Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd

Nick Mason’s biography of Pink Floyd, the band he has served as drummer for nearly 40 years, pulls few punches. He is particularly scathing about one member whom he characterises as callous, spineless and non-confrontational to the point of duplicity. This unimpressive human being is also, Mason insists, a pretty slack musician: rather than play on one of the Floyd’s later albums he connived in the hiring of session men to conceal his fading abilities. What distinguishes Mason’s line on this ostensible rotter from the standard bitching and score-settling that fill most rock-star memoirs is that he is describing himself.

In his droll, ruthlessly self-deprecating fashion, Mason offers here an insider’s account of a uniquely configured rock phenomenon. Since their emergence as the darlings of the London psychedelic scene in 1967, Pink Floyd have matured into the biggest band brand in the world - a collective whose reputation seems independent of the musicians themselves. Hence the curious fact that Pink Floyd has been successively run by three men who grew up together in Cambridge.

The first, who named them and wrote and sang all their early songs, was Syd Barrett. A charismatic figure damaged beyond repair by a reckless diet of four acid trips a day, Barrett was swiftly ousted by his ambitious, less precocious band mates. Mason well remembers the coup. It happened in February 1968, in a car on the way to a gig in Southampton. “Someone said, ‘Shall we pick up Syd?’ and the response was, ‘No, f*** it, let’s not bother… Most importantly, the audience didn’t ask for their money back: it was clear that the absence of Syd was not a critical drawback. We simply didn’t pick him up again.”

With Barrett out of the frame, Roger Waters, the bass player, stepped forward. By the end of the 1970s, his bold and earnest conceptualising had turned the Floyd into the biggest album sellers of the decade (with Dark Side Of The Moon alone shifting 35m copies) and turned Waters himself into a cruel dictator. As he deletes everybody else’s contributions to The Final Cut album in 1982, his hitherto best friend Mason reports “behaviour beginning to border on the megalomaniac”. After the album’s release, Waters unilaterally declared the band to be over.

The third coming of Pink Floyd was engineered by the youngest of the Cambridge Three, David Gilmour, in the teeth of fierce litigation from the departed Waters. Although collecting and driving classic cars had by now overtaken rock music in Mason’s world (he proudly tells of his 1962 GTO Ferrari, bought in 1973 and now worth millions), he hung in there on the drum stool. “Despite my personal record as rock’n’roll’s vicar of Bray, I was totally committed to the decision,” he says, noting surprise at “this show of will”. With the fans as committed as ever to the Floyd brand, the band carried on, spawning three more multi-platinum albums and mega-grossing world tours.

Mason’s highly readable, delightfully illustrated book is strongest on the early days. The absurdity of four middle-class art and architecture students gigging around the country in satin shirts and loon pants and having beer poured over them by the unenlightened denizens of provincial pubs is recounted by Mason with tremendous relish. His dry-eyed remorse at the way they all walked away from Syd is rammed home by a heart-rending Polaroid of Barrett in 1975 looking fat, lost and generally unrecognisable from the psychedelic poster boy of the late 1960s.

Probably to avoid arousing the ire of his notoriously touchy band mates, Mason becomes more discreet and less gossipy as time goes by. Sexual indiscretions, marital break-ups and drug habits are glossed over completely. He puts most of the Floyd’s problems down to sulking (“we never have any problem remembering real or imagined slights”) and abysmal communication. “Although we possessed a remarkable ability to enrage and upset each other while still maintaining a straight face,” he says around the time of the split in the early 1980s, “we never acquired the skill of talking to each other about important issues.”

Robert Sandall, The Sunday Times, 24 October 2004

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