Quotes from Nick Mason

If I was not having much fun, David was certainly not having an easy time either. Roger was studiously ignoring any of David's suggestions, which is why he probably wanted Michael on board to augment the musical input. In many ways Michael was probably as much a substitute for David as for Rick or Bob, given his melodic strengths and his experience in writing, and arranging. It may well have been paranoia, but it did look as though David was being frozen out.

A far more taxing problem for David was establishing himself within the existing band. Officially he was the second guitarist and additional vocalist. But Syd saw David as an interloper, while the rest of the band saw him as a potential replacement for Syd.

On the bus we got to know a newly married American couple – the groom was about to head off to Vietnam, which meant little to us in 1966; the full significance only hit me later on, and I still occasionally wonder if he survived.

Years before MTV, the system was for a band to appear on one of the celebrity shows then current. The presenter, usually a popular singer of a certain age anxious to extend his career, would sing a couple of numbers, and then bring guests on to chat, with musical interludes from the likes of us. With Syd approaching a catatonic state, you might think this was not a recipe for success, and you'd be right.

We thought we could augment the band with an extra guitarist to take the pressure off Syd. Jeff Beck's name was mentioned, which would have been an interesting (and spectacular) experiment. I don't think any of us would have had the courage to make the phone call at the time. Roger eventually managed it twenty-five years later.

Steve came from a very different background to the band. His father Tommy was a fisherman on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland; when the great American documentary maker Robert Flaherty made his film Man of Aran about life on the islands in the 1930s, Steve's father was one of the featured characters.

The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.

They arrived with few of the preconceptions or expectations of a normal audience, and were often in a chemically altered state sufficient to find drying paint not only interesting but deeply significant.

The R&B classics were mixed up with our longer workouts, so that 'Interstellar Overdrive', which we often used as an opener, might be followed immediately by a very straight cover of Bo Diddley's 'Can't Judge A Book' or Chuck Berry's 'Motivating', one of Syd's favourites.

We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the audience; any sense of resentment has nearly worn off.

But it was another factor in how David and I viewed the future. Both David and myself regarded playing live and touring as an integral part of being in the band. If being part of a Roger-led Floyd meant that there would be no live shows ('due to indiscipline, all touring has been cancelled this term') and only aggravation in the recording studio, the future prospect seemed distinctly unappealing.

I went to see his show at Earls Court, and found the experience had an astonishingly depressing effect on me. The first half was made up of Floyd numbers and gave me the impression of being a (rather elderly) Peter Pan at the nursery window – that was my part being played by someone else. In retrospect this one event probably had as much to do in galvanising me as anything else. I realised I could not quite so easily let go and watch the train roll on without me.

Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way.

That complexity may only have been 'quiet, loud, quiet, loud again', but at a time when most rock bands only had two volume settings – painfully loud and really, really painfully loud – this was groundbreaking stuff.

Bernie Ecclestone's comment that 'If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu.

We also used a Mellotron, with its weird fluxing tape loops of string sounds, which the Musician's Union were up in arms about, as they thought it would mark the end of live string players. The instrument now seems so quaint it feels as though it should be in a museum alongside the serpent and crumhorn, but its sound is so distinctive it is now digitally re-created in soundboxes with all its imperfections part of the continuing charm.

We eventually ended up with enough left-over material that we considered releasing it as a second album, including a set we dubbed 'The Big Spliff', the kind of ambient mood music that we were bemused to find being adopted by bands like the Orb,

Bootleg, a huge and immovable Great Dane, was also in attendance.

Both of these were played on the family's new state-of-the-art gramophone that was electric and connected to a device resembling a cross between the cabinets made in the days of Louis XIV and a Rolls-Royce dashboard.

We returned to the possibilities of musical instruments, and used a very soft beater on a padded bass drum, which strangely sounded far more lifelike, although the average heartbeat rate of 72 bpm was too fast and we slowed it down to a level that would have caused any cardiologist some concern.

even if Guy Pratt was the last out of the bar the night – or morning – before, his playing was faultless on stage, a tribute to his iron constitution or the fact that our music was too easy.

Within a couple of years, I had gravitated towards a group of friends from the neighbourhood who had also discovered rock 'n' roll, and it seemed an excellent idea to put a band together. The fact that none of us knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn't have any instruments.

Help was at hand in the rather large shape of Douglas Adams. As well as being the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas was an Apple Mac genius, guitar enthusiast and – fortunately for us – a fan of Pink Floyd. He could bring a marvellous sense of humour to the most desperate moments. He became party to a lot of the discussions about the album title.

Regrettably these tapes still exist.