Drummer Nick Mason is the only member of the legendary Pink Floyd who has been a part of the band since its inception in 1965 and has appeared on all studio albums. He was also largely the one who kept the increasingly feuding band together and was able to maintain relations with both sides after the split in Pink Floyd’s peak line-up in 1985.
On Saturday, the 78-year-old man performed in Tallinn with his band Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, impressively performing the part of Pink Floyd’s work that people remember less. Pink Floyd has 15 studio albums to date. A total of seven of them were released in the five-year period between 1967 and 1972, before the release of “Dark Side of the Moon” a year later took the band to another level of fame and turned it into a true rock dinosaur that took more and more years to polish the records. After the death of keyboard player Richard Wright in 2008, the band froze their activities, with the exception of the single “Hey Hey Rise Up”, released in support of Ukraine this year.
However, these first seven albums, somewhat weirder than the later ones, all reached the top ten in the British chart, one, “Atom Heart Mother” (1970), even topped the chart. Four Pink Floyd albums earned a top 100 ranking on the US album chart. In addition, the band had two hit singles from 1967, the time of lead singer Syd Barrett. Thus, by that time, they had already achieved much greater commercial success than most bands that have become legends of prog or cosmic rock, such as King Crimson or Tangerine Dream.
It’s a little strange to think that they actually still had everything in front of them. After the huge success of “Dark Side of the Moon” and the records that followed, Pink Floyd’s earlier material was largely overshadowed. The psychedelic debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (1967) is praised by Barrett fans, but there are still many of them, while the six records that followed are mostly forgotten. Neither the other living member David Gilmour nor the ex-member Roger Waters perform these songs in their solo concerts, nor the countless Pink Floyd tribute bands touring the world.
So, at one point Lee Harris, the guitarist of the post-punk band Blockheads, asked Guy Pratt (who played the instrument on tours and records after Pink Floyd’s original bassist Waters left the band) that Nick Mason would not want to form a band that played songs from the Barrett era. (Pratt, by the way, was once Wright’s son-in-law, but he used to go to Tallinn as Bryan Ferry’s bassist in 2007.) Mason was right, Gilmour and Waters also gave their blessing to the plan.
They found Dom Beken, who previously collaborated with Wright, but also with The Orb, as a keyboard player, and Gary Kemp, guitarist, background singer and main songwriter of another post-punk band, Spandau Ballet, as a singer. (Kemp, by the way, at first thought that he was going to form a band with Pink Floyd’s bassist, aka Waters, while Mason thought that Spandau Ballet’s singer, aka Tony Hadley, would join them.)
The two-part concert, with a half-hour intermission, opened with the band’s closing performance before the corona pandemic: “One of These Days” from the 1971 album “Meddle,” followed by Pink Floyd’s first single, “Arnold,” about a man who steals lingerie from clotheslines. Layne” (1967), which was banned by some radio stations due to its content, but still reached the 20th place in the charts.
Among the 22 that came to the performance, the most songs – four – came from the debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and the same number from the last record of this period “Obscured by Clouds” (1972), there were three songs from “Meddle”. This partly reflects the critics’ assessment of these albums, with the exception of “Obscured by Clouds”. The latter is disliked by critics, but Mason has called it one of his favorite Pink Floyd records. Out of the seven albums of that time, only the 1969 record “Ummagumma” was missed, which the band members have generally considered to be their worst.
As strongly as the rest of Pink Floyd, however, Barrett’s shadow loomed large at the concert – as many as seven songs with his sole authorship could be heard, while a total of ten were from the time when he was still in the band.
Some good rarities also came from the stage. For example, the song “Remember a Day” from the second album “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968) has been performed only once by Pink Floyd himself in concert. However, Barrett’s song “Vegetable Man”, recorded for the same record, was left out of the album and was officially released only in 2016.
On the one hand, it was noticeable that this band has no money worries. New guitars quickly appeared from the auxiliary forces for the musicians – and they had to be replaced constantly, because Pink Floyd’s style changed significantly during this period. After the end of the concert, according to my eyes, at least seven people started collecting equipment from the stage.
On the other hand, there was no point in expecting such a spectacular spectacle as Roger Waters performs at his concerts. Namely, Mason has said in interviews that the goal is to make music of a similar nature to the early years of Pink Floyd, only better, as the current technology allows. However, the band at that time was a much more modest undertaking than later.
Instead, early Pink Floyd was characterized by greater improvisation. The goal was not to perform the album songs faithfully, but also to create something new on stage. Same on Saturday. Starting with the fact that there were two guitarists on stage, Harris and Kemp, and not Gilmour alone, as in Pink Floyd at the time.
The song “Candy and the Currant Bun”, the B-side of the single “Arnold Layne”, when sung by Kemp, got a more glam rock feel than the original, which also grew out of psychedelia, and which, in retrospect, is also heard in the original recording of this track.
Kemp and Pratt alternated in the role of lead singer, although it was not divided according to who of Pink Floyd’s four singers of that period (Barrett, Gilmour, Waters and Wright) recorded a song. While the track “If” from the album “Atom Heart Mother” (1970) was originally sung by Waters, at the concert Kemp performed the first verse and Pratt the second. Most of Barrett’s songs were performed by Kemp, but “Lucifer Sam” was left to Pratt. And so on.
Some tracks sounded great in the modified settings. “Interstellar Overdrive”, which was the centerpiece of Pink Floyd’s concerts during Barrett’s time, was almost half as long as the opening track of the second part on Saturday, and the improvisation of its middle part did not resemble the album version at all. But “If” was instead divided into two parts, between which you could also hear a summary of the more than 23-minute long song “Atom Heart Mother” on the album.
At the same time, if you listen to the same “Atom Heart Mother” or especially the track “Echoes” (which is also the name of the tour) from the album “Meddle”, which ended the main part of the concert, Pink Floyd was unmistakably heard on the stage. Of course, Mason’s simple and restrained, but recognisably kind of drumming style on the one hand helped, but the sound of the other instruments also clearly reflected the original performances.
Post-Barrett Pink Floyd has been criticized by some critics for being bleak and unfeeling, so many did not predict a long celebration for the band after the charismatic, but mentally troubled and drug-addicted singer was kicked out. Fans of later works may find the early stories too strange. If Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets is top-notch instrumentally, the band’s biggest shortcoming is probably the lack of a natural soloist like Barrett, who would have breathed a little more life into the concert from the start.
The two sides of Pink Floyd were probably best brought together by the longer songs, the already mentioned “Atom Heart Mother” and “Echoes”, from which the hypnotic progression characteristic of the better moments of the later Pink Floyd stood out, which already took some listeners into a trance. Anyway, I highly recommend any serious Pink Floyd fan to stop by Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets concert if you ever get the chance.
Review Courtesy Of Merit Maarits
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