LONDON’S esteemed Royal Albert Hall holds special memories for Pink Floyd. Under the tutelage of Syd Barrett, the band made their debut on December 12, 1966, as part of an Oxfam benefit evening, sharing a bill with more four-square entertainment including Jackie Trent, Peter and Gordon, Paul Jones, The Alberts, and Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds. “We were quite far down the bill, because no-one had heard of us – we just symbolised this ‘psychedelic’ music that was emerging,” says Nick Mason. “I remember Alan Price taking the piss out of us. He started banging and rocking h.s Hammond B3 organ until it made feedback noises. He said to the audience, ‘There you go, that’s a bit of psychedelic music for you.’ He got a big laugh. Ha ha! I’ve never really forgiven him for that. We were all mortified. Our parents were in the audience…”
Undeterred, The Pink Floyd returned again in November 1967 – this time on a more simpático bill supporting Jimi Hendrix – and again in June 1969, by which time Barrett had left the band. Titled The Final Lunacy, the 1969 performance witnessed keyboardist Richard Wright building furniture on stage while a crew member dressed as a gorilla roamed the audience; at the end of the show, the band detonated a pink smoke bomb, receiving a stern reprimand from the powers-that-be. Many years later, meanwhile, a recording of Wright rehearsing for The Final Lunacy on the Albert Hall’s organ was incorporated into Floyd’s final studio album, 2014’s The Endless River. “Using that organ was a real rigmarole – you had to open up all these cabinets and activate lots of complicated stops and knobs,” says Mason. “There was this rumour that you couldn’t play the bass notes because it would cause the entire building to collapse. Which I believe to be untrue, because surely it would have been irresistible for someone to try it…”
As it transpires, the Albert Hall will once again host the music of the early Pink Floyd later this summer, when Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets play the venue for the final date on this year’s Set The Controls Tour. “It’ll be a thrill to revisit that hallowed space,” says Mason. “It was the first proper, respectable venue Pink Floyd played. So there’s a pleasing circularity in returning there for this tour.”
NICK MASON
Since Saucerful Of Secrets first came together in 2017, much of their MO has been about pleasingly circularity. Formed in the first instance to celebrate the foundational era of Pink Floyd, it has grown to become something more than that – much as their setlists have pushed beyond the Syd Barrett period to chart the band’s years of questing before they arrive at The Dark Side Of The Moon. Their tours have found them going back to many of the regional theatres, concert halls and auditoriums they left behind after their mid-’70s success. Venues like the Roundhouse and the Brighton Dome are memorable landmarks in the Floyd’s story; a deeper investigation of their itineraries will find the Saucers playing other, less celebrated venues for the first time in 45 or 50 years, adding to a general sense that Mason and his co-conspirators are busy not just celebrating but reclaiming Pink Floyd’s past.
But from what – or should that be who – are they reclaiming it, exactly? Even during their lifetime, Pink Floyd gradually moved away from this material towards the weighty concepts
