Two and a half hours (with a break in the middle) of concert, two and a half hours of the more psychedelic side of Pink Floyd. Nick Mason and ‘his’ Saucerful of Secrets didn’t come to miss the best-known songs by the British group, but signed a competent and planned concert mainly thinking about the man who was the first face of Pink Floyd: Syd Barrett

Let’s start with a hypothetical conversation:

– What is your favorite Pink Floyd album?
– Wow, there are so many to choose from. The “Dark Side Of the Moon”, naturally… Or the “Wish You Were Here”. Maybe “The Wall” (we don’t need no education!). I also really like “Animals”…
– And who is your favorite member of Pink Floyd?
– Roger Waters. For the compositions, for the bass line of ‘Money’. But I also like David Gilmour’s solos, of course. And Richard Wright added those synthesized landscapes to them…

Yeah, nobody ever remembers the drummer. Which is strange, since the drummer is Nick Mason, the only member of Pink Floyd who, in addition to helping to form the band, also played on all the records it released throughout its existence. All the previous names are part of the rock canon, and sometimes Syd Barrett also joins them; Mason seems to be constantly relegated to a role of his own, as someone who hides beneath everything else that did, and does, the Pink Floyd sound. Proof of that? The fact that Campo Pequeno didn’t even have half a house, to see it with “its” Saucerful of Secrets (Mason, Dom Beken, Lee Harris, Guy Pratt and Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet), even taking into account the heat and /or the price of tickets.

However, those who were in Campo Pequeno belong to that class of which it is commonly said “few, but good”. We saw them give a standing ovation, right at the entrance of the musicians on stage, under a darkness punctuated by short flashes of light and the cosmic intro that led to the psychedelic rock of ‘One of These Days’ – a theme that Pink Floyd included in the enormous ” Meddle”, the album that marks the division between Pink Floyd by Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd by Waters and Gilmour. We saw them applauding, several times, during the show, reacting effusively to the opening notes of “Echoes”, to the very rocker ‘The Nile Song’, to the wonderfully crazy ‘Bike’, at the end. When they didn’t rise or applaud, they solemnly shook their heads back and forth, raised their index finger and minus in adoration of electricity rather than the horn, or pointed their cell phones toward the stage, since Mason made a point of indicating that there was no problem saving a video format souvenir.

What comes out of these two and a half hours of concert, with a twenty-minute break in between (which served to smoke a cigarette, drink another glass, go to the bathroom or rest the legs and arms, in the case of the drummer ), is a gigantic celebration of Pink Floyd, albeit not the Pink Floyd ones the mainstream knows – the ones from ‘Time’ or ‘Money’, those from ‘Another Brick In the Wall’ or ‘Comfortably Numb’. With Saucerful of Secrets, Mason prefers to look back to the beginnings of the group he saw born, especially those from the Barrett phase, more psychedelic, less progressive in their approach to rock. A few years ago, it was common to hear, in hipster circles, that the only Pink Floyd that mattered were the ones from the first two albums (“The Piper At the Gates Of Dawn” and “A Saucerful of Secrets”); if hipsters still exist (hopefully not), and if they’ve been to Campo Pequeno tonight, they can’t help but be pleased. Only one “anthem” was missing: the frying pan that goes by the title of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Which does not mean that the drummer has appreciation, solely and exclusively, for this phase of the group.

We hear him tell stories about the songs he helped shape and we get the feeling that, in the midst of a band full of egos, he’s probably the only cool guy in it all – or at least the the only one who didn’t have a fight with anyone and keeps good memories of everyone. We saw him pay tribute to Barrett and Wright, we saw him talk about the theme he recently launched with Gilmour, in support of the Ukrainian people (‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up!’), we saw him say that he spent “a good part of his life watching Roger [Waters] beating a gong”, before he did the same during ‘Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun’, which reached its apogee towards the end and during the noisy cacophony that echoed throughout the venue , after the stellar dub for which the theme of “Ummagumma” is (best) known.

On what was the last date of this stage of his tour, Mason also remembered the concert he gave in Lisbon with Pink Floyd, in 1994 (in the “old” Alvalade Stadium), he gave songs such as ‘When You’re In’ the sound of powerful drums and went through the most forgotten (unless you are absolutely fanatical) sides of the group, such as ‘Vegetable Man’ (a song never finished and never played live by Pink Floyd, “nor by Roger, not for David, not for the Australians”, he stressed) or ‘Let’s Roll Another One’. Of the rest of the band, who showed themselves in good shape, Gary Kemp stood out above all, “who overnight stopped being new romantic to become prog”, and to whom the phrase of the night belongs: “when we were kids used to buy these records thinking they were the best ever; today we know they are the best ever”. The encore, with ‘Bike’ but also ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ and the old classic ‘See Emily Play’, put an end to “a wonderful night”. No one ever remembers the drummer? Maybe from now on things will be different.

Review Courtesy Of Paulo André Cecílio

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