Nick Mason of Pink Floyd: 'We first played with the Saucers it was a real sense of deja vu'

The group, which also includes Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, former Blockheads guitarist Lee Harris, Guy Pratt, who played bass with the later incarnation of Pink Floyd as well as Madonna and Michael Jackson, and keyboardist Dom Beken, a Bafta-nominated composer and producer, first assembled in 2018 to perform some of Pink Floyd’s early experimental material – in particular their work with the late Syd Barrett. Since then they’ve gone on to tour mainland Europe and North America.

“This is, to some extent, a labour of love,” says Mason. “It was something that I really missed for quite a long time.”

The drummer might now be 80 years old but it seems he feels the thrill of stepping on to a stage just as keenly as on the ground-breaking tours for The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

“The very curious thing is I’ve never really lost that,” Mason says. “I think most of the people who are still around and still playing feel the same way.

“I’m fond of telling people that when we first played with the Saucers at The Half Moon pub (in Putney) it was a real sense of deja vu, it was like the clock going back to 1967, it’s still the pleasure of showing off.”

While the production set-up on Pink Floyd’s latter-day tours in the Eighties and Nineties was famously elaborate, Saucerful of Secrets is a more stripped-down affair that’s closer in spirit to the gigs they played in the late 1960s.

“The detail is different, but the basis of actually going on stage with a bunch of other guys and playing remains the same, whether it’s The Half Moon pub or Soldier Field (in Chicago) with an audience of 90,000,” Mason says. “It’s very curious but it’s just as either alarming or exciting depending upon what’s going on.”

Today his recollections of shows that Pink Floyd played when they were at the epicentre of Swinging London’s counter-cultural scene might be “a bit more generalised than being able to remember day by day or gig by gig unless something went badly wrong”. Nevertheless he evidently feels that the songs that Barrett, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright and himself wrote for the band as the Sixties folded into the Seventies are worth revisiting.

“It’s not that they’re closest to my heart, but there’s certainly potential to play with the tracks in a way that one can’t with later material,” he says. “You know if you’re going to play Comfortably Numb you know that the audience want to hear it pretty well as it was played on the record originally.

“Also, what the Saucers are playing is not just psychedelia of 1967, apart from the Syd bits – and some of Syd’s writing is not psychedelic at all, Scarecrow is pastoral, almost whimsical. But also the same with things taken from the Barbet Schroeder film (More) or indeed Meddle or Atom Heart Mother, which was long past the psychedelic period.”

He feels Pink Floyd’s early catalogue feels “far more suited” to modification or reinterpretation by his new band “in a way that one wouldn’t really want to do with Dark Side – Dark Side has a very specific art that people recognise and like whereas this early stuff is more about an attitude than it is about very specific musical pieces”.

The inventiveness of the likes of Interstellar Overdrive and Set The Controls For the Heart of the Sun, which stretched song structures and addressed themes that were hitherto new to rock and pop music, made Pink Floyd stand out from their contemporaries.

Mason chuckles when it’s suggested that it must have been an interesting time in which to have been performing. “Actually what we found was a sort of niche where we were able to play these tracks in this extended way,” he says. “But it was a curious one because we had a fanbase in London particularly at gigs like UFO and so on, but the reality was the rest of the country was still going to Top Rank ballrooms to see Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band and actually they weren’t that thrilled with our funny, squeaky noises. Some of them made that perfectly clear.”

His memories of working with Barrett are tinged with sadness at the way the singer’s mental health deteriorated after Pink Floyd made their epochal album Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Barrett dropped out of music altogether in 1972 and lived a reclusive life in Cambridge until his death in 2006 aged 60.

“It’s very happy memories of the first four or five months and then there was this sort of gradual decline, which is still a mystery,” Mason says. “It’s interesting talking about it now because we’re so much more clued up about the whole business of mental health and that would’ve come in under that blanket. We just hadn’t got a clue of what to suggest doing.

“It’s generally believed that LSD played a major part in Syd’s collapse but it might not be that. It might also be to do with what he wanted and didn’t know how to tell us that actually he didn’t want to be in a band any more, he wanted to go back to Camberwell Art School and paint, but we would have seen that as madness. We assumed everyone wanted to be in a rock ’n’ roll band.”

