Nick Mason - Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports (LP)

Nick Mason’s first solo outing is the kind of left turn that separates the curious from the casual. Released in May 1981, Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports isn’t a drummer’s victory lap or a Pink Floyd offcut stash. It is, in spirit and in sound, a Carla Bley album wearing Mason’s name on the spine. Bley wrote the music, produced the sessions, and brought her circle into the room, then let Mason’s cool, unflappable touch guide the groove. Recorded in 1979 at Bley’s Grog Kill Studio in Willow, New York, it sits at a fascinating crossroads where British art rock meets New York’s wry, jazz-inclined avant crowd.

The guest list alone tells you this won’t behave like a run-of-the-mill post-Floyd project. Robert Wyatt, the beloved former Soft Machine singer, takes most of the vocals and colours the record with that unmistakable, tender vibrato. Chris Spedding’s guitar slices and sings when it needs to. Steve Swallow’s bass is lithe and quietly melodic. Gary Windo’s reeds bring bite and slapstick in equal measure, and Michael Mantler drifts trumpet lines through the mix like sly asides. Karen Kraft pops up to front the opening tune and changes the record’s temperature in an instant. Mason, for his part, anchors it with a precise, often dryly recorded kit that leaves room for Bley’s keyboards and the brass to jab and joke.

“Can’t Get My Motor to Start” is a cracker of an opener, a comic engine-room of a song that treats funk and big-band vaudeville as close cousins. The horns blurt, the rhythm section nudges, and you can almost see the smirk in the control room. Then Wyatt arrives and the album’s heartbeat settles. On “I Was Wrong” and “Siam,” his voice turns Bley’s and Paul Haines’ oddball texts into little theatre pieces, tender but tilted. The metres slip around, the melodies unfold at angles, yet the choruses somehow stick. It is playful music with a serious ear for arrangement.

“Hot River” is the track that often snags Pink Floyd trainspotters, and not just because Mason’s name is on the cover. Spedding climbs into a long, searing solo over a slow-burn vamp that feels halfway between jazz-rock and a spacey torch song. Wyatt floats above it with a kind of bemused melancholy, and Bley’s organ swells keep the temperature up without ever turning bombastic. If you came here for some connective tissue to Mason’s day job, this is probably where you’ll feel it most. Elsewhere, “Boo to You Too” lets the horns get cheeky again, “Do Ya?” and “Wervin” carry a tight, almost cartoon agility, and “I’m a Mineralist” closes the set with a deadpan love letter to modern composition and repetition that plays like an inside joke you’re invited to laugh at.

Bley’s production tastefully resists the era’s worst habits. The drums are dry and close, the horns woody, the keyboards present but not sugary. It sounds like a band in a room, arguing and agreeing in real time. That gives Mason a chance to do what he does best, which is to be tasteful and exact without crowding the frame. He never showboats, and that restraint is a big part of why these idiosyncratic songs feel so complete.

It’s worth noting the packaging history for crate diggers. The record originally landed on Harvest in the UK, and for years it lived as a cult object in the wider Pink Floyd orbit. In 2018, Mason gathered this album with Profiles and White of the Eye in the Unattended Luggage box set, giving Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports vinyl a proper modern pressing. If you’re trawling a Melbourne record store or searching for vinyl records Australia wide, you’ll see that reissue mentioned a lot. It’s a tidy way to buy Nick Mason records online without gambling on an old copy, and for anyone collecting Nick Mason albums on vinyl it puts this quirky gem back within reach.

Is it a Pink Floyd record in disguise? Not really. It is a snapshot of a moment when a famous drummer lent his name and chops to a brilliant composer’s mischievous world, then let her call the plays. If you love Robert Wyatt’s voice, if Carla Bley’s sardonic, tune-rich writing hits your sweet spot, or if you just want to hear Nick Mason in a different light, this is a rewarding spin. Pull a clean Nick Mason vinyl pressing, pour something, and let these eight songs bend the room a few degrees to the left. It’s an odd album, but it’s an easy one to love.