Beta Band

I will now sell five copies of The Three E.P.’s by The Beta Band

There are certainly many ways to become part of popular culture, but you'll agree that one of the quickest and most effective is being namechecked in a movie, even better if it's a Hollywood production. One day you're a cult concern for a relatively small audience, the next you find yourself an integral part of the film that, straddling the turn of the millennium, tells us — among other things — what it means to be a music obsessive. Many of us, it's pointless to deny it, first heard the name Beta Band in "High Fidelity", the film based on Nick Hornby's novel of the same name (Hornby also co-wrote the screenplay). When Rob Gordon, the owner of the Championship Vinyl record shop played by John Cusack, drops the needle on the opening bars of "Dry The Rain", the opening track of "The Three E.P.s", for the benefit of the customers in his shop in a now-famous scene, we witness one of those rare moments when something undeservedly small becomes huge right before our eyes.

Looking back, knowing how the Beta Band's adventure would end, we can recognise that endorsement, however immediate it seemed at the time, had already arrived too late for the short and self-destructive arc of the band. It was 2000 when "High Fidelity" hit cinemas, and by then the Scots had already, in a sense, lost the thread of a story that, truth be told, had always been rather tangled. The golden period of the band, formed in 1996 in St. Andrews before soon relocating to Edinburgh and finally to London in search of greater fortune, is entirely contained within the magical three-year run stretching from 1997 — the year the first of three short releases came out, later collected by the independent label Regal on the legendary "The Three E.P.'s" — to 1999, the year in which bands like Radiohead and Oasis would come out with statements along the lines of: "We should make an album like the Beta Band." And perhaps, truth be told, as an endorsement it was even better than the one that would arrive the following year in a different form.

The point is that The Beta Band — aka Steve Mason, Gordon Anderson, Robin Jones, John Maclean and Steve Duffield — genuinely craved success and recognition, like any self-respecting band, but had absolutely no idea how to achieve it. To find proof of this claim, we need only return once more to "The Three E.P.s", which, as the title suggests, gathers together the Scots' first, disorderly recordings for the Regal label: in chronological order, "Champion Versions", "The Patty Patty Sound" and "Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos", three EPs released just a few months apart, each containing four tracks.

The "Three" stand as a monument to the BB's unruly, anarchic genius: shunning, more often than not, the dogmas of the song form and of good sense, they prove themselves architects of bizarre sonic structures in which there are no rooms closed off by walls, but rather open spaces where sounds and genres take turns, blend, duet and stumble over one another with uncanny naturalness. A kind of unbroken stream of consciousness, or a vast container from which anything and everything keeps spilling out: indie rock, folk, electronica, trip-hop, hip-hop, kraut-rock, funk…

A common and distinctive trait of much of this material is perhaps that languid, indolent approach that characterises in particular the first part of the collection, the one taken from "Champion Versions", in some ways the most cohesive of the three, and arguably the best overall. There's something magnetic in the inertia that lulls the listener and ensnares them in the circular motion of the indie-folk "Dry The Rain", where Mason's voice traces a mantra of rare magnetism. It's a formula the Beta Band replicate with equal success on the elegant, almost sumptuous "Dogs Got A Bone". When the Scottish outfit decide to break free from the rules of song structure, out come tracks like "I Know" and "B + A", where the endless repetition of a single pattern flirting with trip-hop justifies the use (also) of electronic gear.

Things get more complicated on "The Patty Patty Sound", produced by Chris Allison. On "Inner Meet Me", another great track, the ideas described above overlap: hypnotic vocal lines, acoustic guitars and electronic pulses converge into one of the best choruses the Beta Band ever wrote. That things are taking a rather bizarre turn is confirmed by "The Monolith", a title better suited to the track's form (16 minutes!) than to the substance of a thoroughly rambling piece: a kind of jam session with neither head nor tail, drifting between ambient sounds, further vocal mantras, sinister instrumental sections and sparse rhythmic parts — a truly "monolithic" manifesto to incompleteness. On the other hand, "The House Song" edges into Madchester territory, and "She's The One" demonstrates once again what the Beta Band are capable of when they decide to write more focused songs, dusting off that indie-folk streak which ultimately represents their finest achievement.

While "Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos" opens by picking up the same thread with "Push It Out", which plays its cards on the guitar-piano pairing plus the by-now-familiar magnetic vocal lines, it's the unusual double bass pulse that sets apart "It's Over", a track that takes the shape of a folk ballad pushed well beyond conventional limits. It's practically like listening to a Neil Young song at 2x speed. The greater use of keys in this third and final part of the collection is confirmed by the crooked trajectory of "Dr. Baker", with its pauses and tempo changes dictated by the piano, and by the organ that outlines the edges of the last gem in the tracklist, "Needles In My Eyes".

The story of The Beta Band continues for a handful more albums and years, until 2004. Flattered by the admiration of a large number of fellow musicians and by a small but devoted fanbase, yet light years away from anything resembling commercial success, the Scots decided to shelve the project, eventually pursuing solo careers of some note. But "The Three E.P.s" remains a singular, unrepeatable record, not only for the band, who would never again reach those heights, but also as a benchmark for anyone who might attempt — perhaps without ever having the nerve to actually release it — to make a record so alien and alienating, so mad and courageous, so inspired and perverse. Sacred and irreverent in its brazen, threefold-in-one essence.

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13/02/2022