Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason picks his favourite Jimi Hendrix song
For anyone with a good pair of ears in the late 1960s, it appears to have been particularly difficult not to fall under the spell of Jimi Hendrix and his mesmeric guitar-based faculties. His presence on stage with psychedelic garb and upside-down Stratocaster was a sight to behold before he played a single note.
Hendrix, iconic as he was talented, naturally had a profound impact on the psychedelic rock scene and subsequent prog-rock spawn of the 1970s. Among his devoted disciples were Pink Floyd, who enjoyed their rise to fame alongside Hendrix in late ‘60s London.
Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason were lucky enough to see Hendrix in 1966 before he had become world famous with The Experience.
In an appearance on the BBC Radio 2 feature ‘Tracks of My Years’, Gilmour picked out Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ as one of his all-time favourite tracks and described his first “Experience”.
“Jimi Hendrix, fantastic,” he said, introducing his selection. “I went to a club in south Kensington in 1966, and this kid got on stage with Brian Auger and the Trinity and [held] the guitar the other way around [upside down] and started playing. Myself and the whole place was with their jaws hanging open.”
He added: “I went, next day, to the record shops and I said ‘You got anything by this guy Jimi Hendrix?’ and they said ‘Well, we’ve got a James Hendrix’. He hadn’t yet done anything, so I became rather an avid fan waiting for his first release. Also, this is one of his beautiful ballads that I really love.”
In 2020, Mason was also invited to BBC’s ‘Tracks of My Years’. Naturally, he, too, would have felt huge injustice in omitting Hendrix from his selections. For his favourite, Mason chose ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Hendrix’s 1968 powerhouse cover of Bob Dylan’s original.
“Well, I chose this because it was really covering two bases. First of all – big fan of Jimi Hendrix,” Mason said, introducing the song. “I mean, I saw him the first time he came to the UK – it was an extraordinary evening.”
“He came on as a guest of Cream,” he continued. “And that in itself was a pretty extraordinary moment for me. Because that’s when I decided I wanted to be a full-on rock drummer like Ginger Baker rather than an architect. Which is the way I was heading at the time”.
“Plus the fact that the song itself was written by Bob Dylan. I’m a huge fan of Dylan, as I think so many people in bands are. In fact, what happened after that was that, eventually, when we became professional – actually, we didn’t become professional, we remained gifted amateurs for some time – but we actually went on tour with Jimi [in 1967].”
“It was one of those last great tour packages. I got to know [Hendrix drummer] Mitch Mitchell quite well, and he was terrific. I mean, that for me was, to have someone of that stature who was sort of interested in my playing was really important.”
Later, Mason reflected on this transition to drumming as a viable career. “So I played for fun as a kid, but only for fun, and the idea of doing it as a sort of a job was quite extraordinary.”
Listen to Jimi Hendrix’s classic Bob Dylan cover, ‘All Along the Watchtower’, below.
