solo project, Wet Dream, in 1978. Pink Floyd's 1979 album, The Wall, eventually sold millions of copies worldwide.

But there were conflicts within the band. Waters, who had increasingly taken control of Pink Floyd, reportedly threatened not to release The Wall unless Wright resigned his full membership in the band. Wright quit, only to tour with Pink Floyd in 1980-81 as a salaried sideman. He does not appear on the band's 1983 album, The Final Cut.

After that album, Waters left Pink Floyd for a solo career, declaring the band a "spent force creatively". Amid lawsuits, Gilmour and Mason regrouped under the Pink Floyd name; Wright rejoined them for the 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason and then The Division Bell in 1994.

He made another solo album, Broken China, in 1996, with Sinead O'Connor among the guest performers.

In interviews in 1996, Wright said he had not spoken to Waters for 14 years. Wright played keyboards on Gilmour's 2006 album, On an Island, and went on tour with Gilmour's band.

Pink Floyd's 1970s line-up reunited briefly at the Live 8 London concert in Hyde Park on 2 July, 2005, performing four songs before sharing a hug.

Richard Wright was married three times. He is survived by his third wife, Millie, their son, and a son and daughter of his first marriage.