Nick Mason
As Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets prepare to release their first live recording, Pink Floyd’s drummer talks about keeping the flame burning, Syd Barrett, and why he’s planning to Meddle with deeper cuts for their upcoming shows.
The drummer reflects on Pink Floyd as his Saucerful Of Secrets release their debut.
“Being in a band is a magnificent support system. If I drop a stick, the others will cover for you. And if you get something really wrong just stare at the bass player angrily and shake your head.”
When Nick Mason walked offstage at Dingwalls in Camden, north London on May 20, 2018, he felt a mix of euphoria and relief. Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, had just finished their first-ever gig, playing a set of early Pink Floyd songs to 500 curious onlookers. Despite Mason’s pedigree as the drummer and sole constant member of one of the biggest and most celebrated bands in history, and despite the fact that the purpose of the show – to solely play pre-The Dark Side Of The Moon material – was clearly marked on the tin, there was a worry that it could have gone horribly wrong.
“Nothing in music is ever a done deal,” says Mason today. “You can’t guarantee that the audience won’t go, ‘What is this?’ Or, ‘It doesn’t hold up very well against Comfortably Numb.’ It would be mad to assume you have the divine right to succeed just because it has the stamp of Pink Floyd on it.”
Almost two years after that Dingwalls show, his concerns look faintly ridiculous. The suspicion that Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets were square pegs being jammed in the round hole that is Pink Floyd’s legacy has been dispelled. Suddenly, the idea of a motley assemblage of musicians that includes a bona fide prog elder statesman (Mason), a bloke from Spandau Ballet (singer/guitarist Gary Kemp), a latterday Blockhead (guitarist Lee Harris), a Rick Wright collaborator (keyboard player Dom Beken) and one of rock’s most celebrated sidemen (bassist Guy Pratt) being keepers of the Floyd flame – or at least keepers of the flame of a specific part of their career – doesn’t seem so outlandish.
“I don’t see myself as the keeper of the flame,” says Mason, as polite in deflecting such a suggestion as he is about anything else. “But I’m enjoying the fact that people like it. Somebody said to me, ‘You of all of us knew Syd the least, but you’re probably doing more to bring him to people’s attention.’”
Mason has never had the profile of either Roger Waters and David Gilmour, yet there’s an argument that he embodies Pink Floyd more than either. Famously, he’s the only member to have played on all of their albums. While Gilmour and Waters have embarked on their own successful solo careers, the drummer has chosen to stay close to the mothership. “I never wanted to go and play in a different band,” he says. “It never appealed. It was always Pink Floyd for me.”
We’re nestled in a meeting room in the offices of Sony Records, who are releasing the Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of
“It would be mad to assume you have the divine right to succeed just because it has the stamp of Pink Floyd on it.”
Secrets’ debut album, Live At The Roundhouse. Living up to their original mission statement, it’s a dive into an era of Floyd that was put into deep storage after their post-Dark Side success: Syd Barrett-era standards such as Lucifer Sam and Interstellar Overdrive sit next to pre-superstardom treasures as Let There Be More Light and the granite-encased The Nile Song.
Live At The Roundhouse is too vibrant to be a museum piece, but it unavoidably evokes a particular period – or periods – of Pink Floyd’s career. Even the venue where the album was recorded is part of the band’s mythology. This former Victorian railway engine shed was the scene of more than one early Floyd gig back when they were the house band of the British counterculture.
Mason looks back on those times with a detached fondness, even if the reality isn’t quite as romantic as the legend. “I don’t think we knew we were in the middle of anything,” he says. “You have to remember that once we got a record deal and an agent, we were off in the transit van. In 1967, we did something like 200 gigs and made a record. Other bands might have been dropping acid in some club, but we were somewhere near Doncaster, unloading the van.”
Floyd weren’t completely divorced from the poets and freaks. They headlined the famed 14 Hour Technicolor Dream jamboree at Alexandra Palace on April 29, 1967. It was a lightning rod for the emergent counter-culture, even if Mason can’t remember an awful lot about it. “We had a gig in somewhere like Holland that evening, so we arrived at two or three in the morning and it was chaos. All I remember is a lot of people wandering around.”
More important, he says, was the short-lived UFO Club on London’s Tottenham Court Road. “UFO [he pronounces it as one word, ‘you-foe’] was terrific,” he says. “The light show was a piece of work in its own right. There was the odd poet that would come up and declaim, or a couple of weird dancers. The sad thing is that the music took over, because it sold tickets. I’m afraid the poets and dancers got shoved out.”
Mason says he didn’t completely buy into the ethos and ideals of this new cultural revolution. “I’d spent the previous three years training as an architect, which is fairly pragmatic. Acid was never part of it for me. I was terrified of it. Especially when Syd went downhill.”
Syd Barrett is the Banquo of Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets. Even though their remit extends well beyond his brief but pivotal time in the band, the late frontman is a semi-spectral figure hovering permanently on the edge of eyesight. What was he really like? Mason thinks for a moment.
