Latest news with #BetaBand
BBC News
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Beta Band reform for new tour after 21 years away
Indie rock group The Beta Band are to reunite for their first tour in 21 four-piece formed in Fife in 1996 and released a string of acclaimed EPs and albums before breaking up in 2004. The reunion tour begins on 25 September at Glasgow's Barrowlands, before dates in Leeds, Bristol, Nottingham, London and Manchester. This will be followed by a run of American group said they would play their 1998 album The Three E.P.'s - which collected their early recordings - as well as "other classics" on the tour. They released two further albums Hot Shots II in 2001 and Heroes to Zeros in 2004. The band said: "The Beta Band, as everyone knows, is an institution, like Bedlam, or the RSPCA, and as such has its own indelible stain on the bedsheet of Western culture. "It was the great John Noakes who said 'you have to shake it out at least once every couple of decades, if you want to know what the moths did.' "So with both those facts in mind, we realise the time has come to show the wall the Luminol, kill the lights and hit the UV."The line-up for the tour will be Steve Mason on guitar and vocals, Richard Greentree on bass, John Maclean on samples and keyboards and Robin Jones on music featured in Hollywood film High Fidelity, where their track Dry the Rain was spotlighted by the main character, played by John the band split following an Edinburgh gig in December 2004, Mason released music as a solo artist while Maclean and Jones formed another band, the also moved into film, directing Slow West in 2015 and this year's Tornado, which opened the Glasgow Film Festival last week.
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We spent £100,000 doing a gig in a scout hut!' The Beta Band on debt, disastrous decisions – and their defiant comeback
Steve Mason is remembering the day in 2004 he was told the Beta Band was over. 'There was enough money in the bank account to pay each of us a month's wages,' says the singer, seated in a busy London greasy spoon. 'And by that point, we were only on a grand a month. Then that was it.' For the previous eight years, life in the band formed in the Scottish seaside town of St Andrews had been one of constant reinvention and innovation. They'd made fiercely original records and experimental films, while putting on visually stunning live extravaganzas. Their transatlantic fanbase included Oasis, Radiohead, Irvine Welsh and actor John Cusack, who'd recommended their song Dry the Rain for a now-famous scene in High Fidelity. Playing a record store assistant, Cusack announces: 'I will now sell five copies of The Three EPs by the Beta Band.' He then puts the CD on and the shopppers nod their heads to Dry the Rain. Although the Beta Band were popular, notching up top 20 albums and biggish shows, they should have become massive. Instead, they ended up owing their label Parlophone £1.2m, reflecting all the money spent on recording, touring, videos and more. They weren't expected to pay it back – but the plug was pulled, and the band was over. 'Something like that is so intense,' says Mason. 'It's a big part of your life that's gone. At the same time, a relationship I had with a girl that had run concurrently with the band ended as well. I had a monumental breakdown. I had a plan to kill myself. Then I tried to get myself sectioned.' But now, 21 years on, they're back, with a reissue campaign and UK and US reunion tours to 'celebrate the music'. Keyboards/samples man John Maclean says he came to regard the debt as a 'badge of honour' and Mason, still only 49, certainly has no regrets. 'We never wanted to be rock stars or make lots of money,' he says. 'Our ambitions were solely artistic and we pushed ourselves until the last minute. Then we split up. But how many bands can say they spent £1.2m on art?' Mason was working as a mechanic when conversations with old pal Gordon Anderson and Maclean, who the latter had met at art school, gave him an epiphany. 'I'd never heard people talk unashamedly about art and poetry before,' he explains. 'I came from this toxic male culture where everyone tried to be tough and there was a lot of tabloid newspapers and talking about women in a certain way. But I suddenly realised the real bravery lies in art.' Anderson soon left, for reasons concerning his mental health, and the lineup became Mason, Maclean, drummer Robin Jones (another art school student) and bassist Richard Greentree. Pitting themselves entirely against the GB jingoism and posturing of the tail end of Britpop, they created music that was completely different: engrossing mixtures of guitars, house grooves, ambient drones, R&B, psychedelia and haunting, enigmatic lyrics. 'We went clubbing and listened to the Stone Roses,' Maclean remembers. 'But I'd sample a bird sound rather than someone in America going, 'Wassup?' It was very organic. We worked with tapes. Pre-computers. Technology was catching up with us. We were constantly making videos. Way before TikTok and YouTube.' Champion Versions EP, made for just £4,000 in 1997, was immediately playlisted on Radio 1. 