Former Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason looks back on ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’
The early psychedelic music of Pink Floyd will be explored by Nick Mason and his band Saucerful of Secrets next Friday night at the Benedum Center.
Photo by Jill Furmanovsky
Nick Mason, the onetime drummer of Pink Floyd.
If you own a Pink Floyd album, odds are itās āThe Dark Side of the Moonā or āThe Wall,ā which between them have sold more than 60 million copies.
And if itās not one of those, itās one of the two in between ā āWish You Were Hereā or āAnimals.ā
A much less celebrated part of the bandās oeuvre are the albums they released before they became arena-rock deities and were pioneers in the psychedelic sounds that were pulsing out of Swinging London in the aftermath of the Beatlesā āSgt. Pepperās Lonely Hearts Club Band.ā For their first two albums, they were led by the gifted and mercurial Syd Barrett, who descended into LSD-accelerated madness and died a recluse in 2006.
Itās this part of Pink Floydās legacy that Nick Mason, the bandās former drummer, hopes to reclaim.
āI think thatās particularly the case in America,ā Mason said in a phone interview from Virginia last week. āBecause what happened with āDark Sideā¦,ā it became so big that it obliterated everything else.ā
To that end, Mason has been out on tour with a five-piece band, playing songs from āA Saucerful of Secrets,ā the second Pink Floyd album, along with other selections from the groupās maiden days. Next Friday heāll perform at the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh at 8 p.m. The tour is being carried out on a smaller scale than the stadium spectaculars Pink Floyd staged until the band was put on ice in 1994, but Mason said that confers some advantages ā this show leaves more room for improvisation, he explained, sidestepping note-for-note renderings of songs designed to please fans in the furthest reaches of the upper deck.
āWhatās quite nice is itās relatively fresh, this early music. Itās a bit freer than the later albums, that became more accurate in the playing and in the structure of them.ā said Mason, who is now 78 and first signed on to Pink Floyd in 1965. He added that heād like to explore other areas of the bandās output āonly if they fall into that early period. It only makes sense to stick with the era that we want to explore, rather than wandering off into what I call tribute-land, if you start picking some of the later music.ā
During the making of āA Saucerful of Secrets,ā Barrett left the band and embarked on a solo career that lasted for two albums before fizzling out. After Barrettās departure, Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour took center stage in the group and drove it to its greatest success. They were also participants in one of rock musicās most vicious and long-running feuds. After Waters was kicked out of the band in 1983 amid creative and personal differences, Waters unsuccessfully sued to stop the group from using the name Pink Floyd, but it carried out on through two subsequent albums as a trio, with Gilmour and Mason joined by keyboard player Richard Wright. The whole band came back together just once, with Waters rejoining them for a reunion at Londonās Live 8 concert in 2005. The possibility of another complete band reunion was foreclosed with the death of Wright from lung cancer in 2008.
And even though the three surviving members are all pushing 80, theyāre apparently not ready yet to let bygones be bygones. A remixed and expanded version of āAnimalsā released this month was delayed amid raging disagreements between Waters and Gilmour over the packageās liner notes, a battle that Mason said he sidestepped.
Still, Mason said if Waters and Gilmour settled their differences and asked if he would like to participate in a reunion, heād be glad to get onboard.
āOh yeah,ā Mason said. āIām still really proud of what we did with Pink Floyd, and thereās still a huge audience out there of people who love it. It only works if everyone wants to do it, and wants to do it together. I canāt see that really happening. The only other way there might be some way of working together would be the equivalent of Live 8, when itās about something more important than musical differences.ā