“Pink Floyd would have been a terrible heavy metal band”

As Pink Floyd's longest-serving member and having played on all of the band's releases, Nick Mason has explored all the styles and cues that have shaped and evolved the legendary British group's sound. Among these, however, there is a genre that the drummer has never considered suitable for Pink Floyd: heavy metal.

There's one song in particular, from the beginning of the group's career, that Mason says even convinced him that the band could never sound like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. The song, which Nick Mason referenced in a 2020 Classic Rock interview, is “The Nile Song,” originally included in the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder's 1969 film “More.”

“'The Nile Song' is probably the heaviest thing we've recorded,” the drummer explained in the chat, recently covered by “Loudersound.” “But we weren't tempted to go down that particular path, no. Bands like Led Zeppelin did much better than us. We would have been a really terrible heavy metal band.”

While Pink Floyd have never played “The Nile Song” live, since 2018 Nick Mason has included it in the setlist of his concerts with the Saucerful Of Secrets, with whom he brings around the music of the British band before “The dark side of the moon” and with whom he will return to play in Italy next July for six dates.