The Beta Band are reuniting this fall for their first tour in 20 years. The landscape of the music industry and the world has changed a lot since Steve Mason, John Maclean, Richard Greentree, and Robin Jones decided to call it quits in 2004 not long after the release of their third album, Heroes to Zeros. Streaming services made music more accessible to everyone while paying artists much less, the US visa process has made it much more of an expensive hassle to tour here, and major labels no longer give out giant record deals to weird bands who have barely released anything.
Formed in Fife, Scotland in 1996, The Beta Band were recipients of one of those mega-major label deals, signing to Parlophone Records, which was then also home of Radiohead and Kylie Minogue. They had immediate early success with their debut, 1997’s Champion Versions EP, which mixed folk, prog, hip hop, trip hop and the Manchester rave scene into a unique sound. That and two other Extend Play records were collected as 1998’s The Three EPs which brought them success in America too; the album and its single “Dry the Rain” were featured and namechecked in a memorable scene in the 2001 film High Fidelity, which boosted their visibility even more. Their live shows were ambitious and often amazing, with members switching instruments — Mason regularly took to a second drum kit for very groovy krautrock moments — and inventive DIY lighting, projections and interactive costumes. “None of us owned homes or cars,” Mason told me over Zoom in July. “We put everything back into our art.”
Putting art first also meant when The Beta Band called it quits they were over £1 million in debt to their label. “To be honest I was kind of proud of that,” Mason said. “It’s just such an arbitrary figure, anyways. It’s not like I have to pay that back from the money I’m earning now. That money gets slowly paid back over the next 2000 years from the tiny little increments of revenue from records or however it is they sell music these days.”
Mason says The Beta Band’s reunion tour is about them finally getting to enjoy playing their own music without any of the pressures of the music industry, and not nostalgia. “I think we owed it to ourselves as a band to fire up the engines and have a trip that was really for us,” Mason said.
On that subject, I asked if he was going to go see Oasis’ reunion run and take notes, to which he laughed. “For me, that does feel like nostalgia, but not really my nostalgia, because they weren’t a band that did a whole lot for me. The Beta Band, for me, was really about demolishing Britpop. We were there to sort of take it apart. The weird thing about Oasis, though, is that even at the time they already felt nostalgic to me. The whole Oasis, Blur, Britpop thing—it just seemed like a giant clusterfuck of ’60s British… I don’t know, nihilism? And it wasn’t something I was a fan of. One of the missions I felt the band was on was to destroy that.”
Our conversation got into a lot more — touring with Radiohead in 2001, rediscovering their 1999 self-titled debut misfire, what the band’s legacy means now, what they have planned for the tour, and more. You can listen to the whole thing in the latest episode of The BrooklynVegan Show podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Beta Band’s fall tour, which will be An Evening With shows featuring the group DJing before their performance, hits NYC at Brooklyn Steel on November 1 and November 2.