Pink Floyd Considering More Reissues After The Wall

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 02.08.2012

Drummer speaks on delving into its vault after The Wall reissues...

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason recently spoke about the possibility of doing more reissued albums on the heels of its upcoming expanded editions of The Wall that are set to drop on February 28th. Check out the highlights:

Nick Mason on possible further reissues: "The idea was always to see whether people like these things or not. If they do, of course we could do more. I think it's an exercise that bears repeating... but I think there might be things to be done that would be rather different to what we've done so far."

Mason on doing collections from eras, rather than individual album reissues: "We wouldn't do one album like 'Piper (at the Gates of Dawn)' on its own. Maybe we'll take 'Saucer (Full of Secrets)' and 'Piper' and maybe one other one and do an early years thing -- partly because there just isn't the material in some cases. That might be a more interesting exercise."

Sound engineer Andy Jackson on recently-discovered material: "There's quite a bit of very, very early stuff, before they had a deal, with Syd (Barrett) in the band when they were still trying to be an R&B band. It's not, like, early versions of songs that turned up on their albums or anything. It's R&B classics, the same as everybody else was playing back them. There's a lot of recordings that may be brilliant for a future project."

Mason on whether Animals will get an expanded reissue: "The answer is I don't know. 'Animals' is the one record Roger (Waters) said he'd like to have a go at remixing. That might be an exercise worth doing. Maybe David (Gilmour) disagreed enough that we could release David's remix and Roger's remix and, ideally, my remix as well." Jackson, meanwhile, notes that, "There's only a finite amount of stuff in the archives. It's a question of what there is and can we find it? That will determine what we do in the future."

Mason on The Wall's reissue: "What's great is we have a greater depth of material for ('The Wall') than we had for the other albums. We have Roger's demos followed by the band demos followed by the final thing, and that makes a big difference. You can really hear how ('The Wall') came together."

Mason on the rumored conflict while making the album: "The sort of concept people have is that this was a record hewn out of rock by very angry people, and I think that's not really the case. A lot of the album was pretty civilized in terms of people getting on with it. I think it all felt fairly positive. Things fragmented later on, quite late in the recording. There was a big blowup, particularly between Roger and Rick (Wright, who was kicked out of the band) towards the end of the process. But the majority of that process I remember as being pretty creative and businesslike, really."