Pink Floyd’s music is still a thriving enterprise, although their last tour was 25 years ago. The band’s primary songwriters, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, each play a slew of Floyd hits at their concerts, and tribute acts like The Australian Pink Floyd and Brit Floyd perform to enthusiastic fans all over the world.
But if you go to see any of those acts, you’ll hear almost no songs that predate Floyd’s 1973 breakthrough album, “Dark Side of the Moon.” This is why the band’s original drummer, Nick Mason, has formed a group called Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets — taking its name from Floyd’s 1968 album.
“You only have to wait for 15 minutes before another version of the greatest hits come ’round, whether it’s Brit Floyd or the Australian Floyd or Roger [Waters] or David [Gilmour], and what I didn’t want to do is get into a competition of who can do the closest to the original ‘Comfortably Numb,'” says Mason, phoning The Post before a Saucerful concert in Houston, Texas. “What I wanted to do was something a lot freer than that that was sort of based in how we did do things 50 odd years ago, and that was sort of important that there’d be some freedom in the music rather than slavishly copying every single note that David did.”
Mason’s band — whose first North American tour includes stops at the Beacon Theatre on Thursday and Friday — plays material strictly from 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” through “Obscured by Clouds” (1972). It’s experimental, underground music that pointed the way for the band’s eventual mainstream success.
Reconnecting with the old material has been a pleasant experience for Mason, who along with Waters, Syd Barrett and Rick Wright formed Pink Floyd in London in 1965. Barrett left in 1968 amid drug and mental health issues; Waters bitterly split with the band in the mid-1980s; Wright died in 2008.
“What’s really nice about this is from the moment we started last year it was almost sort of going back in time,” says Mason. “It reminded me of all the really good times playing with Pink Floyd, in fact. It wasn’t that I ended up playing it in a despondent way. I enjoyed it all the way through. It’s sort of turning back the hands of time, really.”
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of SecretsJill Furmanovsky/rockarchive
Joining Mason in Saucerful of Secrets are Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp, bassist Guy Pratt (who has toured with both Pink Floyd and Gilmour’s band), guitarist Lee Harris and keyboardist Dom Beken.
Though he hasn’t toured since Pink Floyd’s 1994 “The Division Bell” stadium concerts, Mason said he “didn’t really” retire.
“I suppose I lived in hope that Roger and David would do something, or maybe just David would or Roger would, but after 20 odd years I gave up and thought I better get on with it,” he says.
Gilmour, Waters, Mason and Wright did reunite for a one-off performance at the 2005 Live 8 global awareness event. Since then, Mason has popped up onstage at the occasional Gilmour or Waters show. The Gilmour-Mason-Wright lineup released the final Floyd studio album, “The Endless River,” in 2014.
“I certainly think Live 8 would be an absolutely ace thing to go out on, just because it was the four of us playing together again, which gives it a sense of ‘we can be grown up’; it was for a very good cause,” Mason says. ” ‘Endless River’ for me is a really nice piece because it’s a memorial to Rick in many ways.”
Mason has enjoyed playing in theater-sized venues with his new band, something he hadn’t done since before Floyd’s heyday.
“The pleasure of playing with a group when you’re on a normal-size stage is one of the things, so you have eye contact and a relationship with the other musicians. Towards the end of the giant Pink Floyd on huge stages, I couldn’t really have eye contact with some of the players.”
Mason says fans can expect a live Saucerful album, and while he has given up on a full-blown Floyd reunion, the band still remains a working entity in some ways.
“The funny thing is once you reach a certain point it sort of continues under its own steam, so there are things like the V&A exhibition in London, and that’s now traveling and that was great fun to do,” Mason says of 2017’s “Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains.” He says he “was very involved” in the exhibit, which he says “we’re planning to open again in Europe in Spain in the next few months and the big thing will be to then bring it to America.”
“It’s not the band playing, but it’s certainly the band doing something.”
There are also “always plans for remasters” of old Floyd releases, he says: “We’re talking a lot about ‘Animals’ in particular because that was an album that musically we like, but technically we sort of did it in our own studio and it’s not quite up to the standard of an Abbey Road production.”
‘I’m not that bothered about how we’ll be perceived in the future.’
And while there are no plans for a “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style Pink Floyd biopic, the drummer, known for his dry wit and impressive sports car collection, has some ideas about casting.
“I thought Brad Pitt could play me and Danny DeVito can play David, and maybe Bette Midler would play Roger,” he says. “You can imagine coming up with a script that was acceptable to all of us. I think we’re a little bit away from that for a while.”
Whether or not the iconic and influential band gets the Hollywood treatment, it is firmly entrenched in music history, with albums like “Dark Side,” “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall” maintaining lofty perches in the rock pantheon.
“I’m not that bothered about how we’ll be perceived in the future,” Mason says. “It’s very gratifying that people think it might still be around and be important, and I’m proud of what we’ve done, but one has to remember the construction of it at the time was done when music was important but no one ever thought that any record could last more than six months or a year.
“I think, as I say, I’m proud of it, and I’d like to think that my great-grandchildren would be absolutely mesmerized that great-grandpapa had been part of this enterprise.”
