David Gilmour’s opinion on Nick Mason

The guitarist and singer David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1968, three years after Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright had formed the band while studying at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. After Syd Barrett was dismissed due to his deteriorating mental health, this lineup went on to make Rock history with the release of hugely successful albums throughout the 1970s, including “The Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) and “The Wall” (1979).

As the band’s two principal songwriters and frontmen, Gilmour and Waters became the most recognizable members to the general public. Meanwhile, Richard Wright and Nick Mason remained less familiar to casual listeners who were not deeply interested in the band’s history and personnel. Over the decades, Gilmour has shared his opinion on many drummers, including Mason, who did not actually perform on some famous Pink Floyd songs, such as “Mother”.

What is David Gilmour’s opinion on Nick Mason

“What can I say? Nick is the guy who’s our drummer, he is the right guy for the job. We couldn’t have wanted anyone different, better. If you take Nick out of the combination, it doesn’t sound right. You know, we can play ‘Comfortably Numb’ with the best drummer in the world and it sounds great but it doesn’t sound quite right,” David Gilmour said in an interview with Paul Rappaport in 2011.

More recently, during a conversation with Rick Beato, Gilmour said he thinks Mason’s drumming became more simpler over the years. “I love playing all the instruments. I love to be able to get by on all that stuff. Sometimes there would be a drum rhythm that I picked up from God knows where. I would sort of have to learn it a little bit to say to Nick ‘Could we try this? A different thing’. So those sort of things would happen all the time. (We would talk about each other parts) all the time on everything, on every instrument. Nick didn’t need telling very much to be honest, he had his own thing and he did it.”

David Gilmour continued:

“In the 60s, with the very early Pink Floyd he was very much busier but he gradually got a bit simpler with it. But there were things (I used to say), on ‘Comfortably Numb’, there’s a place where there’s a bass drum missing. I said: ‘Can you just not play that bass drum? I want that gap’. That was my thing, I wanted that gap. Little things like that, of course if you’re creating, writing music, it’s in your head and you have very clear ideas often of exactly what you want and you don’t want. Everyone of us would be making suggestions, more or less forcefully given the moment and what the idea, what the dream was,” David Gilmour said (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

He had previously described Mason’s first take on that song as “rough and sloppy”. “Well, there were two recordings of that, which me and Roger argued about. I’d written it when I was doing my first solo album. We changed the key of the song’s opening the E to B, I think. The verse stayed exactly the same. Then we had to add a little bit, because Roger wanted to do the line, ‘I have become comfortably numb’. Other than that, it was very, very simple to write.”

David Gilmour continued:

“But the arguments on it were about how it should be mixed and which track we should use. We’d done one track with Nick Mason on drums that I thought was too rough and sloppy. We had another go at it and I thought that the second take was better. Roger disagreed. It was more an ego thing than anything else. We really went head to head with each other over such a minor thing. I probably couldn’t tell the difference if you put both versions on a record today. But, anyway, it wound up with us taking a fill out of one version and putting it into another version,” he told Guitar World in 1993.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, when he was still not part of the band but had the chance to see them live, he thought that Nick and Roger Waters were not very good yet in their instruments. “Syd was obviously very talented and Rick was a good musician. But Nick and Roger were fairly pedestrian at that time. They were possibly a bit more original than what we were doing but we (my band before joining them) were much, much slicker. We could do all sorts of Beatles Beach Boys things, wonderful harmonies and stuff. We were more of a sort of pretty good local covers band. I think it would be fair to say that they were trying to do something slightly different.” He told John Edginton in 2001.

Gilmour has already played the drums on a Pink Floyd song

Curiously, David Gilmour already played the drums on a Pink Floyd track. That happened in “Narrow Way”, track of their 1969 album “Ummagumma”, which was a track he recorded everything on his own: vocals, guitar, bass, drums, piano, organ, mellotron and percussion.

Although Mason is the only member of Pink Floyd who was part of all the albums the band ever released, but he didn’t play the drums on all the songs. On “Remember a Day” from “A Saucerful of Secrets,” it was the producer Norman Smith who played the drums. On “The Wall” (1979), it was Jeff Porcaro who played in “Mother.” Then on the final album with Roger Waters, “The Final Cut,” Andy Newmark recorded “Two Suns in the Sunset”.

The album that had the most songs recorded by other drummers was “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” (1987), on which Carmine Appice played on “Dogs of War” and Jim Keltner on “One Slip” and “On the Turning Away”.

Besides his work with Pink Floyd, Nick Mason has also released one solo album, “Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,” in 1981. He has also collaborated with other artists like Rick Fenn and Michael Mantler, besides being a producer for bands like The Damned on their 1977 album “Music for Pleasure.” In recent years he has been touring playing early Pink Floyd material under the name “Saucerful of Secrets,” which is rarely covered in Gilmour and Waters’ setlists.