Heroes: Nick Mason

Nick Mason drummed his way into musical history and into Mike Portnoy’s heart with the hugely influential Pink Floyd. Now, in a Rhythm exclusive, Portnoy gets the lowdown about Syd Barrett, sheds some light on the Dark Side Of The Moon, and uncovers the truth behind The Wall...

There is a giant pink pig floating in the sky outside Madison Square Gardens and true to form, most New Yorkers hurry past the prodigious balloon without giving it a second glance. For those in the know, the pig heralds the appearance of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters at the famous concert venue later that evening, when he will perform Floyd’s enduring conceptual masterpiece, Dark Side Of The Moon, from beginning to end. A performance that will be complete with flying pigs, pyrotechnics and, most importantly for guest editor Mike Portnoy, founding Pink Floyd member Nick Mason manning the drums.

Mason has been a member of every permutation of Pink Floyd, from their mid-’60s Syd Barrett-led psychedelic days, all the way through to the band’s 2005 reunion for Live 8. His affability and easygoing disposition allowed him to remain neutral in the sometimes acrimonious clashes that marked Floyd’s career, but it was his inventive and understated approach to drums that served as the bedrock for Pink Floyd’s sound.

The repeating synthesizer line of ‘On The Run’ is being played at an ear-punishing volume as Mike Portnoy makes his way backstage to Nick Mason’s dressing room. Mike is more than a casual Pink Floyd fan – he possesses a broad knowledge of all things Floyd and is eager to get in as many questions as possible before Mason is called away for soundcheck. Mason is non-plussed by all the frenetic pre-show activity and warmly invites Portnoy and Rhythm to sit down for a chat.

Mike Portnoy: It’s great to see you back with Roger. How did your participation in his latest tour come about?

Nick Mason: “I’d done some stuff with him at one of his shows at Wembley, I think about three or four years ago. I think what he was thinking was to do Dark Side... as a single piece. He thought it would be a nice addendum to some of the shows. I’m not doing the whole tour. It’s really nice – I’m doing New York and Los Angeles and I did Hyde Park and France.”

MP: When did you start playing drums and what were your early influences?

NM: “Well, it’s really odd because I think I certainly started because I discovered rock’n’roll. We’re talking mid-’50s I suppose. My first records were the original Elvis records and Bill Haley. They were actually 78s. I had some hankering for the drums. I had taken piano as a kid and I played violin as well, not particularly successfully. One Christmas we just decided we’d get started as a band and it was agreed that I’d be the drummer, so I took 15 quid and went down to a drum shop that still exists, called Chas E Footes, and got myself a very basic bass drum, snare and hi-hat.”

MP: Was it basic blues that you started with?

NM: “That was really basic rock stuff; Duane Eddy and that sort of thing. Almost immediately I began drifting towards jazz. The funny thing is that the music I was listening to at that stage was bebop – Art Blakey in particular – and I never ended up playing like that or even learning those sorts of riffs but that’s what kept me thinking about drumming really.”

MP: Pink Floyd’s style went through many transformations. The early days were psychedelic pop songs, then in the early ‘70s you were doing more progressive extended improvised pieces and then finally you fell into more conceptual song-oriented music. How did your drumming differ throughout these different styles?

NM: “I think initially there was some, improvisation, but after Syd. There were a few tracks, but they tended to be the early tracks. The concert film, Live At Pompeii, was almost the end of that, where we had extended solos with things like ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, but after that period it became, I wouldn’t say technical, but certainly organised, and it reflected Roger’s writing. Syd’s work divides into ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ which is wild, and this pastoral thing, with ‘The Gnome’ and ‘Grimble Grumble’ or ‘Chapter 24’, which are very English songs sung with an English accent.”

MP: In the early more improvisational pieces such as ‘Saucer Full Of Secrets’ and ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ – how do you compose music like that?

NM: “Well you don’t, you start with an idea, a riff. ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ is just that bass octave and Rick Wright (Pink Floyd keyboardist) finding a line to play through it. It’s almost like a 12-bar, but different. The actual construction of it is different. Certain guitar solos tend to be more post-Hendrix. It lost what one would call the 12-bar concept.”

