But you can imagine, if those kind of things are going off, it could just as easily have been a piece over an inch across, which would have taken his head off.” He showed me this tiny quarter-inch piece of shrapnel that had embedded itself in his cheek. The next time I saw him, he was in hospital, having been injured by a mortar. “He wanted to speak on FaceTime – I think he wanted to be sure it was me. Gilmour says it took some time for him to track Khlyvnyuk down, trawling Instagram and trying phone numbers. “When I spoke to Andriy, he was telling me about the things he’d seen, and I said to him, ‘you know this has been on the BBC here in England, and on television around the world? Everyone is seeing these terrible things that are happening.’ And he said, ‘Oh really? I didn’t know.’ I don’t think that most people there have got such great communication and they don’t really understand that actually, the things they are going through are being shown to the world.” Photograph: Marcus Yam/LOS ANGELES TIMES/REX/Shutterstock And the thought, also, that mine and Pink Floyd’s support of the Ukrainians could help boost morale in those areas: they need to know the whole world supports them.Īndriy Khlyvnyuk is greeted by a fan in Kyiv on 2 March. I wouldn’t do this with many more things, but it’s so vitally, vitally important that people understand what’s going on there and do everything within their power to change that situation. “It’s Pink Floyd if it’s me and Nick, and that is the biggest promotional vehicle that is, as I said, the platform that I’ve been working on for my whole adult life, since I was 21.
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. “I rang Nick up and said: ‘listen, I want to do this thing for Ukraine. They also shot a video for the song, with Mason playing a set of drums decorated with a painting by Ukrainian artist Maria Primachenko (the fate of her paintings remains unknown following the bombing of a museum in Ivankiv). She’s very old, disabled, in a wheelchair and has a carer, and Janina and her family managed to get her all the way across Ukraine to the Polish border and now they’ve managed to get her to Sweden, literally last week.”Īfter “finding the chords for what Andriy was singing and writing another section that I could be” – Gilmour rolls his eyes – “the rock god guitar player on”, he hastily convened a recording session last week with Mason, Pink Floyd’s longstanding bassist Guy Pratt, and musician, producer and composer Nitin Sawhney on keyboards, layering their music with Khlyvnyuk’s sampled voice Rick Wright’s daughter Gala also attended. My grandchildren are half-Ukrainian, my daughter-in-law Janina is Ukrainian – her grandmother was in Kharkiv until three weeks ago. “I hate it when people say things like ‘As a parent, I …’, but the practicalities of having an extended Ukrainian family is part of this. The invasion of Ukraine changed Gilmour’s mind. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the fuck can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”ĭavid Gilmour recording the new Pink Floyd song. 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. “I’ve got a big platform that have worked on for all these years. “I thought: that is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” says Gilmour. On his Instagram, Gilmour found a video of the singer in military fatigues, a rifle slung over his shoulder, standing outside Kyiv’s St Sofia Cathedral, belting out an unaccompanied version of Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow, a 1914 protest song written in honour of the Sich Riflemen who fought both in the first world war and the Ukrainian war of independence.
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Gilmour had performed live with BoomBox in 2015, at a London benefit gig for the Belarus Free Theatre – they played a brief, endearingly raw set of Pink Floyd songs and Gilmour solo tracks – but events had moved on dramatically since then: at the end of Feburary, Khlyvnyuk had abandoned BoomBox’s US tour in order to fight against the Russian invasion. A couple of weeks ago, Pink Floyd’s guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked if he’d seen the Instagram feed of Andriy Khlyvnyuk, frontman of Ukrainian rock band BoomBox.
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