Nick Mason on “one of the worst” songs Roger Waters made
For the first few years of Pink Floyd, every piece of the band seemed to be a work in progress. Even though they earned their chops playing along to the delightful sounds of Syd Barrett’s progressive tracks, many of their greatest moments came from Roger Waters slowly learning the ropes of being a frontman, ultimately becoming the driving force behind the band alongside David Gilmour. While Waters would help pen the songs that would go down in rock and roll history, Nick Mason thought that one of Waters’s first originals, ‘Doctor Doctor’, was one of the worst he’d ever heard.
Then again, Waters wasn’t looking to become one of the biggest songwriters of his generation. When first becoming a member of ‘The Pink Floyd’ in the late 1960s, Waters was hoping to fade into the background, adding to the texture of the band while Barrett performed mind-melting exercises on songs like ‘See Emily Play’.
Once the band started to become famous, Barrett slowly began to lose his way, having to be let go halfway through the production of A Saucerful of Secrets after losing his battle with mental health. Although Barrett would eventually move on to have a cult-classic solo career, many of his selections from the next album paint a sad picture of where he would be going.
Left to carry on with Gilmour filling out Barrett’s guitar parts, many of Waters’s songs sought to continue the vision that his former bandmate had started with. Featuring surrealistic images, many of the songs from this era delved into space rock, like on the song ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, which sounds like soaring through the cosmos.
Even though Waters didn’t want to lose the fanbase they had already gained, ‘Doctor Doctor’ would pave the way for the masterpiece, ‘Set The Controls For The Heart of the Sun’. Rather than relying on weird sounds, the entire premise of the song revolved around creating different textures whenever the band performed.
The song wouldn’t even be fully realised when the band performed it on the record, eventually getting even better when they performed it in live shows like in Live at Pompeii. Even though Mason would remain immensely proud of the song, he admitted that ‘Doctor Doctor’ was far from the masterpiece they were looking for.
Being a mindless piece of psych-rock that became lost to time as a B-side, Mason couldn’t help but shame Waters’s first crack at composing a tune, saying, “Something like ‘Set the Controls…’ it’s really interesting, and it’s great fun to play. Also, it marks the transition from Roger’s initial song ‘Doctor Doctor,’ which is possibly one of the worst songs, sorry Roger, to playing something that’s almost my favourite drum track”.
Since the horrors of the Vietnam War hit the counterculture like a hit of bad acid, the band’s decision to move on to progressive rock affairs led to them getting more adventurous both live and on record, culminating in massive exercises like ‘Echoes’ and telling a story across albums like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. ‘Set The Controls for The Heart of the Sun’ may have been the preamble for that song style, but if ‘Doctor Doctor’ had become the band’s next major hit, they could have just been another casualty of the psychedelic movement.
