Miles And Miles Of Squares

I'll get my moan out of the way first- the crowd at The Apollo, or certain parts of it, were a pain on Saturday night, people talking constantly throughout the songs, especially the quieter ones where The Beta Band were locked into their soft psychedelic folk. What you really don't need at that point is several pairs of people, mainly men, chattering to each other all the way through loudly. The same people then treated Dry The Rain as their own personal anthem, sang along all the way through it and then went back to talking to each other at volume, louder now because the songs had got louder. Why anyone would pay the best part of £50 for a ticket only to talk all the way through the gig is beyond me. It wasn't just around me either. Several people standing in different points in the crowd on Saturday night said similar. It's a shame because it spoils the gig. 

The Beta Band, despite all of this, were really good, back together after a twenty one year absence and playing the last night of the UK tour before heading to the USA. The stage set and projections and films are superb, their left of centre, slightly freaked out sense of humour beamed out in the pre- gig films. The stage has bongos, congas and spare drum kits set up, banks of synths and decks, a bird of prey on a stick and potted plants. The four band members are welcomed like returning heroes and the first half of the set is littered with lovely moments- She's The One is spaced out folk, softly sung and played, the Jew's harp part right up in the mix with a pause before the second half's psychedelic freak out, the band sounding more like 1967 Pink Floyd than ever.

She's The One

The tour is billed as The Three EPs tour but they don't just play the tracks from the compilation, the y mix it up and throw in songs from the rest of their back catalogue too. Assessment from Heroes To Zeros is gnarly, Steve Mason's electric guitar and the drums bouncing around the venue. Opening song Inner Meet Me is a lost 60s folk/ psyche strum. Push It Out and Needles In My Eyes both stand out as spooked, hushed late 90s psyche/ folk high points. Dr. Baker and Dog's Got A Bone are accompanied by spaced out lights and projections.

The band jump between instruments, Mason often putting his guitar down to play the congas, John MacLean playing synths, keys, samples, trumpet, scratching on the turntables and visibly having the time of his life, and drummer Robin Jones leaving his drum kit to take the spotlight on guitar for one song.

They play Dry The Rain towards the end and it has an instant effect on the crowd, the crowd singing along, a sea of hands, pint glasses and phones in the air. When the band and crowd sing the last lines together it's genuinely a bit of a moment, and when the band put their instruments down there's a pause and the crowd starts singing the lines again- ' If there's something inside that you want to say/ Say it out loud, it will be OK'. The band look out, pick their guitars back up and slip back into the song, another minute of Dry The Rain, band and crowd feeding off each other. The encore is a stunner, Steve Mason in electric wrap around shades being the front man, out at the edge of the stage. They stretch out the trippy, waking- from- a- dream electronic hip hop of Squares, from 2001's Hot Shots II, built on the famous sample from Gunter Kallmann Choir, Mason repeating the line, 'Daydream/ I fell asleep amid the flowers'. They finish with The House Song, all four members of the band at drum kits, beating rhythms out as the lights strafe the stalls of the Apollo.

It's good to have them back. 

Squares 

Forty Five Minutes Of Beyond The Beta Band

I saw the reformed Beta Band at the Apollo last night- review to follow in a day or two. I posted a Beta Band Sunday mix back in March when the re- union was announced and the tickets went up for sale and I've previously posted a Steve Mason solo mix too. To complete a Beta Band hat-trick of Sunday mixes today's mix is an after The Beta Band mix, forty five minutes of songs from after they split, with Steve mason well represented in various guises and also The Aliens, the band Robin Jones and John MacLean formed after the four Betas called it a day in 2004. 

The Beat Band split up in 2004 and embarked on a farewell tour. Between forming in 1996 and splitting in 2004 they had followed their artistic and cultural noses, making music that spanned the groundbreaking Three EPS and then three further albums that all suffered a little in comparison to the initial trio of EPs. 

