Steve Mason first made his name as one quarter (and the frontman of) the Beta Band, one of the most critically lauded acts of the late 1990s. Mason talks with Eamonn Forde about his circuitous career – from feeling the pressure of leading a hot band to operating under pseudonyms and finally venturing out under his own name. He’s found an approach and an audience where he can move at his own pace. Check out the story of a true original of indie music.
Steve Mason first made his name as one quarter (and the frontman of) The Beta Band, one of the most critically lauded acts of the late 1990s. They mixed disparate genres like hip-hop, folk, dub, house, psychedelia to create something beautifully cohesive and arresting. Their tastes were so eclectic and their desire to make music so compelling that they ended up with something that took the DNA past music and spun it into something wholly new. In that regard, there was a creative parallel with Super Furry Animals.
Their first three EPs in 1997 and 1998 set out their musical agenda “to put a nuclear bomb under britpop” so convincingly that they were always going to struggle to meet the ludicrously raised expectations around them. When Eamonn Forde sat down with Steve for The Art of Longevity, Mason explained that the band’s self-titled debut album in 1999 was rushed and they spent their interviews ‘promoting it’ by saying how much they disliked it!
The use of ‘Dry The Rain’ in the 2000 film High Fidelity was one of those rare moments where music in a movie can escalate the artists profile more than any other medium, and The Beta Band was suddenly bigger in the US than they were in the UK. Hot Shots II 2001 should perhaps be treated as their debut album proper and is the record Mason is most proud of. However, Internal tensions, politics and mounting pressure meant that Zeroes To Heroes in 2004 ended up their final album before the whole enterprise collapsed in on itself.
Mason had already been issuing solo work, notably under the King Biscuit Time name, while the Beta Band were still operational and then evolved into the more electronic, but short-lived, Black Affair. It was the writing of ‘All Come Down’ that led to the career-vivifying Boys Outside album and its companion sub album Ghosts Outside. This was the first time Mason released music under his own name and thereafter he released a new album roughly every three years.
Monkey Minds In The Devil's Time in 2013 was seen as his “political” album and the brittle Meet The Humans in 2016 was almost a recovery album where Mason, who has spoken openly and eloquently about his mental health issues, felt he was able to return to making music and the outside world. About The Light in 2019 was very much conceived as a band project and was a step on from the mournful and elegiac sounds that he perhaps felt constrained by.
Mason talks about his circuitous career – from being in a band but feeling like the pressure of it all was solely on his shoulders to operating under pseudonyms and finally venturing out under his own name. There are common musical threads, but he has found an approach and an audience where he can move at his own pace. He talks about the need to have supportive people and teams around you in order to keep going, something he felt the Beta Band lacked on the management side (rather than the label side) and which ended up hastening on their demise.
Artists need to hold to a vision, he says, but that can come unstuck if the people around you are not able to protect or amplify that vision. For Steve, Longevity is a process of trial and error, but his fizzing enthusiasm for his next album, possibly due later this year, is a sign that the bumpier moments in 1999 and 2004 are the exceptions rather than the rule. Mason has always brought originality and musical ambition to the sometimes workaday indie music scene of these isles and something tells us that his return to the market with a new album is a win-win.
The Art of Longevity is produced by Audio Culture in partnership with Project Melody. Original music is by Andrew James Johnson. The show is presented with Bowers & Wilkins, the British premium audio brand.