Pink Floyd meets for the first time in 28 years: they release a song to support Ukraine

After a 28-year hiatus, the British group pink floyd gets back together to publish this Friday a song in support of the Ukrainian people entitled “Hey Hey Rise Up” (“Hey Hey Get Up”).

This is the first song recorded by the band since the album “The Division Bell” (1994) and includes the voice of the Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk, from the rock group Boombox, who is accompanied by two historical Pink Floyd members like David Gilmour and Nick Mason.

All the benefits generated by “Hey Hey Rise Up” will go to the NGO Ukrainian Humanitarian Relief, as reported by the legendary London band on its Twitter account on Thursday.

“We, like so many others, have felt anger and frustration at this vile act of invasion of an independent, peaceful and democratic country, and the murders of its people by one of the world’s greatest superpowers,” he wrote in the tweet. Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

The guitarist and vocalist of Pink Floyd is accompanied on this recording, in addition to Mason, a founding member of the group in 1965, by other regular collaborators such as bassist Guy Pratt and keyboardist Nitin Sawhney.

The song, completed in the studios last week, took parts of Khlyvnyuk’s voice from a clip posted by the Ukrainian artist on the Instagram social network, at a performance in kyiv’s Sofiyskaya square.

From that symbolic place, Khlyvnyuk sang a well-known Ukrainian protest song, whose last phrase gives the title to the new Pink Floyd song.

The video for “Hey Hey Rise Up” is the work of director and screenwriter Mat Whitecross, while the single’s cover, designed by Cuban artist Yosan León, bears a drawing of a sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine.