Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake

Author:Mark Blake
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Music, General
ISBN: 9781845137489
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2011-08-15T21:25:03+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?

‘I’d have to say that Roger Waters is one of the world’s most difficult men.’

Nick Mason

‘Oh, dear, do we have to?’ There is a note of distress in Nick Mason’s voice.

And it had all been going so well.

Pink Floyd’s drummer is on the campaign trail for an updated version of his memoirs, carefully subtitled ‘A Personal History of Pink Floyd’. It is winter 2005, and the group’s Live 8 reunion is still foremost in people’s minds. Mason is droll and self-effacing, appearing to have an endless supply of ‘I’m only the drummer’ quips. But he’s clearly proud of the reunited band’s performance in Hyde Park. He painstakingly points out that this thaw in relations between David Gilmour and Roger Waters does not signify a long-term reunion for Pink Floyd, but, unable to help himself, admits that should they decide to ‘do something again, my bag is packed and ready to go’. Mason is, after all, as David Gilmour once damned with the faintest of praise, ‘the best drummer for Pink Floyd’.

Mason is conducting interviews from an office/warehouse in a tucked-away little street in Islington, North London. It is the centre of operations for his company, Ten Tenths, which has been hiring out cars, motorcycles, aeroplanes, in fact, every conceivable mode of transport, to film and television companies since 1985. Mason’s own collection of sporty little numbers are among those available for the likes of pop singer Robbie Williams to tear around in for his next video.

After merrily recalling watching jazz pianist Thelonious Monk playing a New York club in 1966, the conversation has moved on through the years and we have arrived, somehow, at The Wall: Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, stage show and movie. All of a sudden, Mason’s earlier enthusiasm for his subject seems to have drained away.

‘It’s just that it was such an awful time,’ he explains. ‘I’ve tried to put it out of my mind.’

Roger Waters’ desire to build a wall between himself and Pink Floyd’s audience had been festering for some years before the ‘awful time’ of The Wall. But the moment it came closer to becoming a reality had been the final date on the In the Flesh tour in July 1977. Waters was mortified by his behaviour (‘Oh my God, what have I been reduced to?’). Backstage, he began a play fight with manager Steve O’Rourke, and a misjudged karate kick led to him cutting his foot.

Carolyne Christie had been at the show with the Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, for whom she’d worked as a secretary. The twenty-eight-year-old Ezrin had overseen albums by Lou Reed, Kiss and the Floyd’s old support band, Alice Cooper. Ezrin, Carolyne and a bleeding Roger Waters piled into a limousine for the drive back to the band’s hotel via a hospital. Also in the car was a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin’s.

‘I always thought it was a wonderful coincidence that I had a psychiatrist with me that night,’ says Ezrin. ‘So we drove Roger

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