In 2004 they owed their record label Parlophone £1.2 million. There was enough money in the bank to pay each member a month's wages (£1000 each). On top of this there was a £120, 000 debt to the taxman, to be split four ways. Parlophone wrote the debt off (EMI signed Robbie Williams the same month for £80 million so money wasn't in short supply at major record companies in the early 00s). The Beta Band spent the money on art- records and recording, videos and films, gigs and touring. In an interview in March Steve Mason said 'We never wanted to be rock stars or make lots of money. Our ambitions were solely artistic and we pushed ourselves to the last minute. Then we split up. But how many bands can say the spent £1./2 million on art?'

Steve Mason went solo under a variety of names- first as King Biscuit Time, then as Black Affair and Good Face and has made five albums under his own name. The Aliens have blazed their own trail, in the 00s and the late 2010s with three albums and EPs and singles. Gordon Anderson records as Lone Pigeon. Between them they've made over a dozen albums since splitting The Beta Band, all of them filled with the same pioneering, willful and artistic spirit that was the core of their starting point in 1996- folk, psychedelia, electronics, samples and found sounds, weird pop, electro, post- rock... few stones left unturned. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Beyond The Beta Band

• King Biscuit Time: I Walk The Earth
• The Aliens: Sunlamp Show
• Alien Stadium: The Visitations
• Steve Mason: America Is Your Boyfriend (Tim Goldsworthy Remix)
• Black Affair: Tak! Attack!
• Emiliana Torrini and Steve Mason: I Go Out
• Steve Mason: Boys Outside (Andrew Weatherall Dub 2)
• The Aliens: Bobby's Song

King Biscuit Time was a Steve Mason solo project from before The Beta Band split, so the appearance of I walk The Earth here is a bit of a bending of the rules but whatever. It's got all the familiar Mason sounds and styles- acoustic guitars, hip hop drums and his melancholic and doleful vocals. 

Gordon Lone Pigeon joined his former Beta Bandmates Robin and John in The Aliens after The Beta Band split. The Aliens released Astronomy For Dogs in 2007 and then Luna a year later. Sunlamp Show is from the latter, a song that sounds like The Beach Boys after a week in a cottage in the Scottish highlands on happy drugs. Madcap psychedelia. The ten minute Bobby's Song closes this mix but opened Luna, an epic Lone Pigeon song. Robot Man from Astronomy For Dogs sat on this mix for a while but I took it out. Not sure why. 

Alien Stadium was Steve Mason and the late Martin Duffy, Primal Scream's keyboard wizard with Brendan Lynch on drum programming. They released Livin' In Elizabethan Times in 2017, widescreen and symphonic sci fi inspired songs about aliens destroying the planet. One of those EPs that makes you wish they'd done more. 

Black Affair was a Mason solo project, 80s electro from 2008, three singles and an album Pleasure Pressure Point. 

Tim Goldsworthy's remix of Steve Mason's America Is Your Boyfriend was a song on a four track EP called Coup D'Etat, three new songs and the remix and originally from 2019's About The Light. Tim Goldsworthy was in UNCLE with James Lavelle and then LCD Soundsystem (before a big fall out with James Murphy. He also produced David Holmes' Let's Get Killed.

I Go Out was a one off collaboration between Steve and Emiliana Torrini along with Toy, produced by Dan Carey and released on 7" single on Carey's Speedy Wunderground label in 2013. Six minutes of driving krauty joy, recorded and mixed in a day.

Boys Outside was a Mason solo album ,a soft and acoustic, folk-ish songs that came from a period of serious poor mental health. Andrew Weatherall did two remixes, a pair of dubs that still sound like some of his best remix work. There was talk of an album with Andrew producing or a remixing the entire Boys Outside album but it never happened more's the pity. there were some Dennis Bovell dub remixes too but I couldn't find them. Funny how digital files just vanish sometimes. 

