Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason has been awarded a CBE for services to music in the New Year Honours list.

The skilled percussionist featured on every album produced by the progressive rock group since he co-founded the band in 1965. Together with his bandmates, including David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Mason helped forge a new and commercially popular experimentalism in rock music.

Mason, 74, has been made a CBE in recognition of his services to music throughout decades in the industry.

He began drumming in bands alongside fellow Regent Street Polytechnic student Waters in the early 1960s, before they teamed up with keyboard player Richard Wright and frontman Syd Barret. From their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Pink Floyd gathered an adoring audience and achieved major commercial success.

Mason was influenced by jazz music, which helped him provide the distinctive percussive elements to the band’s concept albums. He also had a hand in lyrics and co-wrote several songs, including Echoes. He still tours with his newly-formed band, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, and has indulged his passion for motor racing and Ferraris between touring commitments throughout his career.

On December 13, The Pretty Things played their farewell concert at London’s O2 arena. The British psychedelic-pop act was joined by David Gilmour and Van Morrison during their three-set career-spanning night that touched on all eras of their diverse catalog.

The former Pink Floyd guitarist first emerged during the second set of the evening to play on a string of songs from The Pretty Things’ 1968 concept album S.F. Sorrow.

Gilmour assisted on five songs that included takes on “She Says Good Morning,” “Baron Saturday” and “Cries From the Midnight Circus.”

Morrison was welcomed during the third set, as he fronted the band on a handful of blues classics. The Northern Irish singer-songwriter delivered takes on the oft-covered standard “Baby, Please Don’t Go” along with Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell” and “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.”

Gilmour then returned for the final two songs of the set, sitting in on “L.S.D.” and “Old Man Going.”

Both legendary musicians helped close out the night taking the stage during the mid-point of the three-song encore. The augmented ensemble offered up a take on one more Bo Diddley number serving up “Road Runner,” a song The Pretty Things recorded for their 1965 self-titled debut with Morrison once again singing lead.

To honour Armistice Day this year, a number of prominent artists have created a song and video put together from the letters of fallen soldiers, which will raise money for the Cancer Awareness trust.

Cillian Murphy, Ronnie Wood, Brian Eno, Sinead O’Connor, Imelda May and Nick Mason all teamed up for “One More Yard” by the Evamore project, which sees Murphy, the acclaimed actor from films including Dunkirk, reading spoken word poetry over beautiful, haunting instrumentation by Eno.

The track then moves into the song itself, which features O’Connor on lead vocals, Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood on guitars, and Nick Mason on drums.

Lyrics on “One More Yard” were inspired by letters written by Lieutenant Michael Thomas Wall, of the Royal Irish Regiment, to his mother in Dublin. The term “one more yard” was used frequently by soldiers in their letters and diaries, in a reference to the trek across no man’s land.

Nick Mason describes it as a project that “allows people such as myself to pay tribute to the young men of 100 years ago who fought for our freedom but also to do something to help young people facing cancer today“.

Ronnie Wood tells The Independent: “As someone who has had to deal with cancer, I am delighted to be part of this new awareness initiative – it’s a great idea backed by some brilliant scientific people. I love the track ‘One More Yard’ – a sad true story set to a haunting melody. It was a pleasure playing on it. I hope everyone gets behind this charity, and there will be more to come.”

“This project is something I’m glad to be a part of,” Imeda May says. “I was called by producer John Reynolds and instantly knew it was something I had to be involved with. There is a strong connection for me, not just because I;m Irish like the soldier who wrote the letters that inspired the song, but also because of the importance of remembrance and tribute to those lost in WWI. Most importantly I feel using this opportunity to raise money for those affected by cancer through the Cancer Awareness trust. I’m immensely proud to say I contributed to this unique artistic and charitable endeavour.”

The Evamore project was founded by Professor Sir Chris Evans, while he was conducting research on creating a new cancer awareness charity. He was struck by the similarities between the emotional struggle of young people confronted with cancer, and the fighting spirit and written expressions of the young soldiers in the trenches of the First World War.

“It was incredibly moving to see how the words of soldiers 100 years ago were so similar to those of young people suffering from cancer today,” he says. “We can only now honour the sacrifice of those a century ago but there is so much to be done to help those who are locked into the greatest struggle of their lives as they confront cancer. We are very privileged that some of the greatest names in rock music and wonderful actors have chosen to get involved in our project.”

The Evamore EP is out now – proceeds for the project will go to a new Cancer Awareness Trust which will provide expert clinical advice and guidance to cancer sufferers around the world.

More info available : https://www.evamore.co.uk/

Nick Mason of Pink Floyd is revisiting the band’s acid-drenched years – with Gary Kemp standing in for Syd Barrett. Are they serious?

If you didn’t know who he was, you would never take Nick Mason for one of the most successful rock stars of all time. Aged 74, dressed down in jeans and a white shirt, softly spoken and understated to a fault, he might be taken for a retired businessman, a solicitor or perhaps the architect he was training to be until a career as Pink Floyd’s drummer intervened.

Handily, his surroundings tell his story for you. The walls of Mason’s London office are covered with awards and memorabilia. Some dates back to when Pink Floyd improvised a soundtrack to LSD-fuelled happenings at the UFO Club. And some of it speaks of commercial success on a barely conceivable scale. What I think is a platinum disc turns out to be a 22-times platinum disc: “To commemorate the sale of more than 22 million copies of the album The Wall.”

Mason is giving an interview because he finds himself in a “very odd” situation. He’s going on tour for the first time in 24 years and the contrast between then and now is almost comically pronounced. In 1994, Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour grossed $250m and required 53 trucks to ferry it around the world. This year, he’s performing in the kind of small venues no member of Pink Floyd has played in for half a century – and without the “considerable degree of luxury” their latterday tours afforded.

