Nick Mason recently joined an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald and explained why he chooses not to include Pink Floyd’s hits in his performances with Saucerful of Secrets, unlike his former bandmate Roger Waters, who still features the band’s most popular songs in his solo setlists.
The drummer revealed his reason of avoiding Pink Floyd’s hits, saying:
“There’s a million people playing all the Pink Floyd hits, and I think there’s probably nearly enough of them for the moment.”
Mason wanted to encourage people to discover or rediscover the early Pink Floyd songs but also the way they were originally performed, as he stated:
“It’s not only the material, but it’s also the way it was played. For me, the interesting moment with this new band was the first night we played. It was a small venue with an audience you could see every one of, and it was a deja vu of that feeling of being four people on stage when we could all see each other, and we could play with the music. We didn’t have to play it exactly as it was recorded.”
When asked if performing early Pink Floyd material gave him more freedom on the stage compared to later albums in a chat with Forbes last year, Mason expressed:
“I think it’s got to be very important. We’re not a Pink Floyd tribute band or a Roger Waters tribute band, or a David Gilmour tribute band. So, I think we keep our identity by working in a very different way. What’s nice is that it’s very much sort of in line with what we were doing in 1967 – most songs were an opportunity to sort of play the song and then take off a bit.”
With Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, the musician usually prefers to play songs from the Pink Floyd albums, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ ‘More,’ ‘Ummagumma,’ ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ besides the deep cuts from other records. The drummer is set to perform with his band in Europe throughout July, followed by Australian dates in September.
