Richard Wright’s keyboard playing was a vital ingredient of the sound that made Pink Floyd one of the biggest-selling acts in the history of rock music. A founder member of the band, he also sang lead on several tracks on the group’s early albums and co-wrote music for several of their best-selling albums, including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

He later fell out with the band’s Roger Waters, who fired him from the group during the recording of The Wall. Wright continued to work with the group as a hired musician, but was restated to full membership after Waters left the group in the 1980s.

Richard William Wright was born in 1943 in Pinner, Middlesex. His father was chief biochemist at Unigate Dairies, and he was brought up in a large and comfortable house in nearby Hatch End with his two sisters. Educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s school, he played piano, trumpet and trombone as a boy, adding the guitar to his repertoire at the age of 10. His first musical passion was jazz and by the time he was in his mid-teens he was hanging out at London clubs watching Humphrey Lyttelton and Kenny Ball.

In 1962 he enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic to study architecture and the following year joined a band called Sigma 6, which included his future Pink Floyd colleagues Roger Waters and Nick Mason. In 1964 the band became the Abdabs (sometimes the Screaming Abdabs) and with Wright’s girlfriend, Juliette Gale, sometimes singing with them. By the summer of 1964 the couple had married. Wright dropped out of his course and went travelling around Greece before returning in 1964 to enrol at the London College of Music.

Pink Floyd at the Rainbow, 1972

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With Syd Barrett (obituary, July 12, 2006) now added to the line-up and with Wright restored alongside Waters and Mason in a group now known as the Tea Set, they played R&B songs in a style similar to the early Rolling Stones. By late 1965 they had begun experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, and the experience was reflected in a more experimental style musically, a proto-psychedelic sound based around extended improvisation between Wright’s keyboards and Barrett’s guitar. There was also another change of name, to the Pink Floyd Sound, named after two American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and then trimmed simply to Pink Floyd.

The band’s timing was perfect. The London “underground” scene was just emerging and Pink Floyd became its house band. With Barrett starting to write his own songs, Pink Floyd became a fixture at such counterculture venues as the UFO club and at benefits for such radical causes as the London Free School. They also began to accompany their performances with a light show and at the end of 1966 they recorded two tracks for Peter Whitehead’s film Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London, although they failed to appear in the film.

With the mainstream music industry waking up to the commercial potential of the new psychedelic sound, the group signed to EMI and made the Top 20 with its first two Barrett-written singles, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, both released in 1967.

Their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, followed later that summer and was a landmark in the development of British psychedelic music, combining the whimsy of Barrett’s songs with a free-form sound in which Wright’s keyboards featured prominently, the avant-garde quality enhanced by the use of stereo panning and other studio techniques which are old hat today but at the time were groundbreaking. Wright also sang lead on a number of tracks, including Astronomy Domine and Matilda Mother.

By the time of the release of their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), however, Barrett had become one of rock music’s first acid casualties and was replaced by the guitarist David Gilmour. If they missed Barrett’s songs they did not miss his LSD-induced unreliability, and the increasingly complex structures of their compositions helped to define the new notion of “progressive rock” far removed from the three-chord, three-minute-single format of pop music.

The band’s next major release, Ummagumma (1969), featured all four members on extended, solo compositions, Wright’s contribution being a four-part, 13-minute avant-garde instrumental suite called Sysyphus.

Atom Heart Mother (1970) found the band recording with an orchestra for the first time on the title piece, a 23-minute long “rock-orchestral” suite, while side two of the album included Wright’s nostalgic Summer ’68. It was the band’s first No 1 and was followed by Meddle (1971), which, minus the orchestra, cemented the epic, post-psychedelic Pink Floyd sound that was to make their next album, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), one of the biggest-selling and most influential albums of all time.

Although the concept for the album belonged to Waters, Wright’s jazz background exerted a strong influence in various ways, including the prominent use of a saxophone and his singing with Gilmour on Time, one of the album’s most famous tracks.