Forty Five Minutes Of The Beta Band

The Beta Band's reformation to play some gigs in the autumn and maybe make some new music is one of 2025's most cheering stories (in a year not exactly over- burdened with cheering stories admittedly). Sometimes people say that The Beat Band 'should have been massive' but it's a comment that makes me scratch my head and think 'in what world?'. 

It's difficult to imagine a world in which songs, the sheer number of ideas, the weight of experimentalism and out there nature of what they were trying to do, crossing over into the world of millions of albums sold and stadium gigs. Steve Mason, John MacLean, Robin Jones and Gordon Anderson and later bassist Richard Greentree were not making music for the masses- and they seemed ill equipped to deal with that anyway. Besides, somethings are best kept n a smaller scale. 

The Three EPs overshadowed everything they did subsequently, all three albums that followed felt like they failed to meet the expectations the Three EPs placed on them. Listened to now, they seem less burdened by that weight and there's a lot worth listening to in The Beta Band (1999), Hot Shots II (2001) and Heroes To Zeroes (2004). 

Forty Five Minutes Of The Beta Band

• Push It Out
• Dry The Rain
• Eclipse
• Assessment
• Inner Meets Me (10:40's Outer Hebrides Dub)
• The Cow's Wrong
• The Hard One (Manmousse Remix)
• Simple 
• Dr. Baker

Push It Out is the opening track on 1998's Los Amigos Del Beta Bandidos, the third of the three EPs that announced them as the late 90s flagbearers for genre busting low fi, experimental indie. Is indie the right word? It seems too small for The Beta Band. Attempting to dissect or explain what makes Push It Out and the other songs from the three EPs is pointless. You just have to listen to them and feel them. The pots and pans percussion, dub basslines, acoustic guitars, samples and space/ atmosphere is solely their own. Steve Mason's vocals- double tracked, doleful, oblique, melancholic- sound more and more like a man trying to work his way through the depths of depression. Dr. Baker is stunning, a song that tells the story of the titular figure, a man whose 'dog was dead and wife was dead/ misery planned inside his head', a song with Mason singing the line 'see me lost inside' over and over, that sounds like a long dark night of the soul and yet somehow makes it all seem OK. Genius. Not a word I use lightly. 

Dry The Rain I wrote about recently. If it's what they end up being remembered for, it's probably more than enough. 

Eclipse is from 2001's Hot Shots II, a song about questions. The album was a complete piece of work, minimal hip hop beats and their experimental sound refined with the help of producer Colin C- Swing Emmanuel. 

Assessment opened their third and final album Heroes To Zeroes, self produced and then mixed by Nigel Godrich. Over blistering ringing electric guitars Steve Mason sings 'I think I cracked my skull on the way down/ I think I lost my head when I lay down' and everything goes leftwards from there. The crunchy guitar breakdown in the middle is exhilarating and the pile on of instruments at the end, trumpets joining in, is a rush. Simple is also from Heores To Zeros, more lovely, expansive experimental indie with another lost and broken lyric from Mason- 'I tired to do my own thing/ But the problem with your own thing/ Is you end up on your own'. 

Their albums are all overshadowed by The Three EPs but there's gold in all of the three proper albums and this is one of the pieces of gold. And the video is unbelievable. No- one else was doing this sort of thing or doing it so effortlessly (it cost them the band though- they split owing the record company one million  quid, partly the result of making expensive arty videos).

Inner Meet Me is from the second EP, The Patty Patty Sound. Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 Dub is exactly what it says it is. Jesse's a big fan and I think you can hear it in a lot of his work. This edit originally came out on Paisley Dark in May 2021. 

