Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

When: 8 p.m. Monday

Where: Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave., downtown

Tickets: $50-$65, plus service fees

Phone: (619) 615-4000

Online: ticketmaster.com

Q:

Did you at any point lose

your callouses?

A:

I don’t have callouses. I

won’t say I’m a light player, but I use quite a light stick. But as soon as we actually have completed the first two dates on a tour, there will be a blister.

Q:

I have interviewed Roger

Waters and David Gilmour, separately, and one of the few things they agreed on …

A:

(laughs)

Q:

... is that Pink Floyd, early

on, was a band of young musicians who had a shared goal and were driven to succeed.

A:

I think that’s true. The

good thing about the early days of a band is almost everyone has the same sort of aspirations. We ended up making music a little more complex than the run-of- the-mill rock music at the time and finding something we all thought was good that no one else was doing. When we started, every band wanted to be an R&B band. I think we wanted to be an R&B band, but we found a different sort of niche for ourselves.

Q:

Roger also told me Pink

Floyd’s extended improvisations in concert were not inspired by jazz — and he cited John Coltrane and Sun Ra — but came about simply because the young Pink Floyd was not very good.

A:

I think he was right. In a

way, we might have been influenced by jazz and, especially me, by the Blue Note Records catalog. But I don’t think it had an influence on the band as a whole. It’s this “10,000 hours” (of practice and honing) thing. We weren’t very good because we had not played very much. We were college kids and we hadn’t had a childhood dedicated to music — or been in a band that practiced four or five hours a day for five years. We made it up as we went along. To be fair, we were not very good. But we did get better!