Beta The Devil You Know!

Good to see the return of Steve Mason nearing ever closer. Mason is one the most creatively eccentric – not to mention cantankerous – artists of the past twelve years, emerging as the frontman of kaleidoscopic alt.folk legends The Beta Band at a time when, by law, any music that featured acoustic guitars had to be unimaginative, wet and thoroughly, utterly dull. The Beta Band were men apart, though, bonkers Scots who definitely and defiantly were not gonna be the next Travis. And that wasn’t just down to the dreamy, soporifically ace anti-pop that Mason created, unfortunately; The Beta Band were good enough to never have been played on the radio and been massive, a British Flaming Lips. But they never did, a mixture, perhaps, of their rotten luck (encapsulated in the ditched lead single from brilliant second album ‘Hot Shots II’, ‘Squares’, which relied on the same sample from I Monster’s totally shit ‘Daydream In Blue’, which disastrously came out about a month before The Beta Band’s superior effort) and also due to Mason’s restless rancour – it was totally refreshing to hear Mason and his bandmates totally berate their debut album and record label, especially as they did it before it was actually released, but you wonder how much it set the band back in the minds of a music public who were already a bit unsure.

A better second effort followed their flawed debut, but it was no surprise when The Beta Band split at the end of 2004, six months after the release of third album ‘Heroes To Zeros’, their most coherent and best album (and six months after they’d been on the cover of The Fly, yours truly venturing up to Edinburgh to interview them). Throwing himself back into his King Biscuit Time solo guise, Mason wasted no time in letting The Beta Band dust settle, releasing singles in ’05 and following them up with work on ‘Black Gold’, a full-length that injected his electro-experimentalism with beat-heavy grooves; the lullaby-stomp of ‘C I AM 15’ showing his way of crowbarring an effortless, simplistic hook onto jittery, dustbin-lid rhythms (although I’m still not sure on the reggae-rap outro) hadn’t been blunted and ‘Kwangchow’ demonstrating he could even do straight-arrowed fuzz-folk without leading it into brain-trampolining spaced-out climaxes. There was only one problem, though; a week before ‘Black Gold’’s release, he announced his retirement from music, his rampant, riotous gliding from genre to genre having seemingly eventually led him down a dead-end (The Guardian’s Dave Simpson has a great article on this period, which you should read, here).

When he eventually resurfaced, it was in another curveball guise as the soulful r’n’b maestro behind Black Affair in 2008, Mason’s long-standing love of r’n’b making ‘Pleasure Pressure Point’ an interesting, if not electric, listen that felt more like a sidestep – odd, really, considering everything he’d done up til that point had felt like intergalactic leap forward. There was a niggle that Steve Mason was escaping Steve Mason, the feeling that he might hop from pseudonym to pseudonym without ever truly settling. Now, watching the Youtube clips of him putting the finishing touches to the first album to be released under his own name, it looks like Steve Mason might be ready to stop throwing awkward shapes in the corner and carry on making the sort of glistening psyche-pop that The Beta Band were space-cadet kings of – and rightly so, no-one else does the combination of mind-expanding rhythmic conundrums and monumental melodies that Mason does; he’s unique and 90% of his output verges on brilliance. It should make Steve Mason’s – under the name Steve Mason – solo album one of 2010’s most intriguing releases.