“The problem is really the passing of time,” he says. “Remembering what happened and in what order. Syd’s sister, Rosemary, said that maybe he always had some slight element of being on the [autism] spectrum, but I was never aware of that. When I first met Syd, he was absolutely charming, easy to be with. But then there was the thing where he was doing acid and it wasn’t really going well for him, so instead of packing it in, he did more. Since then, someone has told me about a form of acid that was about 10 times stronger, one that people didn’t come back from. Maybe he had some of that.”
Mason remembers Floyd bassist Roger Waters speaking to RD Laing, the noted psychiatrist. Laing told him: “Maybe Syd’s not mad, maybe you’re the mad ones.”
“We couldn’t possibly believe that Syd could be sane if he didn’t want to be a pop star or be in a successful band,” he says. “He ended up going back to painting, which is where he’d come from, so maybe there was something in it.”
Mason remains “an admirer” of Barrett’s work, though he’s been less effusive about his own talents as a drummer. “There was definitely some insecurity there,” he admits. “I always though of myself as a gifted amateur. I have great respect for the technical drummers, Bill Bruford or Simon Phillips, and you think, ‘I wish I could do that.’ It’s funny, when I listen back to some of the stuff, I think, ‘God, I wouldn’t do that now.’ But I’ve become more comfortable in what I do. And being in a band is a magnificent support system. If I drop a stick, the others will cover for you. And if you get something really wrong just stare at the bass player angrily and shake your head.”
How does that go down with Pink Floyd’s bass player? “You do it when he’s not looking.”
He won’t be drawn on his favourite period of Floyd. Each one, he says, had its good and bad moments. “The starter period was great, we were all living the dream,” he says.
“But then it was marred with Syd losing it. The period working up to Dark Side was perhaps the purest – everyone was contributing, not just the musicians but people like [engineer] Alan Parsons, [mixer] Chris Thomas and [sleeve designers] Hipgnosis. It ended up producing something that picked up critical mass and became so important.”
Even when life in Floyd became fraught – the second half of the 70s and the start of the 80s – Mason seemed to rise above the tensions. “People talk about Pink Floyd being hard work,” he says. “Actually, most of it was great. We worked really well together and we had a good time together. We made The Wall in France, and I went and stayed with Roger for a lot of it. I certainly have no memory of people being irritated with each other onstage, which is the most important thing. My experience was that people wanted to do whatever was best for the music.”
He’s not oblivious to the influence Floyd have exerted for decades, though he says it surprises him. “It does,” he insists. “People talk about the status of it all, but I see us as slightly to one side of the mainstream of what rock has been.”
What does he mean? “It’s hard to explain,” he begins. “It is influential but I don’t see it being as influential as other bands in terms of how they would make records or do shows. For instance, if you went to see the Rolling Stones, the video screens would be full of Mick and Keith. If you went to see Pink Floyd, the video screens would be full of something else. There wouldn’t be that attention on spotlighting the individuals. From that point of view, it put us slightly outside of the mainstream.”
Has he heard Dub Side Of The Moon, the reggae version of The Dark Side Of The Moon?
“Yes,” he says, smiling. “And also Luther Wright And The Wrongs, a country and western version of The Wall.
They’re great.”
Mason still sees both Waters (who joined Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets onstage in New York in 2019) and, less frequently, Gilmour. “Dormant,” is how he describes Floyd’s status today, then adds: “I suppose all it needs in theory is for David to announce a Pink Floyd tour and that’s it.”
Would you want that to happen?
“Not particularly. Because I think it would regenerate that sense of Roger not being part of it.”
You get the feeling that Mason is happier leading his Saucerful Of Secrets from the back, and you can understand why. It’s a chance to celebrate the past of a band he was such a key part of without either the political and emotional baggage that would come with a fully-fledged Floyd reunion or the sense that he’s in competition with his old bandmates.
Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets are already digging deeper into the early repertoire: their upcoming planned tour will see them tackling epic Meddle cornerstone Echoes, something Mason purposefully avoided first time around in deference to the late Rick Wright. Does he ever see himself venturing beyond the boundaries of the early period?
“Not for a while,” he replies. “I really don’t want to go out and do Comfortably Numb.”
You could do The Final Cut...
“I don’t think so,” he says with a laugh. “I’d like to continue opening up that material. There’s plenty. There’s seven albums plus other bits and pieces. That will keep us going for a while.”
Do you still have the urge to make new music?
“Not particularly. That might be something to look at one day, but for the moment there’s a lot to be done with this.”
It’s a typically charming brush-off, and one that’s understandable. There’s a place for Comfortably Numb and Money, and there’s a place for Fearless and Obscured By Clouds. Prog senses it’s with the latter that Nick Mason is happiest.
Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets Live At The Roundhouse is out on April 17 via Legacy/Sony. A limited edition etched 12-inch of See Emily Play and Vegetable Man will be released on June 20 for Record Store Day. See www.thesaucerfulofsecrets.com for more.