Quotes from Nick Mason

Rick played trumpet as a schoolboy, and always maintained that he played the piano before he could walk… but would then add that he didn't walk until he was ten.

In his autobiography, Is That It?, Bob also tells the story of one scene in the film in which an American actress, keen on method acting, had to show that she was frightened of Pink. She asked Alan Parker what her motivation for doing this was. Alan sighed and told her, 'The money'.

In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.

Storm also recalls that Syd adored the Beatles, at a time when most of his friends preferred the Stones.

It was still rare for musicians to be allowed anywhere near the mixing desk, and not unknown for session players to be brought in to save on studio time: the Beatles had begun changing this, as their success convinced record companies to interfere less and less. Virtually every subsequent band owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Beatles for creating an attitude where popular music was made by the artists, and not constructed for them.

These were the early warning signals of fundamental disagreements within the band. Lines were being drawn in the sand, indistinctly and involuntarily, but being drawn nonetheless. At the risk of simplifying things too far, David and Rick felt more comfortable with a purer musical solution. Roger and I were drawn towards experimenting with the balances, and making more of the non-musical elements. David always preferred a certain amount of echo, Roger preferred the sound to be much drier.

There was, though, a sharp divide between classical and pop in the upper echelons; although the pop releases were subsidising the classical recordings, the staff who created them were treated like other ranks by the top brass. The chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, must take a lot of credit for bringing down this antiquated hierarchy. To put things in context, two years before he joined EMI, the board had decided there was 'no future' in the long-playing record.

Everyone remembers Syd for his songwriting, but he probably deserves equal credit for his radical concept of improvised rock music.

By mid-April Peter, Andrew and ourselves had felt obliged to run a spoof ad entitled 'Freak Out-Schmeak Out' to poke fun at them, but even so promoters who were jumping on the bandwagon, or just plain dumb, failed to get the joke, and their ads were still blithely using the line 'Turn up, shell out, get lost

The suggestion was put to us that we should become non-resident in the UK for one year so that we could earn some money and replenish the dwindling coffers, and provide some time for our accountants and tax specialists to salvage something from the wreckage. The whole experience cast an enormous cloud over us. We had always prided ourselves on being smart enough not to be caught out like this. We saw ourselves as educated, middle class, in control of everything. We had been utterly wrong.

In the Hilton in Scottsdale, we fell back on any opportunity for a wager – I recall David riding a motorbike through our hotel restaurant for one particular bet. The diners either thought that this was normal, or that he was packing a gun, because they completely ignored him.

One still unused experiment from this time was an exploration of backward vocals. A phrase written out backwards letter for letter and then read out will not sound correct when reversed, but a spoken phrase recorded and played backwards can be learnt and recited. This gives a very odd effect when it is in turn played backwards. 'Neeagadelouff' was one I remember: it should come out as 'fooled again'.

Curiously we did it all over again when we made the Live At Pompeii film, this time using another dog, called Mademoiselle Nobs. On the positive side, even when hard pressed, at least we resisted the temptation to construct an entire album of barking dogs, and to audition a clutch of session dogs desperate to make it in the music business.

As a climax to the show the octopus was inflated and came rearing out from the lake. The moment would have been improved if a number of over-enthusiastic and mind-altered fans had not stripped off and taken to the water; in scenes reminiscent of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, these lunatics got tangled with the air pipes and threatened to spoil the performance by thoughtlessly drowning.

The press had missed the real story: that our front man, guitarist and songwriter was beginning to unravel in a serious way. We weren't oblivious to the fact, but from our point of view Syd was having good days and bad days, and the bad days seemed to be increasing in number.

Whatever bond Rick had enjoyed with Roger in the previous fifteen or so years was terminally broken, and Rick's downfall was swift. Steve was happily cruising to America on the QE2 when he was called by Roger and told to have Rick out of the band by the time Roger arrived in LA, where the album was due to be mixed.

Lawyers were summoned, emergency plans mapped out, and scapegoats nominated.

I still find it hard to really cover some of the events of this period properly. Roger was probably still my closest friend, and we were able to enjoy each other's company. But our friendship was increasingly put under strain as Roger struggled to modify what had been an ostensibly democratic band into the reality of one with a single leader.

The subtleties of inner-sanctum passes are a degree subject in their own right. Access All Areas means about halfway in, VIP one level further. A laminate trumps a stick-on and a green dot lets you through another gate. After that it helps if you are either part of the show, a family member, or have that demented look that ensures that there are always a few lunatics who make it to where they absolutely should not be.

The end of the Animals tour marked another low point. David now says that this was one period when he really felt that it might be all up for Pink Floyd. His view is that we had achieved, and sustained, the success we had originally wanted as a band, and accordingly were finding it difficult to see what more we could do.

I headed out front to watch Paul McCartney and U2 perform 'Sgt Pepper' and even as a fully paid-up, jaded and jaundiced veteran of the music business, was moved by the power and strength of what was happening both on stage and in the audience.

Preliminary discussions threw up the idea of a record created entirely out of sounds that had not been produced by musical instruments. This seemed suitably radical, and so we started out on a project we called 'Household Objects'. The whole notion seems absurdly laboured now, when any sound can be sampled and then laid out across a keyboard, enabling a musician to play anything from barking dogs to nuclear explosions.