“I wouldn’t buy it”: The Pink Floyd album Nick Mason says no one needs to hear
Few bands have managed to capture the attention of the British music-buying public quite like Pink Floyd. From their early formation in 1964, the band have attracted an incredibly dedicated cult following, which only seemed to increase as their discography progressed into groundbreaking releases like The Dark Side of the Moon. The intricate, obsessive nature of the music itself can only be rivalled by the legions of completist fans that Pink Floyd attracted – if Roger Waters ever sneezed, there are probably two dozen bootleg recordings of it.
Perhaps due to the fact that Pink Floyd were so groundbreakingly original in their operation and material, fans of the band seemed to place a colossal amount of importance on every little thing they ever did. This is particularly true of their early period under the leadership of artistic visionary Syd Barrett. As the driving force behind the band’s sound and songwriting during these early years, Barrett was responsible for some of Pink Floyd’s greatest work, namely Piper At the Gates of Dawn.
Nevertheless, Barrett’s time with the band was tragically short. As a result of a growing dependence on psychedelic substances and a grappling with mental health issues, the songwriter was pushed out of the band in 1968. The next few years would see the group struggle to adapt to a post-Barrett sound, becoming increasingly experimental in search of something that carried on their reputation while also driving them in new directions.
Eventually, after some miss-hits and underappreciated gems, this new incarnation of Pink Floyd hit their groove on 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, an album which perfectly toed the line between mainstream appeal and experimental composition. However, the preceding few years saw the band flirt with much more experimental, often bizarre album ideas. Most notably, the group had the idea to construct an entire album from recordings of household objects rather than instruments.
While this idea is not all that outlandish when considering the landscape of experimental styles like musique concrète, which was founded on that very principle, it would be pretty out of place within Floyd’s wider discography. “We’d spend days getting a pencil and a rubber band till it sounded like a bass,” Richard Wright recalled during a 2007 BBC documentary.
Although this idea led to the recording of two tracks, ‘Wine Glasses’ and ‘The Hard Way’, the concept was eventually abandoned. Wright shared, “I remember sitting down with Roger and saying, ‘Roger, this is insane!’” That feeling seemed to emanate throughout the band’s line-up, with even Waters and David Gilmour agreeing on the fact that the idea was inherently flawed. However, the subject remains a continued source of fascination for fans of the band.
After all, Floyd must have recorded a lot of material while attempting to construct these strange compositions. Sounds are presumably hidden away on cassette recordings in studio vaults. As such, die-hard Pink Floyd devotees have been steadfast in their desire to hear them. Nick Mason, on the other hand, has affirmed that the tapes for the abandoned Household Objects project probably aren’t that interesting.
“I think it’s of interest to the…what one might call the trainspotter, but I don’t think it’s of great interest to the majority of people in terms of music,” he said in a 1996 interview. “From a historical point of view, it’s probably interesting. Exactly. So if you’re a musical archaeologist, OK, but for anyone interested in music…put it this way, I wouldn’t buy it myself!”
There are certainly enough Pink Floyd-obsessed music historians in the world to warrant the release of this unfinished material. Either way, it is unlikely – as Mason echoed – that the actual material would be good, or even recognisable as being recorded by Pink Floyd. After all, Household Objects was a huge departure from the band’s previous psychedelic efforts, and the completed tracks are worlds apart from the experimental mastery of The Dark Side of the Moon.
