I have a recurring fantasy that just as the past decade has seen the popular resurrection of that original ‘between two stools’ genre, post-punk, so a future generation will decide that the years that lay between the demise of Britpop and the elevation of the Strokes were a singularly inspirational time for guitar music.
As it stands, the chances of that happening are pretty slim. The historical narrative has all but firmed up. The cocaine hubris of the final days of Britpop sent guitar music into a stupor of pale imitation, with the music press desperately applying the pitiful defibrilator of contrived new scenes, the apogee of which was the New Acoustic Movement. It was not until 2001, when the Strokes reminded everyone how much they’d missed studied cool, leather jackets and the Velvet Underground, that guitar music again had anything worthwhile to deliver.
But just as the ‘1976 was Year Zero’ punk linear narrative fails to stand up to any kind of real scrutiny, so does the claim that the years 1998 - 2001 were a barren wasteland of mediocrity and boredom. When’s the last time you listened to Six by Mansun? Or F♯A♯∞ by Godspeed You Black Emporer? Going back to them now, 12 years on, and the sheer weight of ideas and ambition in these records is something to behold, particularly in the context of the really-truly-genuinely dull New Rock Revolution bands that were heralded as the saviours of everything a couple of years later.
But the band who, more than any other, epitomised the creativity that flourished with the release of Britpop’s reductive grip, was the Beta Band. Former lead singer Steve Mason has a new solo record out in a month or two, which was the spark for me to recently revisit his old band’s records. And for the first time it struck me how incredible lucky i was to be able to listen to and see the Beta Band as a callow 16 year old, still working out just how important music could be. Because the truth is that there simply has not been a British guitar band in the intervening years that has got anywhere near them in terms of originality, experimentation, or openess to ideas.
The initial triology of EPs - Champion Versions, Los Amigos Del Beta Bandidos and The Patty Patty Sound - was, and is, astonishing. Dry The Rain’s slow but relentess incline from the black humour of ‘choking on the vitamin tablets the doctor gave in the hope of saving me’ to the sunburnt joy of the final ‘I will be alright’ remains one of the greatest unwrappings of a song on record. Inner Meet Me showcases what would become their trademark use of looped vocals as a rhythmic base, turning Mason’s endearingly morose baritone - he sounds like a schoolboy chorister whose soul has been ground into the dirt by the travails of maturity - into the central point around which everything else orbits. The improvised,and in parts unlistenable, chaos of House Song and Monolith pushed the drums to the fore, contrasting sharply with Needles in My Eyes - the nearest they got to a ‘rock classic’ in these early days, it is all the more disconcerting for it.
What happened next was more remarkable still. Rightly heralded as geniuses by a weekly music press desperate for someone, anyone, to fill the void left by the end of the Britpop party, the Beta Band became front page news. Listening to a song like Monolith now, this seems almost inconcievable - especially so when you bear in mind the kind of bands who were to be shepherded onto NME etc covers in the next decade. And the Beta Band - and Steve Mason’s fragile mental state in particular - were never going to thrive in that position. In the week their debut, self-titled, album was released, they gave an interview to the NME, saying that they had rushed the record under pressure, and that it was, in their words, ‘rubbish’. In the context of Britpop’s pervasive and seemingly obligatory ‘we’re the best band in the world’ bravado, this was even more shocking than it seems now. Especially as The Beta Band, despite containing a smattering of filler, was far from being rubbish. In hindsight, it turned out to contain at least two of the highest points of their career.
It’s Not Too Beautiful starts with a chugging chord, similar to that which opens the Stone Roses’ Bye Bye Badman, before spiralling off into a cinematic reel of dischordant orchestral samples, paranoid vocal and tumbling rhythms. It is one of the weirdest, most unsettling songs of the last two decades. Greater still, and in my view one of the greatest songs of all time - as in proper, up-there-with-the-Beatles-and-Joy-Division great - is The Hard One. The Hard One was the Beta Band’s Unfinished Sympathy, their Paranoid Android. It is slow, languid, restless, dark. The bass starts alone, joined by a two bit drum machine, then a descending piano and Mason’s shuffling vocal about how his ‘head is banging on a darkened door’. Then everything drops out and we’re left with a sub bass drone and a detuned radio. And then, and then….and then is Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, coming up at you from the darkest recesses of the 80s, except the key phrase is reversed - so it’s now ‘once upon a time i was falling apart, now I’m only falling in love’. It’s sung with such despair, with so much death in the eyes, that it feels like it can only be a joke, and maybe it was once. But not now. It can’t be.
The song collapses in on itself, and then rebuilds gradually, uneasily, to a climax where a lone trumpet, echoing the armistice bugle, sings out a last post of bitter regret and remembrance and loss. It’s devastating.
The Beta Band never reached that plane of genius again. Two more albums of varying quality followed, before they split, still owing their label millions. But, listening back now, the inevitable diminishing returns of their career mean nothing. One day, in a decade or two, a new generation will stumble upon The Hard One, and Dry The Rain, and Dr Baker, and realise that for a moment there, poor old disgraced 1998 had its geniuses too.
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