A motor racing connection between Roger Waters and Nick Mason is partly to thank for bringing half of Pink Floyd back together.
The band members may have had little in common socially and the classic line-up would perform just once together after 1985, but Pink Floyd‘s material has remained a constant on stage. David Gilmour incorporated many hits from the band into his solo show setlist, as did Waters. The bassist and founding member would unite with drummer Mason for a show at the French Grand Prix, which led to a tour from the pair. The worldwide tour would see Mason appear in several dates, including the shows at Hyde Park in London and three nights at the Hollywood Bowl in California, United States. Though he was not there for the whole tour, Mason did appear in several performances with Waters, along with ex-Thin Lizzy member Snowy White, and Waters’ son, Harry.
It was their love of motor racing which brought Waters and Mason back together on stage. The drummer was invited to perform at the French Grand Prix by Waters, who recalled the pair’s love of the sport.
He said: “Oh god yeah. I mean I’m having an absolute blast. I mean, this tour that we’ve been doing is terrific fun. The band is great. I don’t know if people know this but the story behind why we do the whole of The Dark Side of the Moon was brought about by the French Grand Prix organisation last summer called up and said, ‘We want Pink Floyd to do Dark Side of the Moon at the French Grand Prix’
“Everybody was saying, ‘Fuck off you’re insane,’ and they went ‘Oh what about Roger Waters’, and they said ‘Well, dunno, we’ll ask him.’ And so they did ask me and I thought, ‘Oh what a strange idea but I thought why not? Why I didn’t think of that myself a few years ago!'”
Waters would say it wasn’t just a love for the F1 that brought the tour to life, but a desire to revisit The Dark Side of the Moon. Their one-off show soon expanded into a twenty-date tour of Europe and further dates in North America followed.
“It’s a piece I’m really attached to, and then they asked if I’d take Nick Mason so I said, ‘Hey do you want to go and do The Dark Side of the Moon at the French Grand Prix. And he is an enormous aficionado of motor racing anyway, so he said ‘Yeah I’d love to’ so we did it and then it seemed daft for it to be a one-off, so I said, ‘Hey let’s do a couple of festivals in Europe,’ and then that turned out to be twenty dates in Europe.
“And we thought, ‘Oh well, we are up and running, we might as well go to the States.’ And then it was great, it was such good fun. We thought maybe next year we should go to the Southern Hemisphere and go and do some there…”
