At the age of 78 he is still on tour: Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd, will be a guest at the Vienna Gasometer on Saturday with his new band “Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets”. Mason founded the band in 2018 and, together with younger colleagues, only plays songs from Pink Floyd’s early work. In an interview, he talks about the creation of the Ukraine benefit song “Hey Hey Rise Up”, Pink Floyd’s first collaboration in many years, about aging and the chances of the legendary band reuniting.

“Wiener Zeitung”: Mr. Mason, you recently went on tour with your band “Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets”, founded in 2018 and named after the second Pink Floyd album. You now play the songs from that time with musicians like Guy Pratt and Gary Kemp – and it seems like you have a lot of fun doing it. Because you no longer have to pay attention to the strict concepts and vanities of your Pink Floyd colleagues David Gilmour and Roger Waters?

Nick Mason: I actually really enjoy playing live. But I’ve also loved performing with Roger and David and have great fond memories of everything we’ve brought to the stage together. Funnily enough, whatever differences have arisen at Pink Floyd over the years, there have never been any problems on stage. That was always fun.

It’s just that you haven’t played as a threesome since your appearance at the “Live 8” benefit in July 2005…

… Yes. Also, the nature of Pink Floyd’s early music is perhaps more relaxed. Nobody expects you to make it slavishly sound like it’s on the record. When we played “The Dark Side of the Moon” or “The Wall” that was mostly the claim because the album version was sort of the final one. So you’ve already formed your new band to be a little more free? Yes absolutely. As the years went by, Pink Floyd got more and more serious: bigger audiences, more elaborate staging, lighting and so on. You lose a bit of the fun there. But this new band wasn’t my idea at all, it was our guitarist Lee Harris’ idea. They want to capture and liven up the early Pink Floyd spirit. What exactly do you mean by that?

We want to respectfully give the old material our own signature instead of becoming just another tribute band. The album “A Saucerful of Secrets” sounds almost sacred to me because there are so many ideas in it. It may not always be perfectly executed, but it was a guide for our later things. Pink Floyd’s songs always evolved as we played them live. However, many of these older titles were not performed very often, actually only for a year. Then something new came up. Pieces like “Arnold Layne” were pushed into the background and weren’t really part of our repertoire anymore. Bringing these old ideas back to the stage now brings me back like déjà vu to the first year or two with Pink Floyd.

If you look back on all the ups and downs, from the experimental beginnings with guitarist/songwriter Syd Barrett, the smash hits in the ’70s to the departure of Roger Waters and the time after that when keyboardist Rick Wright returned after many years: You had it something like a most beautiful Pink Floyd moment?

There is no such thing. It’s often wrongly thought that the best time was when we were jetting around and playing in front of 90,000 people. In fact I have very fond memories of when Syd was still operational and we all drove up to Scotland in a Ford Transit. You know, that was just as exciting and new as playing New York’s Shea Stadium. So it’s a whole collection of great memories from all different phases of my life – from the boy band to my grandfather playing concerts.

Our Thanks Go To Will Ireland

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