The Cow's Wrong is from their self- titled 1999 debut album, an album they legendarily slagged off to the music press. 'It's fucking awful', they told the NME, 'one of the worst records that'll come out this year'. Experimental pop, ambient drone, excursions into trip hop and cosmic balladry crossed with folky psychedelia and late 90s indie together with the mass of acclaim for The Three EPs  took its toll on its makers. It's better than its creators had us believe at the time but its also dense and abstract, a complex and ambitious album. They also got into legal trouble with Bonnie Tyler and Jim Steinman on The Hard One. The Cow's Wrong and The Hard One are both from The Beta Band (The Hard One Manmousse Remix came out as an extra track on an extra disc, an ambient- abstract hip hop version of the song). They were following their noses and taking risks and that's what artists should do. 

An Hour Of The Jezebell Takeover

Last weekend's Jezebell Takeover at The Golden Lion in Todmorden was a lot of fun, two days of DJs and a live act playing to a full house. Saturday kicked off with Nessa Johnston getting things into gear quickly and setting the pace for everyone who followed. ACR's Martin Moscrop played a set that took in dub and disco, including a low slung dubbed out cover of Born Slippy, and at just after 8pm OBOST played a live set. 

OBOST is Bobby Langfield, ridiculously young, still in his teens- synths, keys, laptops, a microphone and an hour of uptempo electronic music that sounds like it has decades of experience behind it. Jamie Tolley took over at 9 and took things up a notch again, bpms and energy levels rising. At one point he dropped As I Ran by Yame, a bit of an ALFOS at The Lion moment last year and the pub erupted. The Jezebell headliners took over at 10, Jesse first and then Darren. The floor was packed, a mix of youth and older dancers...

I had to run for a late train back to Manchester so missed the last our of Darren's set but was back in the pub on Sunday afternoon where Jesse and Darren were starting proceedings off. Maybe they'd stayed up and played straight through. My guest slot was at 4pm and I had a few technical difficulties at first- I accidentally cued up a track from Jesse's USB instead of mine, then the right hand deck got stuck in an emergency loop and things took a little while for me to sort. Eventually Martin Moscrop turned the deck off and on again and as usual with piece of IT support advice it did the trick. Adam Roberts, due to play after me, was also official photographer. All the photos here are his and if nothing else he made me look like I know what I'm doing. 

I came off the decks feeling it had been a bit of a nightmare- technical issues, trying to cram too much into an hour- but looking at it now, a week later, it seems ok. The link below is the set recreated at home.

Bagging Area At The Jezebell Takeover

• Moon Duo: In A Cloud
• Durutti Column: For Belgian Friends
• The Charlatans: Trouble Understanding (Norman Cook Remix)
• The Beta Band: I Know
• Dub Syndicate: Right Back To Your Soul
• Soft Cotton County: The Future's Not What It Used To Be (Five Green Moons Remix)
• David Holmes: Blind On A Galloping Horse (Sons Of Slough Remix)
• Totem Edit 12: Feel
• Mogwai: The Sun Smells Too loud
• Orbital, David Holmes, DJ Helen and Mike Garry: Tonight In Belfast

Adam Roberts followed me, four four house and disco action and then Kim Lana. We had to leave so missed the remaining Sunday night fun, Stuart Alexander and then FC Kahuna, both of whom were outstanding by all accounts, Jesse saying Dan Kahuna was the weekend's highlight. Some hardy souls were back in The Lion on the Monday for St Patrick's Day celebrations, a live band and unplanned karaoke session. There's a second Jezebell Takeover planned for September. 

Jesse's been uploading recordings of some of the sets. His Saturday night hour is here and his Sunday afternoon set is here. 

I hadn't met Jesse or Darren before despite having had a several years strong online connection. It's always brilliant when people turn out to be as lovely in real life as they appear online and the crowd they drew to the Lion- regulars and newcomers- was testament to what they've built together as Jezebell. More power to them. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Today's songs come from the soundtrack to the film High Fidelity, released a quarter of a century ago in 2000, the film version of a Nick Hornby novel of the same name. High Fidelity is about Rob Fleming, a record shop owner going through a mid- 90s, mid- life crisis. It's all very of its time, very mid- 90s/ turn of the millennium, Rob a slightly sad soul who can't commit, who deals with life via making lists and tapes, and with crises by re- organising his record collection. When the book became big- and then the film- lots of people assumed that if you bought records and filed them in any kind of organised way, you were a version of Rob. Which maybe some of us are- but also aren't. 

