In two seperate interviews, both published yesterday in UK newspapers, Nick Mason and Richard Wright both expressed their wishes that Pink Floyd would perform together live again.

With all the recent activity, not least the release of the PULSE DVD that showcases the band's 1994 Dark Side show, both band members talk about how good it would be to play together again.

The Independent, July 7th

The Sun, July 7th

The rare interview with Richard was for The Independent. He starts by talking of how pleased he was that PULSE had finally got released. "One of the things I always regret about being in Pink Floyd is that you can never go to see the show. I have no idea what it looks like. We know it's pretty powerful, but when you're on stage you have no clear idea of it. So when I watched it on DVD I was overwhelmed by how amazing it looks."

Wright put most of this down to the creative genius of lighting director, Marc Brickman. "[He] is a genius. I don't think there's anyone else's lighting that has that imagination and feel for colour. Marc says the way he lights us is like painting a picture, and watching it, I know exactly what he means. Sometimes, he would be asked by various people, 'Could you put this spotlight on this musician?' or 'Could you give the musicians more light?' and he would get upset because it would destroy his painting. I was watching the DVD with someone last night, and they said, 'It's like the lighting at the Barcelona Olympics.' I said, 'He lit the Barcelona Olympics too.'"

The interviewer notes that the current David Gilmour tour has helped reacquaint Richard with the joy of playing live, something he much prefers to the grind of studio work. The subject of Live8 arose, and Richard noted that despite his dislike of the corporate nature of the event, particularly backstage where people such as the Beckhams were drinking their free champagne, he thought generally the event was wonderful.

"Apparently, when Pink Floyd went on, the whole backstage area was empty! Which says something. And it was really nice that we did get onstage again with Roger, because it was a good cause - the cause was more important than our arguments with each other. But I doubt very much whether we'd all four of us get on the road again and do a huge tour.

"I have no problem with us all maybe doing one-off shows together again, but I don't think anything more than that would work at all. But who knows? Although I have to say, I do wish the Floyd - Nick, myself and David - would go out again."

Nick Mason expressed similar sentiments to The Sun newspaper. Looking back at the 1994 tour, he is asked if that tour was a sad time, and did he feel like things were coming to an end. "No, not at all. I was rather surprised that we didn’t go back on the road again. Funnily enough it was something quite new to us because until we did the year-long tour in 1987/88 we had always just done three or four weeks. One of the great things about long tours is you can get it right. You can afford to put great production values into the staging, the films and all the extras."

This is made clear when you watch the PULSE DVD - and more than that, the performances are really good. "Absolutely. I think we’d actually got to the point on that tour where we had moved beyond getting it precise to the point where we could get a bit more loose with it."

Nick talks in depth about the creation, and recording, of Dark Side Of The Moon, which features in its entirety on the DVD. "There’s a lightness of touch about the recording ... Interestingly, when we did play it live in 1994 in America, the first attempt was pretty bad because everyone overplayed it like mad because of 30 years of learning how to play the guitars, keyboards or drums better. We had to strip it back. It only took one play through to realise what was going wrong."

Nick is then asked if he hangs on to the hope that it is not necessarily the end of Pink Floyd as a creative force. "I personally hope that at some point we could do something else. I live in hope, I’m an optimist."