Why did Nick Mason call Pink Floyd’s early shows “rubbish”?
It’s always a challenge trying to get any musical idea from the rehearsal space to the stage. For all the artists claiming to sound heavenly whenever they get together to jam, the greatest test is showing that music to the rest of the world and seeing how they respond to it. Pink Floyd may have been able to get their foot in the door in the 1960s psychedelic movement, but Nick Mason didn’t consider their live act all that impressive when they first got started.
Then again, talking about the Pink Floyd of 1967 and the Pink Floyd that most people know is talking about two very different entities. Although the band may have started out with core members Roger Waters and Nick Mason already in the group, Syd Barrett was the real driving force behind the band, constantly trying to push the envelope with his fanciful pieces of psychedelic rock.
Although songs like ‘See Emily Play’ seem like the polar opposite of the band that would one day create the song ‘Money’, Barrett’s songwriting was still enough to get the band a major following in England, recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in Abbey Road Studios while The Beatles were making Sgt Pepper. If you thought it sounded strange on record, it was nothing compared to what happened onstage.
Being one of the first major advocates of spectacles at shows, every concert the band put on around the London club scene felt like it was ripped straight out of an acid trip. From the various lights going off all over the place to the different improvisational pieces of the set, no one was going to see the same show twice from the band, especially once Barrett’s mental state started deteriorating.
Outside of their main setlist, the band also indulged in a handful of experimental moments when they took to the stage. While they admitted that it was interesting seeing what they could do with their instruments whenever they got onstage, Mason thought that hardly anybody was enjoying it but themselves.
Recalling those early shows, Mason said that the crowd had to sit through too much experimenting than they usually bargained for, recalling in Saucerful of Secrets, “In the very early Pink Floyd days, there were people definitely prepared to go on the basis that we were being great eighty per cent of the time rather than twenty per cent. But there was a hell of a lot of rubbish being played in order to get a few good ideas out”.
Unfortunately, that same kind of experimentation only signalled the breakdown going on with Barrett, as he became more lost in his own head as the years went on. After replacing their frontman with David Gilmour, the band would veer off in different directions on their later output, focusing on sounds that reflected their state of mind after losing their old mate.
As they continued to play more massive venues, though, the excitement of their live show never went away, from the grandiose sets that went into the tour for The Wall to bringing a huge inflatable pig to fly above the audience during the tour for Animals. While every member of Pink Floyd has never been known to be terribly animated when they went onstage, those years of rubbish led to them letting the music do the talking more often than not.