Anyway, this post isn't really about High Fidelity, a film which has its moments as any film with John Cusack in will. It's mainly about the band in this scene....

Teasers on social media led us to assume that a Beta Band announcement about a re- union was imminent and lo, earlier this week it happened. A tour of the UK in September and October followed by one in the USA. The scramble to get tickets for the UK dates has been a bit mad but I managed to bag a ticket for Manchester Apollo on 4th October and though it's six months away I'm really looking forward to it. Word has it there will be new music too. 

Dry The Rain is on the High Fidelity soundtrack but originally came out in 1997 on their first EP, Champion Versions. The Beta Band sounded so different and so fresh in '97 they became treasures immediately, the melancholic and doleful vocals matched by the inventiveness of the sounds- dub basslines, samples, pots and pans percussion, trumpets, acoustic guitars, a new low key psychedelia for the late 20th century, eclectic but accessible too, experimental but with tunes. Dry The Rain, 1997's best song, floats in, shuffles along, builds beautifully and ends with the chanted vocals' 'If there's something inside that you wanna say/ Say it loud it will be ok/ I will be alright/ I will be alright', the sound of a man trying hard to convince himself that he will be ok. 

Dry The Rain

I saw them in 1999, on what would be Eliza's birthday four years according to the internet, at Leeds Irish Club. I went to review them for a long gone Manchester arts and music magazine. The venue was swelteringly hot, hotter than hot, trousers sticking to your legs hot. The Beta Band were epic, four men with banks of equipment, instruments, amps, microphones and gaffer tape. They split in 2004, three albums behind them and a million pounds in debt. They've all travelled some distance since then. It will be good to have them back.

Another band on the High Fidelity soundtrack, another 90s band combining experimentation and pop and also still touring, are Stereolab. 

Lo Boob Oscillator

Fifty Minutes Of Edits Volume Two

Another Sunday mix of edits to follow the one from two weeks ago (here). The first one was quite thumpy. This one is more dubbed out, more blissed out and laid back, more drifty, featuring a similar and familiar cast of edit- creators. There's plenty of material unused sitting in my downloads folders too so volume three is only a matter of time. 

Fifty Minutes Of Edits Volume Two

• Nine Million Rainy Days (Los Lopez Edit)
• One Way To Go (10:40's So High It Hurts Edit)
• Inner Meet Me (10:40's Outer Hebrides Dub)
• Kate's Bush (Nocturnal Edit)
• Steppers Rock
• Totem Edits 19 Medicine
• Edit To The Siren
• Totem Edits 18 Air

The Los Lopez edit of The Jesus And Mary Chain's 9 Million Rainy Days first came my way well over a decade ago, 2013 I think, Jim and William's misanthropy/ existential despair set to an electronic throb. 'As far as I can tell/ I'm being dragged from here to hell/ All my time in hell is spent with you', Jim mutters (on 1987's Darklands originally). This is the diametric opposite of the feelings and sentiment expressed in the widescreen, gloriously romantic, panoramic love that propels the fourth track in this mix. 

Jesse Fahnestock is 10:40. He recut a very early Verve song, One Way To Go (a B-side to the Wigan quartet's first release, the magnificent sky scraping northern psychedelia of All In The Mind). Jesse looped it up and set the controls for the heart of the dub. On hearing it I said to Jesse he should re- edit all of the early Verve's music as dub extravaganzas- A Dub In Heaven. I'm still waiting. His edit of The Beta Band's Inner Meet Me came out on Paisley Dark in 2021, a song from The Patty Patty Sound, one of those unearthly EPs The Beta Band released in 1997/ 1998 when they looked like the future of leftfield music, a completely new way of doing things. 

