Features

An Extended Conversation with Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason

C Jill Furmanovsky-rockarchive.com

If Nick Mason had his way, he’d unpack his drums today and head back out on the road with his former surviving Pink Floyd bandmates, bassist/songwriter/vocalist Roger Waters and guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour. That’s not going to happen, but deep-pocketed Pink Floyd fans can console themselves instead with lavishly produced boxed editions of three of the band’s classic albums— The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall —which EMI Records, the band’s label since the beginning, recently released as the Immersion series. Each set includes not only the remastered original album, but also tons of rare and previously unreleased material, stunning video (on DVD and Blu-Ray) and printed material, assorted collectible knick-knacks and more.

Pink Floyd held out for years on releasing reissues and compilations. Now you’ve decided to put out these enormous packages. What changed?

Two things. One was having it explained to us. This was very much generated by EMI. They’d done a whole bunch of stuff with the Beatles and then they made a presentation to us of what they thought we should do. We realized that perhaps because it had been such a long time, it actually might be interesting and the fans might actually like the detail on how we did things. In the past the theory had always been that you just released the album, as perfect as you can make it, in its final form. I have a big collection of jazz records with a lot of outtakes and it does increase the interest. So I think we basically understood that there was some good reason to do this.

Were you surprised to find out how much material was in the EMI vaults?

Yes, I was. But the trouble is that once you start doing it, you’re short of material. Because it was never thought about, what you get is an enormous amount of material for one song or for one period, and then you’re really short of stuff for other elements of it.

What was the best find?

That’s an easy one; it’s the Stéphane Grappelli violin part [on “Wish You Were Here”]. I can’t remember anything quite as special as that. It would have been great to have, say, seven other guitar solos that Dave [Gilmour] out on “Comfortably Numb” before going with the one that we went with.

Who brought Stéphane Grappelli in?

We didn’t. He just sort of wandered in anyway. He was working with [violinist] Yehudi [Menuhin] down the corridor. At Abbey Road [Studio in London] if someone is in one studio they might come in and say hi to someone in another. What I remember about it is the ease with which Stéphane sort of wandered into the studio and knocked it out

How involved were you and the other members of Pink Floyd in the planning of this project?

We’re all involved. Nothing is ever passed by one person. All of us really like physical records. I certainly haven’t grown out of them yet. But I do see the future as being rather different in terms of added value when you buy music. The thing that someone showed me, which I was really impressed by, was the Björk downloading material. There will be fantastic stuff that you’ll be able to download with music that will give it value and bring it back to being more like an old-fashioned CD.

Who do you see as the audience for these, mostly baby boomers who grew up with the band?

Absolutely for the Immersion versions. It’s people who know the music already and would like to engage at another level, particularly with The Wall, where you can track one song from the original Roger demos through the band demos to the actual recording to the live playing. It’s not what I’d recommend to a beginner. Obviously what we’d like to do is bring in a younger listener, to have relevance to kids. That’s gratifying. There is some longevity to the music. It’s important to remember that rock music comes in all different forms. It can be two-minute pop records or 25-minute meandering or whatever.