Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets hits Boston
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets set the controls for tours of Europe and North America in 2022. When COVID postponed the trek, the Pink Floyd drummer used the down time to expand the set list. He wasn’t timid with his ambitions.
“Before lockdown, it was a relatively short show, it was a no (set break) show,” Mason told the Herald. “We decided we would make the jump to doing two (sets) with no support band. And I think it’s a much stronger show.”
Mason is 78 years old. The show can be 21 songs — all from the Floyd’s pre“Dark Side of the Moon” catalog. The songs can be 21 minutes long. (See the band’s Thursday concert at the Shubert Theatre.)
Yes, during the break, Mason and band decided to add in “Echoes,” the absolutely epic closer to 1971 album “Meddle.” Taking on the track exemplifies the spirit of Saucerful of Secrets. After a quarter century passed with no Floyd projects, the drummer gathered a dream team — longtime Floyd touring bassist Guy Pratt, Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp, guitarist Lee Harris, keyboardist Dom Beken — to remake rock’s dreamiest music.
“We’d left ‘Echoes’ out as being too long, too complicated, but now it’s become the high point of our show,” Mason said. “Looking back on the song, it always felt longer than it should be. The extraordinary thing was that when we came to learn to play it properly, it sustains itself. For me, ‘Echoes’ has been the best thing to come out of the new set list.”
Fans might find other high points: “One of These Days,” “Fearless,” “The Nile Song,” “If,” “Remember a Day.”
Of course, many people would rather hear expected tracks such as “Comfortably Numb” and “Money.” But that’s not what Saucerful of Secrets is about, and it never will be.
“You can’t go five meters without a tribute band playing ‘Comfortably Numb,’” Mason said with a laugh. (He’s not wrong, Australian Pink Floyd play the same night in Boston). “For me particularly, I’m very anxious not to get into that territory. … It’s quite important for us to establish our own version of what we are doing, particularly to have the freedom to improvise a bit within things in a way that we did 50 years ago.”
Mason could sell twice the tickets and make three times the money doing a “Pink Floyd Drummer Nick Mason Does the Complete ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ ” tour. But that wouldn’t capture the wild, unprecedented energy of the band’s early run. And it wouldn’t be fun.
“When you start off in a band, you’re friends, eventually you find that each of your friends has got their own lawyer,” he said with a laugh.
“We are at the stage where we are much friends and I think that comes across on stage, we are there because we want to be,” he added. “We were very unsure as if this would work at all and I was probably the most diffident about it. So we said we’d do two days in a rehearsal studio and just see if it might work … after two days we went, ‘This is really fun, let’s get on with it.’ ”