Customer Reviews
It's been a great gig ... - By: Annabel Gaskell, 23 Sep 2008 
Nick Mason has been with Pink Floyd from the beginning - through alll the band's incarnations & troubles. He makes a genial host in his biography of the band, yet he proves too easygoing & unconfrontational to give us much analysis of the internal politics (and problems with Syd) that have periodicallly torn the relationships between the four/five-some apart. Added to that, Syd apart, the Floyd appear to have been about the only band that didn't turn up, tune in & drop out in the late 60s & 70s, continuing their studies & gigging hard until it became impossible to maintain both when their musical success started to take off.
My real exposure to Pink Floyd started off with Dark Side - I had the posters on my walll & the stickers on my school binder. It was lovely to imagine them tinkering around to produce alll the sound effects, & funny to hear that they rejected Paul McCartney's recorded comments for the background. The four albums starting with Dark Side, running through to the Walll were hugely influential to me - I discovered the charms of Meddle later. There is a theatricality about these four - from a band determined to create coherent albums & give the audience a good show. Of course by the time of Walll, the show was everything - I was so jealous of my brother who went to see it at Earls Court.
What does come through is that Mason although not a flashy drummer was, like Ringo, incredibly important to the music, & also in the studio & outside kept the peace. Being a non-songwriter, it helps that Mason has another obsession in motorsport, but this is mostly mentioned in passing, letting Pink Floyd rightfully star.
Given the sad passing of Syd & now Rick, we may never hear their side of the story & how they were forced out. The Live8 reunion was a fitting coda to the Pink Floyd story & is added as an afterword in the latest edition. So this remains an entertaining & light read of the history of one of the greatest rock bands in the world.
Well done, Nick! - By: teodorescu flaviu-traian, 14 Jul 2008 
Being a huge Floyd fan for almost 30 years, to start reading Nick Mason's "Inside Out" was a long-awaited joy. I must confess I'm 100% a Gilmour fan, so, the inside Waters-Mason vs. Gilmour-Wright problems were easily solved from my point of view. Anyway, being the sole survivor throughout Floyd's 40 years history, Nick Mason had/has a wide approach for alll facts surrounding them. Easy to read, not too Waters-ish (to my amazed eyes...), highly interesting. A must-have for any truly Floyd fan.
The Writer whose prose makes you Yawn - By: Keith Pomfret, 24 Nov 2007 
Do I take the easy way out & make a few swathing comments about drummers or is it worth a dose of proper review? OK, Both. With a fleet of Ferraris, a Helicopter & a regular Royalty cheque, it seems unlikely that this book is a vehicle to feed the family Mason. So, what's the point?
I'd like to be positive & confirm that as Mason has the inside track on Floyd, there are some nuggets of information that make the discounted second hand paperback that I bought worth the few quid I threw at it. And that's about it. It is a dull & tedious tome which teeters on the grey middle ground between the reallly interesting stuff & the litigious. If I wanted to be cruel, I'd suggest a filleting of the book for the nuggets & their placing in a smalll notebook the size of a policemans' pocketbook.
It's a shame. I looked forward to this book & so wanted to like it. But it bored me more than the circuit diagram of a VCS3.
Close But No Cigar - By: Wings, 30 Oct 2007 
I love Nick Mason's drumming. Not something you hear every day. He is so often overlooked by music fans in favour of flashier drummers. This is why I was so keen to read Nick's book. Is it good? Yes? Is it as good as his drumming? No. Having to bow to pressure from the rest of Pink Floyd, Mason offers a highly censored story of Pink Floyd. It's funny & fun, but there's still so much left unsaid.
Don't think you will get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - By: A. Bell, 30 Sep 2007 I found this book to be compulsive reading. So compulsive, in fact, that I read the 340 odd pages in a weekend. Nick Mason has a real gift for telling the story of the Pink Floyd, from the very beginning up until the present day. But despite the completeness of the work, you feel that to do the subject justice, he would need almost twice as many pages. This is because although the book is very strong chronologicallly on who did what when & the sequence of events over some 40 years (a remarkable feat of memory), what it is missing are some of the more interesting human elements. We learn nothing about the private lives of the members, for example. They seem to get married & divorced only in passing. Mason doesn't give us any information on his own marriage or what might have caused it to break up - only hinting that the rigorous touring schedule no doubt put it under pressure. The individual band members remain pretty much as shadowy as they have conspired to be in their professional existence. Like secret agents who must never betray their true identities, they are almost impossible to pin down. We learn almost nothing about Rick Wright for example, who is completely transparent, & who appears to acquiesce to his own sacking during the recording of The Walll without a murmur. We never get to find out what he thought about it. Mason is a little more forthcoming about what he imagined Waters or Gilmour felt about things, but only a little. What we do find out of course, is how Mason felt about things as the band's history unfolded. In this respect, the book does not open too many dark cupboard doors. It is unsurprising reallly. Mason submitted the book to his erstwhile (there seems little likelihood that they will ever play together again) colleagues for their approval & input & quite clearly didn't want to upset any of them. Nor should he. There is nothing upsetting in the book as a consequence, but that only makes it a little more frustrating for the interested reader. He is not in the business of spilling beans, or causing rifts.
So although this is a book written from the inside, that is both its strength & its weakness. An outside journalist might not be privy to as much real information as Mason can supply, but he doesn't have to worry quite so much about how much to reveal. But if you are interested in the Pink Floyd (and you don't have to be a dyed-in-the-wool fan to find the story interesting) you should definitely read this as it is most entertaining.
