Remembering games and daisy chains and Laughs

When Nick Mason walked offstage at Dingwalls in Camden, north London on May 20, 2018, he felt a mix of euphoria and relief. Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, had just finished their first-ever gig, playing a set of early Pink Floyd songs to 500 curious onlookers. Despite Mason’s pedigree as the drummer and sole constant member of one of the biggest and most celebrated bands in history, and despite the fact that the purpose of the show – to solely play pre-The Dark Side Of The Moon material – was clearly marked on the tin, there was a worry that it could have gone horribly wrong.

“Nothing in music is ever a done deal,” says Mason today. “You can’t guarantee that the audience won’t go, ‘What is this?’ Or, ‘It doesn’t hold up very well against Comfortably Numb.’ It would be mad to assume you have the divine right to succeed just because it has the stamp of Pink Floyd on it.”

Almost two years after that Dingwalls show, his concerns look faintly ridiculous. The suspicion that Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets were square pegs being jammed in the round hole