MP: It became the 52-bar jam with a gong at the end! (laughs)

Your appearance on Dark Side Of The Moon on this tour makes you the only Pink Floyd member to have performed it on all three live incarnations; the early ‘70s version, the ‘90s version, and now Roger’s 2006 version....

NM: “I certainly qualify for long-service medals if nothing else, because I am the one who’s been on every album.”

MP: That’s my favourite Pink Floyd trivia question that no one ever gets night: ‘Who is the only Pink Floyd member to be on every album?’, and of course it’s you. So you’ve seen every step from the beginning to today. How does that feel?

NM: “It probably feels like being a drummer, because you tend to be at the back slightly and watch the fight from the side.”

MP: What made Dark Side Of The Moon stand the test of time as well as it has?

NM: “It isn’t one thing – Dark Side...’s success is down to a whole bunch of different elements that happened at the right time and have kept it cooking ever since. I think Roger’s lyrics work incredibly well, they are still relevant today and, rather extraordinarily, they are particularly relevant to an older generation. When I listen to the lyrics now I think, funnily enough, they could have been written by a 40- or 50-year-old rather than by a 20-something-year-old. The thing about time passing and losing out and all the rest of it. That may be one element of it. The engineering was particularly good, we had Abbey Road post-Beatles, the top recording studio of all time.”

MP: To my ears, that was the next logical ground-breaking album after Sergeant Pepper terms of a sonic masterpiece.

NM: “It really was very well put together. Alan (Parsons) was a great engineer with a great feel for that. It was also that Chris Thomas was involved. He is a great producer and came in to help with the mix and perhaps resolve any differences, which was very important in order to get it right. There are other elements, but things like the sleeve design played some part. The American record company finally committed to making it work. If you don’t have the support of the record company, you can do Sergeant Pepper and it will disappear without a trace. All those sort of things.”

MP: I know the studio version changed a lot from the live version that was played the previous year – how much of your drumming was developed in the studio compared to what you were playing live?

NM: “Probably the basis of a lot of the tracks was very similar, but of course what changed was intros, outros, things like the Rototoms, which are very specific to being in the studio because we happened to find them in there one day. Obviously all the segue sections and the vocal overdubs and stuff like that. I suspect ‘Brain Damage’, ‘Any Colour You Like’ were more or less what you’d have heard if you had heard the band live...”

MP: But ‘On The Run’ was completely different from the live version...

NM: “No, not really, because we used the same machine the VCS 3. What’s funny about this is that they put together a DVD a few years ago about the making of Dark Side... There’s a thing where either Roger or David is playing the synth line, but of course that wasn’t at the session at all, it was done some time after for some explanation.”

MP: To me, Floyd leadership is broken up into three distinct periods; the Syd Barrett period, the Roger Waters period and the David Gilmour period. What are the differences in all three of them in terms of composing and general work ethic?

NM: “Me next, by the way! It’s hard to say, because it’s not really about the characters, it’s about the period of time and where we were in our career and so on, so there’s not much of the sense of Syd being the leader; he was by definition the leader because he played lead guitar and did most of the writing, but I don’t remember him being particularly adamant about how something should be done. He would present something and then we would sort of knock it into shape and play it. Then when he began to lose the plot a bit we were almost having to carry him along. Occasionally he’d be doing really peculiar things. But it wasn’t a sense of leading from the front. Roger became increasingly in charge. I think the writer tends always to be the main force because they have certain rights over their work. You bow to how they want to do it unless you can argue why something should be done differently. Of course, the other thing was that Roger was particularly interested in the show, all the way up from Dark Side... to The Wall. He had a view of what we should do and how to do it. It was in his own mind quite clear.

“Then when Dave and I sort of took over, again the writing indicated that Dave was leading it. But the first tour we did, the 1987 tour, was odd because we didn’t quite know how to tackle It. We actually went at it by putting together a band and then more or less saying, ‘Well, this is the Pink Floyd band’. Looking back I think we should have been brave and said, ‘This is the three of us with some other musicians’, and we found ourselves somewhat uncomfortable in the 1993 tour trying actually to separate it out again.”

