Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake Page B

London to see a package rock ’n’ roll show featuring The Rolling Stones, Helen Shapiro and Gene Vincent, at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn. The brooding, leather-clad Vincent had none of Elvis’s pretty boy charm. An alcoholic who’d permanently damaged his left leg in a motorcycle crash and walked with a pronounced limp, stories circulated of Vincent being rolled up in a carpet by his bodyguard and forcibly carried on stage after he refused to perform. Maybe something about Vincent’s outsider image and damaged persona made its mark on Barrett and Waters. Whatever the catalyst, on the train back to Cambridge, the two sat together, sketching a picture of the amps they would need when they started their own rock ’n’ roll group. Yet by the time Syd arrived in London, Roger was already part of a band.
    Without Barrett’s flair for painting or Gilmour’s for playing guitar, Waters found himself pondering his next move on leaving the County. When he saw Syd perform with The Mottoes, Waters would talk later of ‘wanting to be a bit further towards the centre of things’. After abandoning plans to study Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University, he submitted to a series of aptitude tests for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, who suggested he might be cut out for a career in architecture.
    As a precursor, Waters spent a few months working in an architectural office in neighbouring Swavesey, before enrolling on a degree course at Regent Street Polytechnic in London’s Little Titchfield Street, near Oxford Circus. Waters brought his guitar and billeted himself in a number of downmarket student houses, including a cold-water squat near the Kings Road. As one of his future bandmates would later explain, ‘Roger wanted to free himself but he didn’t know how to do it.’ By the spring of 1963, though, Waters had drifted into the orbit of a group of like-minded fellow students, which included a drummer, Nick Mason, and a keyboard player, Richard Wright.
     
    Nicholas Berkeley Mason was born on 27 January 1944 in Edgbaston on the outskirts of Birmingham. His father, Bill, was a Communist Party member and former shop steward for the Association of Cinematographic Technicians. Accepting a job as a documentary film director, he moved with his wife Sally to Downshire Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London, when Nick was aged two. Three daughters, Sarah, Melanie and Serena, completed the family.
    Bill collected vintage cars, and was a motor racing enthusiast who competed at an amateur level. On a similar theme, his early film-making credits included Le Mans , a 1955 documentary about the French sports car race. The Masons’ car collection wasn’t the only evidence of their wealth. Like the rest of his future bandmates, Nick’s upbringing was comfortable. Though, in his case, a little more comfortable. As Pink Floyd’s first manager Peter Jenner recalled, ‘I remember being amazingly impressed that Nick’s parents had a swimming pool.’
    Nick’s musical education also began with Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and regular scanning of the airwaves in search of Radio Luxembourg. He learned to play the violin and piano, but showed no great aptitude at either. A drum kit followed later, and Mason became part of an ad-hoc school group called The Hot Rods, whose repertoire rarely extended beyond tireless renditions of the Peter Gunn TV theme.
    At the age of eleven, Mason was enrolled at Frensham Heights, a co-ed boarding school near Farnham in Surrey. Today, the school prides itself on ‘No uniforms, no competition, teachers and pupils all on a first-name basis.’ And even in the 1950s, compared to Waters’ experiences at the strait-laced, boys-only Cambridge County, Nick’s time at Frensham Heights was a good deal more relaxed. ‘I enjoyed my time at Frensham,’ he wrote in 2004. ‘It was fairly traditional, in terms of blazers and exams, but it had a far more liberal approach to