‘Looking back …’: Nick Mason on the conflict, glory and charitable intent of Pink Floyd

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The 20th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s final studio effort sparked a series of retrospective thoughts. As for Nick Mason, the only member to have played on every Floyd release, he has no regrets.

“I think it would have been nice, looking back, to have understood more about how we could have worked better together,” Mason tells Burn FM, “and perhaps done more work. But I think, perhaps if we had done that, maybe the work wouldn’t have been so good. I guess there would have been some element lacking that made it work properly. More than regrets, it’s more like: I wonder what that would have been like?”

By the time Division Bell arrived in 1994, the group consisted of Mason, David Gilmour and Richard Wright. Syd Barrett, who co-founded Pink Floyd with Mason, Wright and Roger Waters, had long since retired. Shifting lineups into the 1980s produced an album without Wright (1983’s The Final Cut) and then an album with only Gilmour (who joined just before Floyd’s second album in 1968) and Mason making major contributions — 1987’s Momentary Lapse of Reason.

The lineup that created a string of well-regarded albums from the decade before — among them Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall — wouldn’t reunite until 2005 for the benefit Live 8 concert. Though Wright (and Barrett) have both passed since then, Mason has more recently intimated that the remaining members might reform again, if the charity intent similarly connected with erstwhile band leaders Gilmour and Waters.

“They’re both good hearted,” Mason adds, “so if the cause is sufficient, they’ll do it — and they’re happy to do it. I think the thing that people find it hard to get their head around is the fact that neither of them are particularly interested in doing it just for the money. The reasons have to be right.”

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