'Driving to our first gig,' says Mason, 'we pulled up next to some builders and our song came on their radio. We all started cheering.' In the 1990s, major labels could lavish cash on artists, so the Betas told Parlophone: 'All we want from you is the money to pursue our ideas, then to be left alone.' After early compilation The Three EPs reached No 35, further catapulting expectations, Mason felt 'on a mission from God' when they were then given £300,000 to record their eponymous debut in four cities and one isolated hut in Scotland. 'The original idea had been to record in three different continents with Indigenous musicians,' he sniggers. 'But that would have cost a million.' However, they then disowned the album. 'In those days,' says Maclean, 'Oasis would release a new record and claim, 'This is the greatest ever!' So there was an element of us going the other way.' Mason now admits the album has flaws, but is not without its moments: 'We were still finding a way of writing together. The best tracks are the ones we worked hardest on.' The album reached No 18 in 1999, but two years later the band were still dismissing it, not least in a notoriously grumpy interview with the Guardian in Atlanta. Mason says it was sprung on them just as they came off stage, tired and still jetlagged. 'So it was a disaster.' Hot Shots II, made with R&B producer C-Swing, was released to rave reviews in 2001. The album reached No 13 in the UK and dented the US Billboard charts, but by then the band had acquired a reputation for being difficult. Mason says: 'When we recorded the single Broke for Top of the Pops, I said, 'We're in the belly of the beast now boys!' as the song started. So it was never broadcast.' Squares, the single that followed a year later, would surely have been a huge hit – had Sheffield electronic act I Monster not released a song containing an identical earworm sample of Daydream, Günter Kallmann Choir's trippy 1970 single. 'I'm still suspicious,' admits Mason. 'What are the odds on that?' Radio 1 played I Monster and the Sheffield boys went Top 20. Some of the Betas' adventures are quite Spinal Tap. They spent £4,000 on Velcro suits which a roadie left on the tube. They got themselves stage outfits that lit up. 'We'd hear the crew walking down corridors muttering, 'The fucking suits',' Mason laughs, 'because they were always breaking down. They were only powered by nine-volt batteries but one night Richard threw his bass down and started ripping off his jacket. He'd been sweating so much he was being electrocuted by this little battery.' The band once turned up in a small US town only to discover that the venue was 'a scout hut'. They had to halve the show's capacity just to get their equipment in. 'We put on a hundred-grand show for 150 people,' laughs Mason. 'But I still get messages saying, 'You changed our town!'' High Fidelity and tours with Radiohead boosted their American popularity enough for Mason to justifiably claim to have been 'bigger in the US than Manic Street Preachers or Robbie Williams'. But then, as the singer has revealed in previous interviews, an onstage joke in Texas, about clubbing together to get a rifle to shoot President George Bush, led to a petition to deport him being sent to the FBI. Today, Mason insists such behaviour wasn't self-sabotage, but was actually caused by his struggles with mental health. 'I was suffering a monumental lack of confidence and other stuff. I was so disappointed with the debut album. I mostly used to smash up my own possessions. Then once in rehearsals, I read some comments in the music press slagging us off. I picked up a samurai sword and caused four grand's worth of damage to our equipment in 60 seconds. I remember John saying, 'Well, that's the rehearsal over.'' Maclean thinks that rather than rush to record 2004's Heroes to Zeros, their third album, they should have taken six months off to recharge their batteries and repair their relationships. 'But there was never a plan,' he adds. 'It was always, 'Right, we're all moving into one house.' 'Right, we're splitting up!'' With hindsight, Mason thinks the biggest reason they didn't become as successful as they should have was 'a lack of effective management or guidance. So we made poor decisions, especially choosing the second manager because he had eyes like a great white shark.' The week after they found out they owed £1.2m, EMI signed Robbie Williams for £80m. A more pressing issue was the £120,000 the members collectively owed the tax office. Mason sighs: 'It took me 12 years to pay my share off.' Still, things haven't turned out too badly. They've all got families. Mason, much happier, has made five solo albums. Greentree pursued carpentry. Jones and Maclean became film directors, the latter after actor Michael Fassbender liked the Beta Band videos and suggested collaborating. This led to the acclaimed 2015 experimental film Slow West. Maclean reveals that his new movie, Tornado, is loosely based on the Beta Band video for Trouble. 'A samurai comes to Britain, suffering nightmares. But instead of me in it, it's a Japanese actor called Kōki – and instead of Robin's dad, it's got Tim Roth.' Meanwhile, it's hard to argue with how Mason sums up these upcoming tours: 'A chance to see one of the greatest British bands of the last 30 years – before they turn us into holograms.' The Beta Band's UK tour starts at Barrowland, Glasgow, on 25 September. A deluxe reissue of The Three EPs is released at the same time, with more to follow.
BBC News
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Tornado: The wild west samurai movie set in 18th Century Scotland
Scottish filmmaker John Maclean has always loved 2015 debut film Slow West was still on the festival circuit when he sat down and began to write a new time, he wanted to set his story in Britain in 1790, drawing on characters who he felt had never been given screen time before: the outlaws, the musicians, the circus he was determined to add a samurai element. "At the time I had immersed myself in Japanese cinema," he says."I had seen and loved some of Kurosawa's films but decided to watch his entire work in order and read every book analysing his technique and storytelling style in order to analyse the to-and-fro between the American western and the samurai film."The result is Tornado, a British period drama and a coming of age story. Filmed on location in the Pentland Hills in January 2023, it stars Japanese actress Kōki as the eponymous Tornado, a performer in a travelling circus who learns to use a sword for the show, but by the end of the film is wielding it to the tender age of 22, she has many talents: catwalk model, musician, composer and actor. But she'd never been asked to use a samurai sword before."I was completely new to it so I contacted an action team in Japan and started to learn before shooting," she says."It was a completely new experience, the way you use your muscles, your posture, the mindset." Takehiro Hira plays her father – and the character who teaches her to use the samurai sword. He was impressed by her skills."She was always practising off-set, and posting photos on Instagram," he recently appeared in the FX series Shogun, which is the first Japanese language series to win an Emmy (18 of them).And he didn't doubt John Maclean's knowledge of the culture."I was so impressed with his knowledge of Japanese film," he says."Not just the obvious ones but some even I didn't know."When we first met on a Zoom call, he showed me a copy of my father Mikijirō Hira's debut film which I'd never seen." A founding member of the Beta Band, John Maclean started out making music promos with budgets ranging from zero to £70, 2009, he wrote his first short film, Man on a Motorcycle. It starred Michael Fassbender, who went on to appear in his next short film Pitch Black Heist and his first feature Slow having proved he could make a western, he wanted to see if he could transplant the genre to 18th Century Britain."1790s Britain felt like 1860s America," he says."It was wild and lawless, but things were changing. The law was coming, the industrial revolution was coming."And like the wild west, it's a multicultural mix and a fight for even a band of outlaws led by Sugarman, played by Tim Roth. "I remember coming in for the costume-fitting and what they were quietly doing was crossing time periods," he says."I was wearing things which could have been worn in the 1940s, but there were other elements which were maybe more in keeping with the 1790s. There was an extraordinary freedom in that."John Maclean agrees: "There wasn't that much recorded about these sorts of people then so if you do look up costumes from the 1790s, you get the powdered wigs and the breeks but we really have no idea what ordinary people wore."Takehiro Hira adjusted his traditional costumes for the Scottish weather."We had kimono costumes but not the kind I would wear in Japanese cinema," he says."This had a lot of pieces and I would wear it like a coat although it was meant to be worn like a scarf so we were improvising just as any ordinary person of the time would have done." Midgie season John Maclean says it was the tight-knit cast and crew, working on a low budget, which allowed his dream of a Scottish samurai western to at last become a reality."I was very fortunate to work with cast, crew, producers and financers that embraced the originality of the story. I think the only way we managed to shoot this in 25 days was the amount of preparation done."Kōki is an absolute star and there is nothing she cannot do, her acting skills matched by her fighting skills. Jack Lowden embraced the mantra 'there are no small parts'. Tim Roth, lying on the ground of a freezing Scottish forest delivered a performance which can be fully appreciated on a large cinema screen."For Roth, the freezing forest was a breeze compared to his experiences filming Rob Roy in 1995. "I know a lot of people think January in Scotland would be the worst time of year to shoot a film, but when we shot Rob Roy it was midgie season and I would take this over that any time. It's hard to explain just how awful it was, swarms of them, and unless you keep moving…"One of Roth's other films has an important place in John Maclean's heart."I worked at the Cameo cinema as a student. Tarantino came with Reservoir Dogs and I met him and talked to him and thought I could maybe be a director. "So to have Tim Roth in this film feels like coming full circle."Tornado is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on 23 May
