The Pink Floyd exhibit, Their Mortal Remains, opened last week at the Better Living Centre at Exhibition Place in Toronto.
Drummer Nick Mason tells the Toronto Sun his favorite piece of displayed memorabilia has nothing to do with music.
“The most bizarre item probably was the cane that was used to punish both Roger (Waters) and (frequent Floyd album art collaborator and graphic designer) Storm Thorgerson when they were school boys at Cambridge and that arrived with a punishment book.
“I don’t know who had it. It’s one of those things where it sort of appeared and someone said, ‘Well, this is amazing. Put this in the show for sure.’”
And while he says he is "more of an archivist than any of the others" [in the band], he wasn't convinced there was enough memorabilia for the exhibit.
"(Former Rolling Stones bassist) Bill Wyman kept absolutely everything. In fact, I very nearly brought the whole crumbling thing to a halt because the then director of the Victoria & Albert Museum (in London) suggested it to me and I said, ‘Nah, we couldn’t do it. We haven’t got all the stuff, the memorabilia.’ By then I’d seen the David Bowie exhibition where all the costumes (were) all carefully annotated with dates and all the rest of it. And as far as I was concerned, we had one big coat and a couple of shirts, that’s about it. What was great was I was wrong.”
The exhibit has an open-ended run in Toronto. Details at PinkFloydExhibition.com.