PRESENTING - SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS

PINK FLOYD DRUMMER NICK MASON JOURNEYS ON HIS OWN TO DELIVER A GIFT TO FANS YEARNING FOR THE EARLY PSYCHEDELIC DAYS.

- DAVE THOMPSON

In a perfect world, you’d have had the album six months ago, and be looking forward to seeing the show in a few weeks’ time. In a perfect world, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets would already have their biggest tour to date poised to tour the USA. In a perfect world.

“I’m fine,” Mason answered when the question was posed to him back in March. “Whether one could say that about the rest of Europe at the moment is a different matter.”

Today, with all that we’ve undergone in the months since then, his prediction that “certainly touring is going to be held up for a little while” has been proven several thousand times over. As has his condemnation of the preparations (or otherwise) that were allegedly in place at the start of all this. “It shows we haven’t quite made the strides we think we have.”

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets is a bit of a mouthful as band names go, but with the vagaries of internet search machines having rendered single words and simple phrases utterly redundant — go on, try Googling ‘Yes’ and see where you get — NMSoS tells you exactly what you’re going to get. The second Pink Floyd album, and more besides, as seen through the drumsticks of one of just two Floyd founding members who are still with us.

Mason formed the band in 2018, initially as a low-key affair whose first live shows, clubs and pubs around London testified to the lack of expectation that went into the band’s creation. Mason was joined, as he still is, by sometimes Floyd bassist Guy Pratt, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, guitarist Lee Harris and keyboard player Dom Beken.