Pink Floyd sample Ukrainian musician on new song 'Hey, Hey, Rise Up'

Pink Floyd have released their first new music in decades in aid of Ukraine, featuring a sample of Ukrainian singer and frontline soldier Andriy Khlyvnyuk.

‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up’ includes the vocalist of Ukrainian band Boombox, and marks the band’s first original music to be released since their 1994 album The Division Bell. All proceeds from the song will go to Ukraine Humanitarian Relief, the band explained.

The impactful music video, directed by Mat Whitecross, has already amassed over 1.3 million views in just 12 hours.

Pink Floyd – who comprise David Gilmour, Nick Mason, bassist Guy Pratt and keyboardist Nitin Sawhney recorded the new single on March 30th this year.

Discussing the new song in a statement, Gilmour said: “I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities, and raise morale. We want express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.”

The singer has a Ukrainian family. He joined the band as guitarist and co-lead vocalist in 1967, shortly before the departure of founder member Syd Barrett.

“We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers.”

Discussing the creation of the track, Gilmour added: “We recorded the track and video in our barn where we did all our Von Trapped Family live streams during lockdown. It’s the same room that we did the ‘Barn Jams’ with Rick Wright back in 2007. Janina Pedan made the set in a day and we had Andriy singing on the screen while we played, so the four of us had a vocalist, albeit not one who was physically present with us.”

1/3 Tonight at midnight, Pink Floyd will release a new song, 'Hey Hey Rise Up', which sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by Guy Pratt & Nitin Sawhney, with an extraordinary vocal by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.
Listen/download at https://t.co/i1l92D3AYU

— Pink Floyd (@pinkfloyd) April 7, 2022

Gilmour had previously played with Khlyvnyuk’s band in 2015 as part of a benefit gig for the Belarus Free Theatre, pointing out that the singer was halfway through a US tour with Boombox in February when he returned to his homeland to fight on the frontline against the Russians.

On ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up!’, Khlyvnyuk is sampled singing patriotic Ukranian song ‘The Red Viburnum’. A viral Instagram video shows him singing the powerful song in Sofiyskaya Square in the capital Kyiv.

“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,” Gilmour said. “It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”

“I thought: that is pretty magical and maybe I can do something with this,” Gilmour told the Guardian of the footage in a new interview. “I’ve got a big platform that [Pink Floyd] have worked on for all these years. 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. The frustration of seeing that and thinking ‘what the fuck can I do?’ is sort of unbearable.”

Трішки мотивації від лідера гурту «Бумбокс» Андрія Хливнюка 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/VQFdRjahGF

— UkrArmyBlog 🇺🇦 (@UkrArmyBlog) February 28, 2022

Khlyvnyuk suffered injuries in the war, and was in hospital when Gilmour managed to contact him.

“I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing,” he said. “We both hope to do something together in person in the future.”

Last month, Pink Floyd and David Gilmour removed their music from streaming services in Russia and Belarus in an act of support towards Ukraine, which has suffered terrible atrocities war crimes all over the country as a result of Russia's invasion. The port city of Mariupol is currently under siege, with 130,000 people trapped in a humanitarian crisis and countless dead or kidnapped and brought to Russian territories.

Writing on Twitter, Pink Floyd said: “To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour’s solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia an Belarus from today.”

Gilmour added: “Russian soldiers, stop killing your brothers. There will be no winners in this war. My daughter in law is Ukrainian and my granddaughters want to visit and know their beautiful country. Stop this before it is all destroyed.”

Check out the video for 'Hey, Hey, Rise Up' below: