Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue. You don’t get many freebies in the world today, do you? Just not a very 2023 kind of vibe, the freebie, but your friends at The New Cue are here for you every Monday, flying the freebie flag like it’s 1986. Long live the freebie.
Today we’ve got a mammoth chat with Steve Mason as he tells us about his excellent new record, looks back on both his solo career and life in The Beta Band and reveals his standing as “the rock star’s mechanic”. If you enjoy it and you want to get involved in the full TNC experience, then click Subscribe Now below. It costs £5 a month and you’ll get access to Friday’s letter and our massive back catalogue. Go on.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Steve Mason
Steve Mason is one of the great maverick artists working in British music. He first came to prominence as frontman of The Beta Band, adventurers in sound who melded hip-hop, folk, experimental rock, woozy electronica and more. After one argument too many, they split up in 2004 but Mason picked up the mantle with his solo career. There were a few false starts. First, he began releasing music under the handle of King Biscuit Time, a project he’d started whilst The Beta Band were still going (The Beta Band might even have had a hit if he’d used them as his outlet for the brilliant I Walk The Earth in 2000), and then there was Black Affair, an electro-pop duo he formed with Detroit producer Jimmy Edgar. It was when he started making music under his own name, though, that his solo career started to take shape. The stark Boys Outside, released in 2010, showed that underneath all the eclecticism and sonic tinkering Mason was a compelling singer-songwriter. Its centre-piece track The Letter is just devastating:
From there, his music seemed to regain the swagger that defined early Beta Band recordings and every record since has taken a left turn whilst always sounding like a Steve Mason album. There have been call-to-arms protest songs, like this very literal call-to-arms protest song:
He followed that up with some of his sweetest sounding tunes on 2016’s Meet The Humans, summed up by the tender singalong of Planet Sizes:
And then there’s been soulful rock bangers, like the lead track from 2019’s About The Light:
All of his diversions appear to converge on his brilliant new album Brothers & Sisters, which came out last week. Its production is expansive and ambitious, its melodies warm and embracing, the grooves jubilant. Here’s the stirring title track:
It’s one of his best. Last week, Niall spoke to him about how it came together, why now was the time for a clean slate, how The Beta Band will always follow him around (and he’s alright with that) and more.
Hello Steve. How’s it going?
Yeah, okay, just trying to get various things off the ground. I’ve been trying to write a book. I started it about seven years ago, not exactly necessarily about The Beta Band, but stories from throughout my life from various periods.
Where’s it at at the moment?
I’ve written a fair amount, but it’s just one of those things where I really want to get it done. I’ve got loads and loads of stories and there’s still more stuff I haven’t written yet. But I feel like I’ve stalled a bit on it.
I’ve always had you down as someone facing forward, is it weird for you to look back?
Yeah, I very rarely look back. I started it when I was moving away from Scotland. The last time I moved away from Scotland, I’d packed up all the studio stuff, so everything was packed up for about a couple of weeks before I actually moved so the only thing I had was my laptop. I started writing and really enjoyed it, and remembered loads of stories, stories about school and jobs that I had after school. I was a car mechanic for about four years. There’s a few stories and then leading up to the band, and then obviously, stuff within the band and various adventures. I really enjoyed writing it.
Are you still a decent mechanic?
Well, my problem was that when I quit being a car mechanic, which was around ‘93 or ‘94, everything within car technology was changing over to electronics and engine management systems and stuff like that. I could certainly service a new car but I’d be more probably more value and more at home in a classic car garage these days, which is quite tempting at times.
Do your friends call you if they have a car issue?
They do! They do it all the time. With scooters as well. When Mani got himself back on the road, he would regularly call me up by the side of the road with an issue. I get a lot of that. I’m the rock star’s mechanic!
There’s your memoir title! Congratulations on the record.
Thank you very much. Did you enjoy it?
I did. It’s great. It’s imposing right from the first notes of the opening track.
With Mars Man, Vangelis died so I was trying to harness a bit of Vangelis. I thought to start with a track like Mars Man levelled the playing field and you thought, ‘well, this record could go anywhere from this point on’, which was kind of the idea because it’s such a massive, overblown start to a record. I love that idea that it could just go anywhere from there, it was like a huge ball of flames going through my back catalogue, thinking ‘what the fuck is gonna happen now?’.
It's got a swagger about it, it feels like it’s reaching out.
Yeah, I guess ‘cos a lot of it was written during the lockdowns. During that point, you would expect any artist to be looking more inwards and I was in a way, but then I was thinking about exploding out and trying to find some form of hope and spirituality, spirituality that isn’t necessarily hooked up to an organised religion but some form of spirituality, which perhaps binds every human being together but sometimes the waters get a bit muddied by organised religions. I was listening to a lot of spiritual music and gospel music and white gospel music and black gospel music and especially the black gospel music, the older stuff like Mahalia Jackson. It doesn’t matter that you’re not a religious person but it goes straight into you and brings you some sort of salvation. I’ve always loved the idea of spirituality without, as I say, having to fall back on the crushing organisation that comes with organised religion, which I think is somewhat anti-spiritual.
I read that you stripped everything down when writing so that you were starting with a clean slate.
I just kept deleting stuff. I really struggled to write during the lockdowns at all so I knew that I had to make an album that was extraordinary, because I felt like I was going down a slightly reactionary path musically. I was maybe chasing radio plays, which is always a mistake because you can find yourself making a record that you don’t like, your fanbase doesn’t like and doesn’t get played on the radio - and then you’re really fucked! And you’re certainly not an artist anymore.
I remembered when I was sitting here trying to write and thinking, ‘Well, I guess I’ve always been more into the creation of music rather than the writing of songs,’ actually building a track and bolting things together and putting a vocal or some sort of song over the top of it, rather than sitting down and thinking about a middle eight or a bridge, whatever it might be. There’s a massive skill to that and that’s not to put anyone down who’s into that but I’ve always tried to come at making music in a slightly more abstract, artistic way. I think of it more like a painting. What was happening was I would sit there and try and write a song and I’d go, ‘this is garbage’, so I would just delete it. And then that would happen again, delete, again, delete. That kept happening so I was like, ‘this is the definition of madness right now’. So I wrote something, and I worked on it for a couple of days, I knew it was shit so I thought, ‘well, this, I like this one thing’ and it might even have just been a four second loop, so I did something else on that, and then slowly got to the end. By that point, I knew in my head the kind of sound that I wanted. The first track that I wrote that I finished was Upon My Soul. With me, it’s always a case of getting that first track in the bag. It almost sets a template for how you want it to be and it doesn’t matter if it deviates from that, it’s just a matter of getting off the starting blocks.
Out of all your solo records, which is the one you’ve learned the most from?
Probably this one. I think this one is maybe the distilled product of the last four albums. With Boys Outside, it was kind of panic stations because after The Beta Band, I released the King Biscuit Time album and then I had this monumental breakdown and was really suffering from some serious mental health issues. I slowly sorted that out, started writing with acoustic guitar again, actually writing songs again. I didn’t have a manager, I didn’t have a record deal, I didn’t have anything. Then Richard X reached out a hand and helped me to believe in myself again and to get these songs together. I guess that album told me that I could do it again and I still had some music to make.
Then Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time was this sprawling political concept album, dancing along that line of making music and being a crazy man in the street that people step around to carry on their journey, I was trying to walk that line there. But again, that showed me what was possible, because Monkey Minds… was a lot of work. It’s a big double album and it’s not a a double album like some double albums where it’s a single album spread over two vinyls, it’s a proper double and there was a lot of music that went on in between the main tracks. I learned how to put something ambitious together with that and not be afraid of making something ambitious.
I think what I learned from Meet The Humans was that there was a few disappointing songs and these days, you can’t really have any weak songs at all. If you’re gonna call yourself an artist, you can’t settle for that level of complacency.
About The Light was a difficult one because I got married and had a kid and I suddenly felt this huge weight of responsibility, it wasn’t just me anymore, I’m responsible for three people now. So that was difficult but I had to get a record out because I had to go on tour to make some money, so I got the band involved with the writing and then got Stephen Street on board because I knew that he’s very well experienced and knew that he’d be a firm hand at the tiller.
Going into this record, what I realised before was that perhaps I was heading far too much down that road of chasing radio play. I had to remember what I got into this for and what I want to be and hopefully what I am, which is an artist, and to be an artist, you have to push any responsibility and any worries that you have about your art making money, you have to fucking put all that in a ditch and bury it.
Which must be easier said than done?
Yeah, very difficult. But that’s what I managed to do with this record. I went into it just thinking, ‘this might be the last record I ever make but if it is then I want to make something absolutely extraordinary and leave no stone unturned in terms of being creative’, not prepared to let anything whatsoever come in to the creative process and change my way of thinking whatsoever. I had to just come up here, close that hatch and forget I had a family and forget I had a mortgage and had to put food on the table and just be creative. That’s what we were like in The Beta Band, it’s certainly what I was like, but it was easy then, you were young, you had no responsibilities whatsoever so it’s an amazing time and it’s a beautiful time. I’ve been doing this 25 years, the idea that that was never going to change is a bit ludicrous. I think I’ve learned something from every single record. I mean, I’m a very slow learner so it takes me a long time to learn each thing from each album, but I think that this album is perhaps the 25-year-old malt at the end of the rainbow.
In that sense, did you feel like you’d reignited your sense of adventure?
Yeah, I knew that I wanted to collaborate and get as many people as possible involved with the record. That’s been part of my problem before as well, being too controlling about my own music and worrying that something might get weakened along the way if I relinquished any form of control. That’s just not true, that’s not what happens when you collaborate. When you collaborate, you find things within yourself that you never knew were there and whoever it is you’re collaborating with, they find the same thing and you create something together which never would have existed if it wasn’t for the pair of you. I had a lot of issues and I wanted to mentally prove to myself outside of The Beta Band that I could exist. It maybe sounds a bit crazy to say that, God knows how long it is since we split up, it’s got to be 17-18 years! I guess because I still get asked about it a lot, you always feel like it’s sitting there on your shoulder going, ‘yeah, you haven’t really done anything as good as that, have you? That’s why people still ask you about it...’ But that’s not necessarily a negative thing because it does push you on. I am somebody that always needs something to push me on.
What would be the worst thing that anyone could say to you about your music?
That it was it was bland and reactionary and it was just the sound of somebody treading water, that it didn’t mean anything.
How did you feel when you put a full stop on this record?
Fantastic. But that didn’t last long unfortunately because I realised very quickly after we finished, after we got it mastered, that it wasn’t going to be out for another year because of the vinyl lead time at the moment is, like, eight to 12 months. That’s the problem, waiting for an album to come out is totally torturous because you want to get out and play, you want people to hear it. And as much as I’m sure people that you talk to say they don’t read the reviews, or don’t care what people say, you do care what people say. I think the first review I saw was seven out of 10. I was livid, because I was like, ‘seven out of 10? Well, seven is virtually six and six is basically five, so that basically says it’s mostly crap.’
But seven is also 70% and that’s an A…
True. That’s what my wife was saying. ‘Seven is basically an eight which is virtually nine!’ I’m just looking forward to it coming out and people being able to hear it. The idea behind the record more than anything was to make something uplifting. I wanted to make something which was positive and uplifting and gave people a beautiful experience. There’s still some darkness there, there’s still some sadness there but ultimately you want to bring something positive. People are very careful about where they spend the money these days and I quite like the idea of being an entertainer. People want to be entertained and they want to go home with their hearts full rather than their eyes full of tears.
ND