Nick Mason picks out the best Pink Floyd songs by Syd Barrett
After a few foundational gigs as a more conventional rhythm and blues band, Pink Floyd joined London’s psychedelic rock wave with paisley-clad clothing and technicolour light shows. Early bandleader Syd Barrett wrote some attractively bizarre lyrics and cosmic guitar lines to match the mantra as dictated by The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Pink Floyd puritans will often laud the Syd Barrett years as the band’s finest and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as the band’s overall masterpiece. Still, a greater proportion of fans will argue that Roger Waters’ years in charge, involving seminal releases like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, were far superior. For me, both eras are essential and incomparable: I’d rather have both than either, and neither would be a crime.
The Pink Floyd catalogue is split into several rather disparate chapters. However, the most definitive line is that between the early psychedelic period and the peak of popularity in the 1970s. Several transitional albums of limited critical and commercial attention lay between these chapters, including Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma.
In a 2024 interview with Far Out, drummer Nick Mason discussed his current live project, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. He named the band after Pink Floyd’s second studio album, which was the final to include contributions from Barrett before his departure. Mason noted how the vast gulf between the earlier and later albums makes them unfit for comparison. However, he feels the latter unfairly eclipses the former.
With his new live band, Mason celebrates Pink Floyd’s psychedelic roots with covers from their early albums. While he doesn’t necessarily consider 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets “underrated”, he feels it is “enormously worthy” of being revisited. “I think Saucer’s one of my favourite albums because it’s got this extraordinary variety of things on it,” he added. “It’s got a sort of ‘goodbye to Syd’ element, and then it’s got ‘Set The Controls’, which for me is still one of my favourite pieces to play live.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Mason discussed the influence of his two all-time favourite drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker. In Pink Floyd’s early material, he felt his drumming was generally more dynamic and directly inspired by his contemporary heroes. Another early favourite of Mason’s is ‘Astronomy Domine’, the opening track on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
In a 2019 feature with Rolling Stone, Mason discussed ‘Astronomy Domine’ as one of his five favourite songs from the Barrett years. After applauding Barrett’s conceptual work on the “great science fiction vibe” and the “‘60s philosophy mixed with a sort of psychedelic lyric,” Mason noted the song’s “interesting time signature”. “It’s also really fun to play because of the tempo. It reminds me a little bit of Ginger Baker, who was a huge influence on me. There’s a Ginger Baker-style of drum fill in this song,” he added.
Kicking off the second side of the debut album was another cosmic hit, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. The instrumental track was a collective songwriting effort featuring some jazz-inspired drumming from Mason and some heavy, chugging guitar work from Barrett. Mason said he also enjoys playing this classic with Saucerful of Secrets because of its capacity for improvisation. “When you play the opening riffs, you can freestyle it so many different ways,” he said. “At the moment, we have one way of playing it, but I think once we get back on the road, I’m hoping it will take some other directions.”
After lauding Barrett’s work on Pink Floyd’s “really unusual” debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’, and the “wonderful” “almost punk” track ‘Vegetable Man’, Mason described ‘Bike’ as a deceptively poignant moment. As the closing song on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the song carries a psychedelic vibrancy as Barrett delivers his nursery rhyme-adjacent lyrics. However, upon closer inspection, the desperately romantic song brings a tear to Mason’s eye.
For Mason, no song fits the memory of Barrett quite so snugly as ‘Bike’. “The lyrics to this are so very Syd, astonishingly clever,” he said. “It’s fun, but there’s a depth of sadness to them. When I listen to it now, I realise how young and immature we were and how hopeless we were at coming to grips with Syd’s breakdown.”
