Pink Floyd have reunited to record their first new material in 28 years, a protest song against the Ukraine war.
Hey Hey, Rise Up! features David Gilmour and Nick Mason alongside long-time Floyd bassist Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards.
But the song is built around a spine-tingling refrain from Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the band Boombox.
Gilmour says the song is a show of “anger at a superpower invading a peaceful nation”.
But it is also intended as a morale booster for the people of Ukraine, and a call “for peace”.
Work on the song began a couple of weeks ago, when Gilmour was shown Khlyvnyuk’s Instagram feed. The singer had posted footage of himself in in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square, fully armed and ready to fight the Russian invasion.
Hey, Hey, Rise Up Lyrics
In the meadow a red viburnum has bent down low
Our glorious Ukraine has been troubled so
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey – hey, rise up – and rejoice!
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey – hey, rise up and rejoice!
Is Pink Floyd From Ukraine?
Pink Floyd was founded in London in the mid-1960s and helped forge the U.K. psychedelic scene before releasing influential 1970s albums including “The Dark Side of the Moon”.