The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Seeing the light
As St Andrews-raised musician Steve Mason’s solo UK tour brings him to Dundee, he speaks to Michael Alexander about the rise and fall of The Beta Band, his struggles with mental health – and becoming a dad
After years of acclaim as the creative force behind cult 1990s psychedelic outfit The Beta Band followed by years of debt, depression and isolation while living back in Fife, St Andrews-raised musician Steve Mason’s historic struggles with mental health issues have been well documented.
In a notorious 1999 NME interview, he left his bandmates “open mouthed” by stating that The Beta Band’s top 20 debut album was a “crock of s***” – later blaming his mood swings for wrecking the band which, by the time of their split in 2004, were £1.2 million in debt to EMI, with Steve facing a £30,000 tax bill.
Two years later, as he prepared to go on tour with his then new musical foray King Biscuit Time, he suddenly vanished from his East Neuk home – simply leaving a cryptic message on his Myspace page which said: “I’ve had enough. Over and out”.
Citing the breakdown of an eight-year relationship and disillusionment with the music industry for “squandering” his work, he later revealed: “I’d been driving around Fife marking out trees that would be good to crash into at high speed. I thought, ‘For f***’s sake! I’d have probably ended up with a dented bumper and had to walk home.”
Today, 13 years on, Steve’s life could hardly be more different. Living in Brighton, he is dad to an “amazing” two-year-old girl and loving life as a solo musician. The dramatic change in circumstance came about after he came back off tour around 2012/13.
“I had a little cottage in Fife and I just walked in and thought ‘hang on a minute, what the hell are you doing here?” said the now 48-year-old.
“In a blink you are going to be 50 and you are going to be living in the woods on your own like a little weirdo.
“So I just basically packed up a transit van and got the hell out of there and moved to Brighton.
“I’ve got a lot of friends in Brighton – it’s always been a place that I’ve loved.”
But despite a reluctance to go back over the roots of his past problems which are like “talking about someone else”, he is as forthright as ever when he talks about the need for men in particular to be more open about mental health.
“I’ve been absolutely fine for a long time now,” he said.
“I’ve been off the anti-depressants for about five or six years. It’s just not really part of my life anymore.
“But mental health issues are something that will never go away.
“From what I can see there seems to be a hell of a lot of less stigma talking about it now than there was 10, 20 years ago which is great.
“People have to talk about these things – especially working class people. Working class men in particular – they just have this thing where they can’t talk about it. That whole bollocks thing about keep calm and carry on and all that f***ing nonsense.
“F*** that. Let’s sit down and talk
In a blink you are going to be 50 and you are going to be living in the woods on your own like a little weirdo
about what’s f***ing bothering you and sort it out and then we can actually improve everyone’s lives.”
When Steve plays Fat Sams in Dundee on November 24, supported by Pictish Trail, he’s promising a “lot off the new album and then bits and bobs from the last 10 years”.
But it’s also an opportunity to reflect on his roots growing up in north-east Fife and his early obsession with music.
Born in Kirkcaldy, Steve moved to St Andrews when he was about four where he attended Canongate Primary, Greyfriars Primary then Madras College.
The first two records he bought when he was about eight or nine were an Adam and the Ants single and an X-ray Spex single. He became “totally obsessed” with music thereafter and has fond memories of the record sections in St Andrews’ Woolworths and John Menzies stores as a teenager in the mid-late 1980s.
But it was trips over to Groucho’s record store in Dundee that, like so many folk of his generation in the area, proved to be his musical lifeline.
“That’s where everybody used to go,” said Steve.
“Certainly me and a guy called James Wright (now better known as Cellardykebased musician James Yorkston) – we used to go through every Saturday with our pocket money or our paper round money or whatever it was.
“I’d just go through everything – whatever we were into at the time whether it was punk or soul or whatever it was.
“It was like every Saturday, that’s what you did – you got on the 95 Leven to Dundee bus at St Andrews. That record shop was really important.”
Steve recalls that there was a real buzz around St Andrews at that time with the students’ union putting on a lot of bands. St Andrews was part of the gig circuit back then, and while he was too young to go to any of those gigs, their presence “filtered into the kids” that were older than him and they formed bands.
“We realised there were people in the town who were actually in bands,” he said. “That makes you think ‘maybe we could do that?’”
While in more recent years it’s the Fence Collective founded by local musician Kenny Anderson that became the stuff of cult music legend in Scotland’s back catalogue, before Fence even existed, it was Steve’s friendship with Kenny’s younger brother Gordon, who was a year below him at school, that led to the formation of The Beta Band.
“What happened was me and Gordon were running about St Andrews trying to get something going,” Steve said.
“Everyone was either too old and not that interested in what we wanted to do or they were just a load of crap.
“I had a girlfriend at the time in Glasgow who was moving to London. I thought I’m going to move to London because there’s just nothing happening here and see what happens.”
Steve and Gordon started working with Gordon’s old friend John Maclean from Tayport who had got into the Royal College of Art in London and they added Robin Jones on drums. Not long after the band signed to Regal/parlophone, Gordon became ill and went back home.