The Pink Floyd album Nick Mason thought was overproduced: “Far too much stuff on it”
Any group that loses one of its core members is usually in for a complete system reset. It’s hard enough trying to make a record when everyone’s firing on all cylinders, but when people start dropping like flies, it almost feels impossible trying to get one song done, let alone a handful of tracks that would be good enough to put on a record. While Pink Floyd without Roger Waters was already bound to be a tough sell, Nick Mason admitted that they didn’t put their best foot forward on A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
But wouldn’t any Pink Floyd album start to sound strange without Waters at the helm? Sure, he had become more of a dictator than a band member towards the end of his time with the group, but cutting him out of the picture put them in the same position that they were in during their early days when Syd Barrett left the fold.
Despite Waters claiming that he was the main creative force behind Pink Floyd, David Gilmour rose to the challenge on A Momentary Lapse of Reason. While something definitely feels missing, the album is still musically up to their standards, featuring fantastic guitar solos on tracks like ‘Learning To Fly’.
That’s before you get to the all-star team of session players on the album, including Guy Pratt on bass for much of the record and stellar saxophone breaks from Scott Page on a handful of tunes. All the pieces are there to make an excellent record, but from where Mason stood, there may have been a few too many people at the studio than there should have been.
While the drummer still thought that the record was good, he admitted that he still had issues with the way that they put everything together, telling Uncut, “We sort of laid everything on [the album]…There was a sense of trepidation over what it would be like without Roger, so we slightly over-egged the pudding in terms of lots of session players. Some of it’s overproduced, far too much stuff on it.”
Then again, that might come from the fact that even Mason was pushed into the background for a lot of the record. Since he had stepped away of his own accord because he didn’t think that his chops were good enough for the record, a lot of the album feels like it was put together in a lab sometimes rather than coming from a genuine artistic place.
In fact, a lot of the songs ended up sounding so much better when they met the live stage instead of in the studio. Whereas a song like ‘On the Turning Away’ sounds cold and ominous playing over the main vamp, hearing it on the live album The Delicate Sound of Thunder is among one of the best live performances that the group ever did, Waters be damned.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason is still far away from being the best Pink Floyd record, but maybe the plan wasn’t about making the best record. It was about making an album to make sure that this new version of the group worked, and now with a foundation, Gilmour could stretch things out a bit more as a frontman.
