Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason: ‘I was buggered if I was going to be the bass player’

Nick Mason was never all that close to Syd Barrett, the original singer, songwriter and leader of Pink Floyd. Barrett was a closer friend of Roger Waters, the group’s bassist (and, later, dictator), and of David Gilmour, who succeeded him as guitarist in 1968. The last time Mason — Floyd’s drummer, and the only person to be a permanent member of every line-up of the band — saw Barrett, who died in 2006, was in 1975 when he paid an unexpected visit to Abbey Road during the recording of Wish You Were Here.

It is therefore, he notes, “slightly odd” that he has spent the past couple of years, with his current band Saucerful of Secrets, playing the music Floyd made with Barrett before his mental health issues, profoundly affected by prodigious LSD intake, forced the band to sack him — as well as songs from the years immediately thereafter.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets in fact plays only the music of 1967-72 (more or less, the music the other former members of Pink Floyd don’t play in their own shows). Even though Pink Floyd became one of the world’s biggest bands, it’s something of a niche act. Yet, it has attracted enough interest and praise for Sony to release a live CD/DVD set of one of the shows they played at the Roundhouse in London last year.

When Pink Floyd finally, officially and incontrovertibly disbanded following the release of The Endless River in 2014, Mason, then 70, imagined his playing days were done. “What I ended up doing was quite a lot of what one called ‘gardening the catalogue’. It’s nearly always the 40th anniversary of something, or the 50th. I was quite involved with the V&A show [2014 Floyd exhibition Their Mortal Remains] and that was part of the driver for this. I really enjoyed working on it, but something was missing. I was doing Q&As and chats, which were performances in the most minor way, but I realised the good part was banging the drums.”

The first Saucerful of Secrets shows were in May 2018, in tiny London venues, Mason joined by four other musicians, including Guy Pratt — Floyd’s touring bassist in the 1980s and 1990s — and Gary Kemp, late of Spandau Ballet. They were the smallest places in which Mason had played since, well, since Barrett was still in the band. “The first night we played the club gigs it was just like being back in 1967, and the excitement of being in a band and being onstage and having an audience was absolutely terrific,” he says.

The choice of Kemp to channel Barrett raised eyebrows. “As far as trying to emulate Syd,” Kemp says, “I’m singing Syd by having taken the baton through [David Bowie’s persona as] Ziggy Stardust, through Johnny Rotten. Because that’s how I view it. I take my acting head and think: ‘What was the sensibility of the time? What was the zeitgeist of the UFO club?’ Well, it was a bit like the Blitz [the club in which Spandau Ballet started out], a bit like what I did then. A little bit like punk, like the Roxy. You hope it all comes out when you sing it and it works.”

Mason has a very distinctive way of playing — long, lazy rolls around the kit, playing just off the beat, as if he’s just waking from a very pleasant dream — that was as central to the Pink Floyd sound as Gilmour’s equally languid guitar playing or Richard Wright’s vast, melancholy keyboard chords.

“That’s my natural way of playing — I was never a technical drummer or a student of drumming,” he says. “I’m a worrier — I’ve always had a very low opinion of my drumming skills, I suppose because I don’t have that technical background. I do realise that what I do works, and now I’m comfortable with it, but I always felt a bit ill at ease about it. I only took up drumming in the first place because someone else had got a guitar and we were forming a band and I was buggered if I was going to be the bass player. That’s the truth. I like the drums, but that was more or less how it panned out.”

Not a constant practiser then? “No.” Is he naturally lazy? “I don’t think so. I do quite a lot of other things. I couldn’t give a drum masterclass, but I have a certificate to teach motor racing and another one to teach helicopter flying and another one to teach sailing. I love learning things, but it’s almost as though I didn’t want to alter the way I play drums by suddenly studying and feeling I had to change the way I play.”

In Pink Floyd, though, being the drummer was a position he has often compared to being the ship’s cook. Now, he is the captain. It’s his name on the marquees. Is it more fun than being in Pink Floyd? “It’s different. Because it’s new, it’s probably a bit more fun at the moment. But I definitely don’t see it as ‘This is fun, that was hard work.’ A lot of Floyd was great fun.”

It didn’t look much like fun from the outside, I point out. It looked an awful lot as if it were an endless series of passive-aggressive psychodramas conducted with exquisite manners. Mason laughs a little. He is not going to be caught pointing fingers, nor is he going to deviate from his public persona of undemonstrative equability. “Of course there were moments like that, but we went through quite a long period of time enjoying each other’s company and enjoying the work.”

The equability is not fake, though. Mason and his bandmates are devoted to each other; they as fans of Pink Floyd, he as someone evidently grateful they have given him the impetus to get back on stage. Each night they play, there’s an air of astonished delight in the audience, too, as they realise they are going to hear songs they never expected to see anyone from Pink Floyd perform (“Interstellar Overdrive”! “Bike”!) and songs Pink Floyd never performed at all first time round (“Vegetable Man”!).

And Mason is similarly delighted by it all, by being in a band, by no longer being hidden behind countless backing musicians and enough special effects to fill a Hollywood blockbuster. “That’s what’s so great about it. Once you are exposed, that brings the band together, because that’s your support system.”

Mason isn’t making grand plans. The band will tour two or three times a year for a month at a time, he says, and they’ll stop when he feels too old to carry on. After all, he notes, there are times when he doesn’t need to be reminded he was in Pink Floyd. “We were in the pub having dinner the other night,” he says, “and they had a playlist from Spotify on. I heard the unmistakable sound of that ping from ‘Echoes’. I looked at my wife and said, ‘This is going to be a long 20 minutes.’ ” He laughs, gently, and sighs.

The CD/DVD set ‘Live at the Roundhouse’ is released on April 17 on Sony Legacy. The concert film screens at UK cinemas on March 10, nickmasonfilm.com

A tour of the UK and Europe begins April 23 thesaucerfulofsecrets.com

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