Dish Walahs Over three and a bit years, Nick Mason’s early-Floyd flag-wavers have turned cynics into converts. “We took the pomposity out of the music,” they tell
ON PAPER, the idea looked fairly ludicrous: the septuagenarian Nick Mason revisiting the early days of Pink Floyd with erstwhile members of Spandau Ballet and The Blockheads. But, through their attention to detail and on-stage verve, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets have been a resounding success.
“It would sound too depressing to say I had very low expectations, because it was not really that,” Mason tells MOJO. “I just wasn’t sure whether it would interest people.”
“What’s lovely is it’s Pink Floyd when they were a pop group,” states Guy Pratt. “Before it was this vast, faceless obelisk.”
“We took the pomposity out of the music,” reckons Gary Kemp. “We gave it a little bit more fun, a little bit more edge, a little bit more anarchy here and there.”
Even those who were sniffy about Kemp stepping into the shoes of Syd Barrett have been forced to check their snobbery. “Listen, man, I’ve spent the whole of my life with people being sniffy about me,” he hoots. “They have this impression that I just sit at home doing kind of rather thin Nile Rodgers riffs and listening to Bowie records.”
Nonetheless, Pratt admits that, sometimes in their early gigs of 2018, the Saucers were often dangerously winging it. “The first few shows, we hadn’t done Atom Heart Mother,” the bassist says. “Then we put it in the set in Amsterdam. About a third of the way through it, I suddenly thought, ‘What the hell are we doing? This is incredibly ambitious’ (laughs).”
All attest to experiencing some properly transcendent moments on-stage, particularly at Den Atelier in Luxembourg on September 9, 2018. “When we did A Saucerful Of Secrets,” Pratt recalls, “the entire audience sang the vocal part. That was just extraordinary.”
Mason’s venture has met with the approval of both David Gilmour and Roger Waters, the latter even making a surprise live appearance on-stage with the Saucers at the Beacon Theatre in New York on April 18, 2019, to sing Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun.
“I’d rung him and asked him if he’d do it and I heard absolutely nothing,” Mason says. “And then two days later, he rang me to say he’d left his phone in a taxi, so he hadn’t been in touch. So, we actually more or less put it together on the night.”
“It was incredibly last minute,” says
Pratt. “He didn’t soundcheck or anything. And it was quite funny, because
I remember we just had to have a huddle and a chat about it. Nick was saying, ‘Oh, you know, Roger does it this way when he does it.’ We were like, ‘Yeah, well, we’re doing it our way.’ And he was brilliant.”
“It took a long time to get through the track because he was walking around on-stage a lot with his arms in the air,” laughs Kemp. “But he was great.”
“He actually left the stage before the third verse,” Lee Harris remembers. “Guy had to get him and go, ‘There’s another verse you’ve forgotten.’”
For 2022, Saucerful Of Secrets have a mammoth 84-date schedule in place for The Echoes Tour. Beyond that, MOJO wonders if there’s any chance that they might consider expanding their repertoire into post-1972 Pink Floyd?
“Well, as soon as you start treading on Money and Comfortably Numb and so on, you enter a world of, ‘Well, David didn’t do it quite like that,’” Mason points out.
Lee Harris, however, wonders aloud whether there might be other neglected corners of the wider Floyd landscape into which Saucerful Of Secrets might venture. “There are pieces like Shine On… (Parts VI-IX) that don’t really get played by the other guys. You could play that as a five-piece easily.
“I mean, I think it could be interesting to do Dark Side…, but when it was Eclipse, before they’d actually turned it into the album. If you were doing The Great Gig In The Sky without the singer, as they did, where it was just a lot of Hammond, you’re taking it back to the music. But, y’know, we’ve got about 90 gigs to get out of the way first.”