With Roger Waters and David Gilmour locked in a decades-long ongoing feud, the chances of a real life Pink Floyd reunion are pretty much zero. Founding drummer Nick Mason wants to see it happen anyway… with AI. Speaking to The Sunday Mirror, he said, “It would be fascinating to see what AI could do with new music. If you tried to run it as a sort of ‘Where did Pink Floyd go after?’”
“The thing to do would be to have an AI situation where David and Roger become friends again,” he continued. “We could be like ABBA by the time we’ve finished with it.”
Last year, two UK musicians used AI to generate songs inspired by another seemingly impossible to reunite band, Oasis; Liam Gallagher called it “Mad as fuck,” saying “I sound mega.” Many other musicians, however, have been far less bullish on the prospect of AI in music, including Nick Cave, who has expressed his desire for ChatGPT to “fuck off and leaving songwriting alone.”
While he hasn’t weighed in on using AI to revive the band, Gilmour did discuss the concept of a Pink Floyd hologram show, like ABBA’s Voyage, with Uncut, saying “If someone came up with all the money and all the brilliant ideas – and then once we’ve agreed to a series of very, very difficult and onerous conditions – I’d say, ‘Yeah, OK.'”
About Voyage itself, he told Uncut, “If you were a determined ABBA fan, you might enjoy it. I thought the images of them were sort of OK, but they weren’t ever going to convince me it was real. If you’re down the sort of mosh pit end of the thing and it’s all going on, it’s probably great. The best moment for me was when the live band played a song [‘Does Your Mother Know’] on their own.”
Mason, meanwhile, is currently on tour with his Saucerful of Secrets project playing early Pink Floyd music. See all dates below.
NICK MASON’S SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS: 2024 TOUR DATES
30/07/2024 Berlin, Tempodrom
31/07/2024 Hamburg, Stadtpark
01/08/2024 Frankfurt, Jahrhunderthalle