Watch Roger Waters, Nick Mason Reunite for Honor at Old School
Pink Floyd‘s two living co-founders, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, reunited this week at the site of the band’s formation to mark the psychedelic/progressive rock act’s 50th anniversary.
The musicians helped unveil an honorary plaque at London’s University of Westminster (formerly Regent Street Polytechnic) on Thursday, though they were brutally honest about their skills in those formative days. “Put it like this: if we’d gone up for Britain’s Got Talent, I don’t think we would have made it past the audition stage; we weren’t terribly good,” Mason said at the event, according to Reuters. “We were effing awful,” Waters added.
The Floyd rhythm section smiled and laughed throughout the ceremony, with Mason adding that the honor was “recognition for something that I think we’re proud of.”
In the same Reuters interview, Waters also answered a question about music streaming services by slamming “all those bastards in Silicon Valley who are stealing not just our work but all the work that all the musicians all over the world are doing.” This follows a May interview with the Times UK, in which he expressed similar concerns about the business model.
“I feel enormously privileged to have been born in 1943 and not 1983,” he said. “To have been around when there was a music business and the takeover by Silicon Valley hadn’t happened, and in consequence, you could still make a living writing and recording songs and playing them to people. When this gallery of rogues and thieves had not yet injected themselves between the people who aspire to be creative and their potential audience and steal every fucking cent anybody ever made.”
Though Waters and Mason appeared friendly at the 50th anniversary ceremony, that doesn’t mean a Pink Floyd musical reunion is in the works. “A reunion is out of the question,” Waters told the Times UK in that same interview. “Life, after all, gets shorter and shorter the closer you get to the end of it and time becomes more and more precious and in my view should be entirely devoted to doing the things you want to do. One can’t look backwards.”