Lost For Words?

Roger Waters may think there’s not enough sex in it, but Nick Mason’s autobiography delves into every other corner of the Pink Floyd story.

Readers will find several drummer jokes here, as if Nick Mason wants to get the self-deprecating gags in before anyone else does. His permanently arched eyebrow gives Inside Out an amused and amusing perspective you probably wouldn’t get from the more earnest Roger Waters or David Gilmour, and makes it an attractive proposition to music fans who don’t necessarily regard Pink Floyd as the most important band of all time.

Part insider, part outsider, Mason seems to have been at both the centre of the action and a passive observer during his time with Pink Floyd, enabling him to take a more knowing view of it all. The result is a book crammed with minutiae but also plenty of wry anecdotes (to help fund Pink Floyd’s mid-80s comeback tour, Mason hocks his prized 1962 GTO Ferrari), several subtle digs at both Waters and Gilmour (‘Somewhere around this time, Dave had decided he would rather be known as David’) and some fascinating, never-before-published photographs – such as a ridiculously youthful Waters horsing around with Mason at Regent Street Poly – that can’t help but make you wonder how sad it is that, for a time at least, it all went so horribly wrong for these long-time friends.

The Floyd renaissance tours of the 1980s and 90s are pored over with a little too much detail, but Mason’s memories of this time will naturally be much clearer. For a man enamoured of fast cars, aeroplanes and all-round boys’ toys, the nuts and bolts of the band’s increasingly overblown stage sets clearly prove irresistible, and hardcore fans will find much trainspotterly detail to keep them occupied.

Concluding with a postscript outlining his reconciliation with Waters, Inside Out even manages a happy ending. Though the last word should go to Mason himself, whose stoic English humour, while a natural trait, allows him to play to the gallery, not least in one incident when Gilmour’s houseboat, Astoria, containing his studio, becomes jammed up against a pier and starts listing as the Thames begins to rise.

“The prospect of the Astoria disappearing into the foaming waters Titanic-style as the band played on was too awful to contemplate (although I like to think Leonardo DiCaprio could have successfully captured my boyish charm in the made-for-TV epic that would have ensued). As it was, our faithful boatman and caretaker, Langley, was on hand…”

As charmingly English as Pimms and heatstroke on a balmy summer’s day, few Pink Floyd fans will want to miss out on this.

Q magazine, Special Edition, September 2004

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