We were awful: Waters on band’s early days

Pink Floyd co-founder jokes they were so bad they wouldn’t have even passed an audition

Pink Floyd founding members Roger Waters and Nick Mason joked, while unveiling a memorial plaque on Thursday that they were so bad at first they wouldn’t have passed an audition on a talent show, reported Reuters.

The pair, together with the late Richard Wright, formed the group when studying architecture at the former Regent Street Polytechnic in central London between 1962 and 1965. The psychedelic- and progressive-rock band went on to become one of the most commercially-successful groups in popular music.

Returning to the site of the polytechnic to unveil the plaque, they talked about their time as students and the early days of Pink Floyd. Asked how good the group was when it started out, drummer Mason said, “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.”

“We were awful,” added Waters, Pink Floyd’s bassist and the band’s main lyricist during their peak years. Pink Floyd, which racked up record sales exceeding 250 million, had an initial line-up that included guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, another student, who left in 1968. Lead guitarist David Gilmour became the fifth member in late 1967.

Waters’s former band member, Nick Mason, said, “Living as a student was a fantastic way to live. Although I’d like to see more government grants introduced ... I mainly spent my grant on curry, I think. But sensible people need the money in order to further their education,” reported the London Evening Standard.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th,  2015.

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