Features

An Extended Conversation with Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason

Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Box

It’s almost radical for you to be putting out these huge physical packages in this era of downloading and streaming.

It’s probably the last gasp at that sort of stuff. I really like it and I think it’s important to do it now, rather than wait until no one wants it. The problem is we’re all living in this different world where property becomes more expensive, particularly for the age group that music is important to. Storage becomes more of a problem. People my age have got huge collections of vinyl and CDs. My kids don’t have room for it, let alone interest in it.

Why did you choose Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall for this special treatment? Is it strictly because these were the best-selling Pink Floyd records?

To put it bluntly, that’s exactly right. But having said that, the idea was always that if people liked it, we could continue. I would love to get started on an early Pink Floyd Immersion, although we’re very short on music. We don’t have much in the way of demos. We do have some demos that we recorded before we had a record contract, and we have some tracks from around A Saucerful of Secrets that have been bootlegged but never put on records. We can do much nicer versions of those.

How much Syd Barrett-era material is still out there and will you release whatever remains in the vault?

There are some things. Those demos that I mentioned are original songs of Syd’s, plus a couple of covers. As far as I know they haven’t as yet been bootlegged. That’s something for the Syd people. I don’t have a problem with that. Syd Barrett Pink Floyd is very special; it was the launch pad of everything else we ever did. If people are stuck in that particular loop, that’s fine by me. I respect that.

Does the early Floyd hold up for you musically?

Yeah it does. One thing is that [Syd] was a wonderfully gifted songwriter and also, there are a lot of germs of ideas that came up later, Rick’s playing [Richard Wright, the band’s late keyboardist] in particular. Tracks like “Interstellar Overdrive” have that whole thing about finding ideas and pushing them around, even in the recording studio.

Was it important to you as a drummer to understand what Roger, or Syd before that, were writing about?

No, to tell you the truth. The lyric content is low on my list of things I need to work out. What I listen to initially is whether a song sounds good. If it’s something that grates lyrically, you might take issue with it. I really like the lyrics for “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” but they’re secondary to the actual feel of the music.

Hypothetical question: If Syd had stayed with the band, do you think it would have become as massive?

I think there’s a chance it would have, because Roger would never have stood in the background and allowed him to be the only writer. It’s a complete imponderable, really. We probably would never have had that really useful thing, which is the great guitar virtuoso [Gilmour], which would have perhaps been a restraint. Maybe Syd would have become that.