MP: Pink Floyd fans around the world were saddened by Syd’s passing this year. His appearance at the Wish You Were Here sessions is well known. Did you ever see or speak to him again after that appearance?

NM: “Not directly, no. Peter Barnes, our publisher, used to deal with him because publishing was one of Syd’s main income streams, and Peter kept in touch with the family. If Syd had wanted to see any of us we’d have been delighted, but I think he was happier in a new life. He didn’t want to be reminded of the old life. That was reported back to us. He said, ‘I’m not Syd anymore, I’m Roger again’. So we tended to leave him alone. We did occasionally get involved if there was ever a sense that people were bugging him or too many people were going round ringing the doorbell.”

MP: So there was never any contact for the Live 8 reunion as rumoured?

NM: “No I think that would have been really distressing for him. It wasn’t something he wanted to do.”

MP: Let’s briefly talk about my favourite album of all time: The Wall. What are your memories of the recording session and the creative process?

NM: “For me it was a very different record partly because of Bob Ezrin (producer) and partly because of the way the thing was written. It was far more technical. The drum parts were far more specific. Generally I had been allowed to more or less do what I wanted and occasionally parts would be shuffled around or whatever. With The Wall it was much more a case of, ‘Right, this is the part’, so it was played in a much more specific way. But I think that was right, I think the songs just demanded a different approach.”

MP: You only played shows in four or five cities for The Wall tour, and the show was probably the most elaborately staged concert of its time. For those of us who didn’t see these shows, were any of them ever filmed?

NM: “Not sufficiently. There is some film around and I think maybe one day we’ll find some way of dealing with it. When we actually started doing The Wall film, we had originally intended to do quite a lot of live footage of the show and so there was some film shot. We never did the whole show and never did the whole thing properly so there is film, but not enough.”

MP: How much of the live show are you playing to a click track or sequencer?

NM: “The Wall show was played with very little click. I think we did ‘Bring The Boys Back Home’ and ‘Vera’, things with strings on had some click, but actually some of the strings were just sampled.”

MP: How about when you are doing Dark Side Of The Moon live tonight?

NM: “Tonight, there’s a lot more click. Everyone has just sort of learned to live with clicks. It’s inevitable and I have to say it’s not something I love. It does sort of tighten the whole thing up. It’s a shame in a way because it makes things a lot less flexible.”

MP: Finally, your reunion last year for the Live 8 shows was something Pink Floyd fans around the world have been waiting 25 years for, and I must say I had tears in my eyes witnessing something I always hoped would happen. I watched it on the internet in my hotel room in Istanbul. What was it like the first time the four of you played together in rehearsals?

NM: “There are somehow two versions of this. I’ve said a few times that it was fantastic and we all just dropped back into it, and we almost could have played the thing straight away and we almost just needed the rehearsals for the technical things and the video link and what have you. But Dave says that’s wrong, and that in real life he’d done a lot of rehearsing and led the rehearsals and he’d done a lot of prepping in advance, and I think that’s probably true. We ended up having to do a little bit of rearrangement and alteration and so on.”

MP: What was the emotion like?

NM: “I think we all really enjoyed it. Everyone was a bit nervous and a bit ill at ease, and actually we did all just drop into it being back together.”

MP: I was also so glad that the reunion was just the four of you and not an augmented version of the band. I have to just say that that was an event that really moved me and I hope one day we’ll get to see you all together again.

NM: “Yeah, well it was great for Live 8, it was great for the audience, and it was great for the band.”

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Mike Portnoy’s recommended listening [for examples of Nick Mason’s drumming]

‘One Of These Days’ – Meddle (Pink Floyd)

‘Time’ – Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd)

‘Echoes’ – Live At Pompeii DVD (Pink Floyd)

‘Sheep’ – Animals (Pink Floyd)

‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ – Ummagumma (Pink Floyd)