Why Nick Mason dug up Pink Floyd's psychedelic past with a new band in 2018

Nick Mason was the only Pink Floyd member who didn’t have a solo project or a side band. By 2018, with Floyd long retired and Roger Waters and David Gilmour each doing their own thing, Mason wanted to play live again—but not the stadium stuff. He missed the weird, early stuff: the Syd Barrett songs, the long instrumental jams, the spacey pre–Dark Side material that nobody else in the Floyd orbit would go near. So he put together a band called Saucerful of Secrets (named after the band’s second album) specifically to play that exact era.

The setlist for their 2019 live album, Live at the Roundhouse, is basically a time capsule of Pink Floyd 1967–1972. It opens with “Interstellar Overdrive” and pulls deep cuts like “Astronomy Dominé”, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, and “A Saucerful of Secrets”. No “Comfortably Numb”, no “Money”. Even the more accessible stuff like “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Layne” feel raw and psych-tinged. The band itself—with Guy Pratt on bass, Gary Kemp on guitar, and Dom Beken on keys—recreates that acid-drenched, tape-loop vibe without trying to be a tribute act. It’s Mason reminding people that before the concept albums and the Wall, Pink Floyd was a genuinely strange, experimental rock band that got audiences lost in sound.