Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets - Live at the Roundhouse

Fans of early Pink Floyd will absolutely adore this 2-LP live set from Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and his band Saucerful of Secrets, an outfit named after the 1968 Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets.

Mason and his band --- Gary Kemp on guitar and lead vocals, Guy Pratt on bass and lead vocals, Dom Beken on keyboards and vocals and Lee Harris on guitar and vocals --- play for more than two hours as they perform material drawn from the Pink Floyd catalog of the mid '60s through 1972's Obscured by Clouds, the release that came immediately before the band's breakthrough effort, Dark Side of the Moon.

This was the era when Pink Floyd was at its trippiest as well as at its poppiest, and examples of both abound here. On the trippy side are takes on cuts like "Obscured by Clouds," "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun."

Many of the pop songs come from the mind of the now deceased Syd Barrett, and "Bike," "See Emily Play," "Arnold Layne" and other Barrett pop gems are performed. So is "Vegetable Man," a real rarity from the band's earliest repertoire that Pink Floyd never officially released until 2016. Another somewhat obscure cut is "The Nile Song" that originally appeared on the Pink Floyd soundtrack album for the film "More."

Like Pink Floyd themselves, Mason and Saucerful of Secrets turn in a flawless performance here on this 22-song show, which is of course a good one to listen to on headphones.

The album is packaged in a gatefold jacket with a very cool die cut outer slipcase. The show, which took place in 2019 and was filmed, is also available in a CD/DVD package and as a Blu-ray.

Rating: