Why did The Beta Band think their debut album was “fucking awful”?
In a famous scene in the 2000 film High Fidelity, John Cusack’s record store owner character, Rob Gordon, pledges to his colleagues in an act of snooty patricianism that he will “now sell five copies of The Three EPs by The Beta Band”. Purely by playing their 1997 cult classic, ‘Dry the Rain’ for his customers, he comes good on his promise of being able to sling his stock to eager music fans, and given the strength of the record, I’m sure all of his fictional clientele went home happy as they clutched onto their new purchase.
However, those three EPs – 1997’s Champion Versions and 1998’s The Patty Patty Sound and Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos – served only as an introduction to the Edinburgh group’s experimental indie rock. When it came to recording their debut album proper, there was a burning desire to push things much further than they had on their earliest releases, but it’s hard to imagine that the scene in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel would’ve worked quite as well if he’d tried to sell five copies of The Beta Band by playing ‘It’s Not Too Beautiful’.
If The Three EPs is an oddball compendium of every idea that the band had collectively stirred up in their nascent years, then The Beta Band is the sound of them overcooking every single one of them. That’s not to say it’s a dreadful plummet from the high bar they set themselves previously, but it’s considerably more impenetrable. Still mixing together elements of indie folk, trip-hop and psychedelic sampling, their self-titled debut sees the group simply take their already extensive song structures and dilute them with slapdashed segues between contrasting sections.
To be honest, it all sounds a little rushed, and as it happens, this is exactly the complaint that the band themselves had about the record. In actual fact, they were a little stronger in their disgust for the record. In an interview with NME a week prior to the album’s release in 1999, frontman Steve Mason would describe their first full-length as “fucking awful” and go on to complain that “it’s definitely the worst record we’ve ever made and it’s probably one of the worst records that’ll come out this year”.
Mason didn’t stop there with the slander. “It’s got some terrible songs on it,” he claimed. “None of them are fully realised or fully even written. Half-written songs with jams in the middle.” Other band members would join in on the critiquing, with bassist Richard Greentree claiming that “the production could’ve been a little less muddy”, and drummer Robin Jones calling it a “bit of a disappointment”. However, it’s clear from other accounts that this wasn’t even the album they wanted to make.
The band’s manager and Regal Records label boss, Miles Leonard, was seemingly more level-headed about the resulting record and said that if the band had had their way, things would probably have been even more catastrophic. “They wanted it to be a double album, and they wanted to record each side in a different continent,” Leonard claimed. “One in Tokyo, one in Mexico, and so on. We tried to plan it but to do it would have been impossible. It would have cost three-quarters of a million pounds or something, and they would have lost the plot.”
Two extended sound collage pieces, ‘Happiness & Colour’ and ‘The Hut’, preceded the album’s release and are perhaps more in line with what they actually wished to achieve on The Beta Band, but they’re even more self-indulgent and lacking the same quirkiness as anything on the album or previous EPs. At least songs like ‘The Beta Band Rap’ and ‘Round the Bend’, while at times a confused hodgepodge of sounds, still have a sense of playfulness, while the final run of tracks in ‘Smiling’, ‘The Hard One’ and ‘The Cow’s Wrong’ are a stunning 24-minute suite of experimental indie rock.
The band may have been dissatisfied with their debut release, and it may be rough around the edges, but it’s also uniquely them and a product of their boundless creativity. Mason wasn’t convinced that things would even go in the right direction after that, though: “The next one will be even worse,” he told NME. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.