Coyote's edit of Nocturn was one of my favourite records of 2022, a swooning, deep sea dive into the cosmos. Or something. Their Magic Wand edit releases, vinyl only, are always top drawer. I love the way it starts off with one beat and then switches tempo, like the speed selector being suddenly flipped from 33 to 45. Nocturn was on Kate's 2005 album Aerial. 'We stand in the Atlantic/ We become panoramic/ We tire of the city/ We tire of it all/ We long for that just something more'. Yep, I know that feeling.

Steppers Rock came out on the recently revived Eclectics label, based in Bournemouth and the start of what promises to be one to watch. 

Totem Edits are the work of Leo Zero and Justin Deighton, a weekly treasure trove. Last week they dropped a Balearic/ cowboy stomp edit of Big Audio Dynamite's  Medicine Show (an all timer of a song for me). Air (from a week earlier) is John Martyn's Solid Air recut beautifully. I've been in a John Martyn phase recently, Solid Air and One World. By all accounts a terrible and flawed person but the music...

Edit To The Siren performs the possibly sacrilegious feat of taking This Mortal Coil's Song To The Siren and turns it into a dubbed out/ late night Balearic treat. The work of In The Valley. Wobbly. 

Paisley Dark Is In Your Heart

Paisley Dark is a label based in Leeds specialising in dark, psychedelic electronic music, edits and remixes and original works. Recently I posted the Jesse Fahnestock re- edit of Spacemen 3's How Does It Feel, a deep, dubbed out version of Rugby's finest's druggy gospel sounds. This one, again by Jesse in his 10:40 guise, appeared at the end of May, a skewwhiff take on a hypnotic, slowly building song that sounds like it's come from somewhere else, a radio tuned into another reality- Inner Meet Me from The Beta Band's  second EP, The Patty Patty Sound (from 1998). Those first three Beta Band EPs really were something else. Jesse's 10:40's Outer Hebrides Dub is five minutes of pulsing, trippy sound and can be found at Bandcamp (free downloads available while they last). 

Inner Meet Me

Also out on Paisley Dark is an edit of Julian Cope's Safesurfer, his 1991 ode to contraception. The Jezebell edit is slightly shorter than the Archdrude's original and burns more slowly- descending bassline, hissing hi- hats, swirling, looped, chopped up vocals smothered in echo before Copey's refrain, 'You don't have to be afraid, love/'Cos I'm a safesurfer darling'. I've no idea who Jezebell is but this edit is clearly an act of love. Available at Bandcamp, free download while stocks last. 

Safesurfer (Peggy Suicide version)

Snow

We've had fair old amount of snow this week. We woke on Wednesday to what for south Manchester is a good covering, a few centimetres, ungritted roads and an iffy journey to work. Work, up in east Lancashire, had its fair share too. Everything that was still on the ground then froze as the temperature barely got above zero all day. Yesterday we got more snow and driving home I stopped on the moors to photograph the Pennine hills that six months ago were on fire.

I've posted this before but it seems appropriate to post it again, a throbbing and wintry ride through the Scandinavian snow, by Stockholm's Paresse.

Hunters In The Snow

I'm going to see Steve Mason tonight, touring to promote his excellent new album About The Light. Back in the 90s his group The Beta Band made one of that decade's best songs, setting a standard that even they found it difficult to live up to. This song- slide acoustic guitars, Steve's doleful vocals, the shuffling rhythms and bass, the crescendo to the trumpets- is a beaut.

Dry The Rain

The Cow's Wrong

The Beta Band released 3 e.p.s in 1997 and 1998 that sent lots of people into a spin. They were then anthologised as The 3 E.P.s and turned up in High Fidelity (and have just been remastered and re-released on vinyl if you've got £50 to spare). Then in 1999 they put out their debut album, a record the band themselves said it was 'fucking awful' and Steve Mason claimed it was 'probably one of the worst records that'll come out this year'. They said they'd been rushed, not been given enough money, not finished the songs, not been allowed to put out an ambient disc as a companion and that the production was poor. And you can imagine how that went down with the record company.

