The most psychedelic Pink Floyd song, according to Nick Mason
Pink Floyd was a band that brought with them a completely unique sound. While they had influences, you’d struggle to pinpoint exactly who they were. Rock played a big part in their sound, but other than that, there were no limits on what kind of approach they could take with their music. They wrote long, drawn-out tracks that took listeners on a journey and became an absolute staple in the psychedelic scene.
A lot of people were big fans of what Pink Floyd was doing. They saw the story-telling and elongated approach to music as something fresh that allowed songs to build in an unprecedented way. Their albums felt like pieces of music that you could invest in, where you could spend time revelling in the progression of a song.
It wasn’t for everybody, though. Jimi Hendrix was famously against their psychedelic approach to music, as he saw it as a glorified light show. “Here’s one thing I hate, man,” he said, “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.”
When Hendrix was once asked about his thoughts on the band’s live shows and whether he would ever go to one on his own, he said, “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights, but they don’t sound like nothing.”
Many people think that Hendrix’s assessment of the band is harsh, but it also reflects the fact that he wasn’t around for their best work. He passed away before Pink Floyd released albums that would become classics, such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall; however, interestingly, he was around for a song that Nick Mason calls one of the band’s best offerings, 1967’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.
Pink Floyd became synonymous with psychedelic music, but ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was, according to Mason, an example of a song in which they completely let go and were free in the creation of it. The result is that they are at their most psychedelic, and it sets the groundwork for some of the classic albums that would follow.
“There’s a lot of muddled labelling between ‘psych’ and ‘prog’, which I’ve always thought were very different things,” he said in an interview before talking about the track. “This is Pink Floyd at our most psychedelic. It is always fun to play. It has that same structure you get in a classic jazz song – you play the melody, improvise around it, then restate it at the end.”
From the album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, this track doesn’t resonate as a particular favourite for Pink Floyd fans, but it stands as a testament to the difference that artists feel when considering their work compared to their fans. Rather than focusing on the specific sound, Mason recalls the fun they had playing the song.