When I mention this, he talks about “the camaraderie” of his new band, Saucerful of Secrets, and mutters something, a little heavily, about how travelling around by chartered 747 doesn’t necessarily make life happier. He did, after all, live through the endless icy struggles that lurked behind Pink Floyd’s vast success.

The real shock is what Saucerful of Secrets, named after Pink Floyd’s 1968 album, are playing. No one expected Mason to see out 2018 as part of a band dedicated to performing the music Pink Floyd made before The Dark Side of the Moon catapulted them to superstardom in 1973. And no one expected such a group to be fronted not just by longstanding Floyd bassist Guy Pratt, but also by Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet.

“I never in a million years thought Nick would do it,” says Pratt. “But I thought I’d send him an email. And he just said, ‘Yeah, come and have a chat.’”

The email caught Mason in a reflective mood, arriving in the wake of Their Mortal Remains, the blockbusting V&A exhibition that finally seemed to draw a line under Pink Floyd’s career. “Well,” sighs Mason. “I always live in hope. They’ll write ‘I’m not sure the band’s really over’ on my tombstone.”

Mason was intrigued by the idea of revisiting an era when “we didn’t really know exactly what we were doing”. These were the years when the late Syd Barrett was Pink Floyd’s frontman and their brand of exploratory psych got very short shrift outside of London’s hippy enclaves. “Oh God,” groans Mason. “Playing a Top Rank ballroom somewhere, on a bloody revolving stage, with Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band on the other side of it, and the whole audience wanting them to come on and us to get off.”

Later, after Barrett’s mental breakdown and departure, Pink Floyd were written off by their own managers and, in search of a new direction, tried everything from spacey improvisations to epic orchestral pieces and pastoral country rock. “I hadn’t really examined these songs in 40-something years. It was a real eye-opener. Syd’s way of working and his writing, and some of the other things we did, you just think, ‘God, this has got such a modern feel to it.’” He smiles. ‘Obscured By Clouds! You could take that to Ibiza.”

Mason’s rediscovered enthusiasm for his band’s soundtrack to the French film La Vallée notwithstanding, Saucerful of Secrets looks like an enterprise fraught with risks. The Syd Barrett era may well be the most revered part of Pink Floyd’s career, its mythic nature bolstered by the saga of Barrett’s decline and subsequent reclusivity. Not every fan was overjoyed to hear that the man who wrote the Spandau Ballet hits True and Gold would be singing See Emily Play and Astronomy Domine.

“I had a very similar feeling when it got announced that I was doing The Krays,” says Kemp, referring to the 1990s biopic of the gangster twins. “Both times, it was people going, ‘What the fuck?’ I was looking at tweets I shouldn’t have, all of which were saying, ‘Gary Kemp’s the new Syd Barrett – what?’”

Kemp is keen to point out that his involvement isn’t as improbable as it seems. He is a longtime Floyd fan: in his teens, his tastes were torn between a love for glam rock and an interest in prog. “I went to a grammar school and all the more middle-class kids in the playground would be into Pink Floyd and Yes. They were the kids whose houses you’d go to and their parents would be reading broadsheets and talking about theatre – and they’d have a wok.”

Also, he notes, the London club scene from which Spandau Ballet emerged wasn’t that different from the milieu that first thrust Pink Floyd to fame: the reputation of both rested on being the London hipster’s house band of choice. “There were people at the Blitz Club who’d been at UFO. They were only 12 years apart. We started out as a cult band. We weren’t doing pop music as such – we went that way when we made True.”
Still, he concedes, playing with a Saucerful of Secrets brings some specific challenges: whatever else Spandau Ballet may have been, they weren’t big on improvising on stage, while Syd Barrett’s songs frequently didn’t bother with standard structures or time signatures. “His writing’s like a machine where some of the cogs don’t touch each other,” says Kemp. “It looks like it’s falling apart, but it still works perfectly. You have to learn where it suddenly jumps to a different bit, where he’s just stuck an extra beat in, or taken one out. But Nick,” he says with a certain wonderment, “didn’t even think about it. He just sat down and played it: ‘Oh yes, I remember this.’”

“It’s still fairly clear, the memory of it,” shrugs Mason. “One sort of looks back and wonders at seeing oneself as such a naive, occasionally pompous sort of character in a pair of William Morris print trousers and boots, but I just do remember a lot of it.”

Whatever anyone’s misgivings, the band’s debut gigs in a selection of tiny London venues were greeted with a rapturous response from audiences and critics alike. Belying Pink Floyd’s later image as the horizontal stoner’s soundtrack of choice, Saucerful of Secrets sound thrillingly raw and punky. Neither of the other surviving members of Pink Floyd attended. “I’m fairly certain,” says Pratt, “that the last thing David Gilmour wants to do with his evening is stand in the back room of a pub in Putney surrounded by 300 obsessive Pink Floyd fans.”

But they did give the project their blessing. Exactly how long it all lasts, however, is a moot point. “I’m concerned it doesn’t become too big,” says Mason. “You don’t want it to get to the stage where the improvisation has to go out of the window because there’s too many people there and it seems like a risk.”

He lapses into a thoughtful silence. I think he’s going to say something about Pink Floyd’s famously fraught relationship with vast venues, when they’d dolefully protest about stadium audiences just wanting to get drunk or stoned rather than listen. But he doesn’t. “I’m sorry,” he smiles. “I’m just trying to think what I’m going to say to you when we meet backstage at Shea Stadium in three years’ time.”

Article Used with permission from The Guardian
Written by Alexis Petridis The Guardian’s head rock and pop critic

On the 16th September 2018 David Crosby brought his 37 Date European Tour to London’s 02 Shepherd’s Bush Empire. In attendance was none other than Polly Samson & David Gilmour.