Twenty years later it's difficult not to feel like the 3 e.p.s  were the peak and that the debut album was a bit of a mess (and they followed it with 2 further albums both of which were much better). But it's also true that not all of The Beta Band is without merit and some of the songs are very good. Listening to it now it is also abundantly clear- and it was at the time I think- that they were doing something new, creating a new psychedelia for the late 90s which was not just a rehash or revivalist version of a 60s psychedelia. The loose structures, the mix of acoustic and electronic instruments and textures, hip hop beats and rapping, the use of dub and delay and repetition, layered vocals, the longer jam sections and stoner parts and the stuff that is chucked in from the wilder corners of their imaginations (barber shop quartets, marching bands), the sheer love of sounds- this is not a disaster, not 'fucking awful' and not the worst record of 1999 (that year saw the release of Californication and Stereophonics' Performance And Cocktails not to mention a Kid Rock lp. There's 3 for starters). There are a few mis-steps on The Beta Band but there are also some gems. Like this one.

The Cow's Wrong

B Is For Black Affair

Steve Mason's 2009 side project Black Affair was an 80s electro inspired job, which was great in small doses but wore a bit over the course of an entire lp. Still, in a field of his own is Steve Mason- most people wouldn't record let alone release an album like this, so far removed from what he's known for. This was one of the highlights.

Sweet

In a slightly belated tribute to United's 20th league title our picture shows Bobby Charlton, presumably in the aftermath of the Munich air disaster or an early anniversary of, with a cracking quiff. Bobby was present as a player for United's 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th league titles and he's still there, although he doesn't make the netting bulge anymore. The Premier League is a million miles from this picture. Yesterday's post-Beta Band group The Aliens had a song called Bobby's Song which I should've posted instead really.

A Is For Aliens

Some of The Beta Band turned into The Aliens following their break-up. A million pounds owed to the record company and being pressured to accept advertising money to clear the debt, Steve Mason called time. Which caused some friction between the band's members. Steve Mason went off into various solo projects (King Biscuit Time, Black Affair, stuff under his own name). The other three, John MacLean, Gordon Anderson and Robin Jones, put out two albums of upbeat, psychedelic silliness (in a good way)- I've only got Luna from which I always liked this one.

Sunlamp Show

B Is For Beta

Listening to Steve Mason's recent solo album has led me back to The Beta Band. They were real one offs- maybe the only reason their second and third albums aren't given their dues is because they set their standards so high early on with the three e.p.s, later anthologised imaginatively as The Three E.P.s.

I drove to Leeds Irish Centre to see them play at some point in the late 90s, on a school night as well. We'd got free entry by claiming to be reviewing the gig for a Manchester music/arts magazine or something on those lines. It was hotter than hot inside- the sort of heat where you can feel beads of sweat running down the inside of your arm and the small of your back. This made moving difficult. And I was driving, so couldn't attack the heat with beer. Carl from Cud stood at the bar, his time long gone. The Beta Band were out of this world that night, versions of spooky trauma song Dr Baker and the trippy Needles In Your Eyes sticking in the memory for ages afterwards. And Dry The Rain of course.

Dry The Rain

Fight Them Back

Can you tell I'm on holiday? Posting twice a day, I should really do something more productive with my time.

I just found this from Steve Mason's new album, Monkey Minds In the Devil's Time. It sounds really good- those doleful, multi-tracked vocals from The Beta Band, the part hip-hop, part indie-dance beats. There's more going on here instrumentally than on the Boys Outside album. And he's pretty pissed off about the stuff you see on the news. Righteous anger.



Then I found the single from back in February.



Anyone got the album? I may have to add it to the list of records I need to buy.