Nick Mason In Concert
As Pink Floyd's original drummer and co-founder of one of the most iconic acts in music history, Nick Mason was on the scene when psychedelic rock first took shape in the late 1960s in London. While his band ventured in many other directions over the following decades, the paths they blazed in their early years remain some of the most thrilling. That's why there's so much excitement around the drummer's latest venture.
Named after the second of Pink Floyd's albums, Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets revisits the songs that helped forge this trippy new sound. According to Mason, it's not a cover or tribute act. It's an effort to "capture the spirit" of the psychedelic era, which reached its first peaks of intensity and imagination in the music the band created with its first singer, Syd Barrett.
Mason renewed his connection to those times when he curated the Pink Floyd box set ‘The Early Works: 1965-1972' in 2016. No wonder he was so receptive when former Ian Dury and the Blockheads guitarist Lee Harris suggested he return to the stage with a new band to perform these songs. The prospect was all the more enticing because much of this material was never played live by Pink Floyd at the time, due to their troubled frontman's forced departure before the second album's release in 1968.
Teaming Mason and Harris with ex-Spandau Ballet singer Gary Kemp, longtime Pink Floyd touring bassist Guy Pratt, and keyboardist Dom Beken, Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets made their live debut in London in May of 2018. The rapturous reception led to a new series of performances, marking Mason's first concert tour since his final shows in support of Pink Floyd's ‘The Division Bell' in 1994.
Mason and his collaborators are equally adept at performing hypnotic rockers — like "Astronomy Domine" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" — and the sunny-yet-sinister psych-pop of "See Emily Play" and "Arnold Layne." They make Pink Floyd's psychedelic breakthroughs feel just as vital and revelatory to audiences now as they did a half-century ago.