Waters and Gilmour have given Saucerful of Secrets their blessing, with Mason remaining on good terms with them both. He says: “Funnily enough, I’ve seen more of Roger than I have of David in the last year or two. I did like the thing that Roger did, that revisit to Dark Side, where he reinterpreted some of it and rearranged some of the music in a way that I thought was really interesting. There was a belief initially that it was going to be a bit of a spoiler and it was going to be another version of Dark Side, but actually in my opinion it fits very well with the original. It’s a sort of move forward from that and I think it’s really interesting.”

The drummer is “definitely” saddened, however, by the ongoing ill-feeling between his two former bandmates and still hopes for some sort of rapprochement.

“I think it would be great not to reform the band and go on tour but at least do the occasional good work,” he says. “When we did Live 8 (the charity concerts organised by Bob Geldof in 2005) it was a great thing to do and from my point of view it would be nice to continue that sort of thing. But I’ve no thoughts of wanting to make another Pink Floyd album. I think we should be able to enjoy our dotage rather than continue fighting.”

On a happier note, three solo albums that Mason made in the 1980s are being reissued to coincide with Saucerful of Secrets’ tour. Of Fictitious Sports, which he worked on with Robert Wyatt and the American jazz composer and band leader Carla Bley. He says it was a record that he “absolutely loved” making. “Carla has very sadly passed now but she was a quite remarkable lady,” he says. “Her ability to control a brass section was amazing, she had perfect pitch so she could always tell if someone wasn’t quite on it, but also it was the way that a brass section 30 years later just sounds fantastic. There’s an album she did of Christmas carols that is just a wonderful thing. It was a privilege to work with her and of course that led on to working with Steve Swallow and Mike Mantler and the very wonderful Robert Wyatt.”

Profiles and White of the Eye were collaborations with the 10CC guitarist Rick Fenn, who was introduced to Mason by Eric Stewart. “It was great fun,” he says. “Rick and I did quite a lot of things together. We did the White of the Eye soundtrack but we also did a load of things particularly for Rothmans who were very involved in motorsport. We did soundtracks for various motorsport activities, which was really fun. We did some of the most incredible motorbike racing that I still watch occasionally.”

Profiles, which came out in 1985, was mainly instrumental, apart from the songs Lie For a Lie, which featured vocals by David Gilmour and Maggie Reilly, and Israel, sung by UFO keyboardist Danny Peyronel. After the notoriously fraught sessions for Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut, Mason found himself wanting to work on a more straightforward project. “There was clearly not going to be much, or any, Pink Floyd activity and I didn’t want to retire at that point, and it was really delightful working with Rick. I still see him occasionally, he’s based in Australia now. He had a band called Rick Fenn and the Feramones, I did a few gigs with them, which was a good way of spending time.”

White of the Eye was the soundtrack to a 1987 British thriller directed by Donald Cammell, best known for the 1970 gangster film Performance, starring Mick Jagger. Mason says writing music for films was “a bit like being at school and you’re told to write an essay”.

“If you’re doing a film then you end up being told what the subject of the essay should be, whereas if you’re going into the studio as a band no-one’s telling you what the essay should be, you can do anything you like. Having to work within constraints, it’s sort of good practice, I think is what I’d say.”

A renowned motorsport enthusiast, Mason remains a keen collector of classic cars, even in this era of electric vehicles. “I think we’re still fascinated by the past, whether it’s steam engines or Jurassic Park,” he explains. “It’s the machinery that is so captivating and when it’s used with a purpose of winning races or whatever, that adds so much to it.”

His favourite car is the Ferrari 250 GTO, which he bought for £37,000 in 1977 with royalties from The Dark Side of the Moon. It’s now said to be worth £40m. “It’s such a great all-rounder, it finished third at Le Mans in 1962 but it also took both of my daughters to church for their weddings and it makes me look really smart for having bought it 40 years ago.”

Having once competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race himself, he says: “It’s a lot more frightening than going onstage, but I loved it. For me, that was the pinnacle, one of those very rare things where the amateur can actually go out there and be overtaken by Derek Bell. It was a childhood dream, you could say.”

Despite having turned 80 in January, Mason says he would like to continue performing for as long as possible. “I’ll carry on for as long as I can,” he says, adding wryly: “The doctor said, ‘I’m afraid Mr Mason if you haven’t grown out of showing off by now, there’s very little chance of getting over it.”

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets play at York Barbican on Wednesday June 12. Fictitious Sports, Profiles and White of the Eye are out on June 7.