“The beginning of rock and roll”: The first song that Nick Mason ever loved
We all have songs or artists that caught us at the right time and changed the direction of our lives. Moments we can point to when our tastes were rewritten, our brains were rewired, and our worlds were rocked. Maybe it was the first time you heard The Beatles, or the first time that Joni Mitchell really spoke to you. Maybe it was the first time that Bob Dylan kicked open the door to your mind, or when Fiona Apple barged her way into your heart. Maybe it was the first time you heard Pink Floyd and wondered what on earth you were listening to.
It’s worth remembering, though, that all of our favourite artists and everyone who has made us feel this way have also had the same experiences. For Dylan, it was when he heard Buddy Holly and Hank Williams or Charlie Parker and Woody Guthrie. For The Beatles, it was The Isley Brothers, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, while Fiona Apple loves Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Kate Bush. All of these passions went on to inform their own trailblazing music, and you can hear the echoes of all those who went before them in these songs. However, for Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, his first musical love is a little more surprising.
When you listen to Pink Floyd, it’s hard to pin down any such musical precedence or inspiration. Their pool of influences must have been as broad as the sonic soundscapes they put together themselves. ‘Money’, from The Dark Side of the Moon, was supposedly inspired by Booker T & The MG’s (although, it’s obviously not as funky or soulful as anything that the legendary Stax house band ever put out), while their more expansive, studio manipulation can be traced back to The Beatles.
On the one hand, their more political lyrics had roots in Dylan, whereas jazz greats like Miles Davis influenced their more inventive elements. But you have to go back a generation further to get to the artist who first sparked a love of music in the Floyd drummer Nick Mason. “Elvis was moving things on slightly from Bill Haley”, Mason said during an interview in 2020, where he heralded Elvis’ cover of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ as the “beginning of rock and roll”.
Mason recalled that though a single from Bill Haley and His Comets would have been the first single “he ever bought”, the first album he ever got hold of was Elvis’ eponymous debut, which “was absolutely stuffed with his early hits”.
The album opens with the explosive Carl Perkins-penned ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. Elvis may not have actually been operating at the beginning of rock and roll—indeed, Trixie Smith was singing about rocking and rolling all the way back in 1922, while the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Arthur Crudup, Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Fats Domino and a whole host of excellent others all preceded ‘The King’—but he was certainly the one that lit the fuse under the genre and brought these rocking rhythm and blues into the mainstream.
And even almost 70 years on from the release of his debut record, Elvis’ performance, and that of his excellent band of Scotty Moore, Bill Black and DJ Fontana, all across the album is just as electrifying, magnetic, exciting, frightening, powerful, holy and otherworldly as it ever was.
Every time you hear it, you can feel the same magic running through the grooves, exploding out of Elvis’ soul and bursting from his spirit. Maybe Nick Mason felt the same when he got the album home, dropped the needle down on side one, song one, and fell in love with ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ for the very first time. Needless to say, his love for it certainly underpins the propulsive rhythm and exultant spirit of the band he would go on to launch.
