The drummer that started it all for Nick Mason: “That’s what I’d like to be”
The very nature of being a drummer is to provide consistency and foundation to a band. While there are moments to flourish, the core role is to keep time and drive the band forward. In the case of Pink Floyd, with ever-changing members and constant internal conflict, Nick Mason’s role in delivering that consistency was more important than ever.
“I wouldn’t ever suggest that I was a mediator, actually,” Mason told Far Out last year when asked about his somewhat understated reputation in comparison to his contemporaries. “I’m quite fond of saying, you know, that people think I’m the Henry Kissinger of rock ‘n’ roll, but actually, I’m Neville Chamberlain waving that piece of paper.”
It says a lot about the calibre of Pink Floyd’s work that the inter-band soap operas surrounding each album cycle are secondary to their reputation. As compelling as the squabbles and rumours may be, the music always comes first. They consistently proved themselves to be at the forefront of innovation.
In Dark Side Of The Moon they didn’t just push the envelope of studio capabilities, seamlessly blending songs with dramatic interludes and consistent narrative threads to help define the art of a concept album, they coherently blended a multitude of different genres.
One of the more obvious was jazz, and Mason has never been shy about sharing his love for the genre. So it comes as no surprise that he heralds as the drummer that sparked his fire of musical interest.
“Most of my icons are the people that were my heroes when I was kicking off. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Ginger Baker,” he said. “When the curtain opened at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1966, and there was Ginger, Eric and Jack, I thought, that’s what I’d like to be, and that was it,” he added.
Baker set the mould for jazz and rock sensibilites to be crossed. And it was his particular use of a double bass drum that set Mason’s curiosity alight and elevated him from being a distant admirer to an artist adopting his methodology and injecting it into a Pink Floyd track.
On ‘Set the Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, Baker was somewhat of a north star for Mason, who tried to replicate his use of psychedelic percussion. “That was one track that’s got something very different about it,” Mason told Far Out.
“Other people – it’s not that they couldn’t play it, but they just didn’t have that sort of track,” the drummer added. “Funnily enough, Ginger, I think his mallets on ‘We’re Going Wrong’ [were an inspiration]. For me, it’s such a different thing to just hammering out fours to being able to work the dynamics of the song backwards and forwards with mallets rather than sticks.”
Baker represented a flashier and more performative drumming style, and despite his studio replications, Mason never was on stage. Instead, he was the much-needed tonic of calmness in a band of warring egos.
