For a group that made a virtue of its flaws, the one perfect thing about the Beta Band was their timing. In the late-1990s, as Y2K-bug experts/fear-mongers started hitting the talk-show circuit to warn us of the impending global technological meltdown, the Beta Band brought with them the reassurance that we’d still be able to get out of our heads even in the event of a worldwide blackout. In stark contrast to the bloated Britpop dominating their homeland at the time, the Beta Band crafted majestic music out of the most modest means: mantric psych-folk anthems built atop a jew’s-harp drone and bongo bounce (“She’s the One”); drum-circle workouts (“B+A”) that hit hard enough to leave fissures in the earth’s crust; a cappella beat-boxed, bell-clanging chants that could make a quiet night around the campfire feel like peak-hour at the Hacienda (“The House Song”).
These epochal early recordings—as heard on the Champion Versions, Patty Patty Sound, and Los Amigos del Betas Bandidos EPs—imagined the White Album as recorded at Black Ark: music of the ancients that sounded as though it was beaming in through radio transmissions from another galaxy. Though not without kindred spirits—from Beck’s stoner-folk freakery to Cornershop’s pan-cultural polyglot—the Betas more acutely symbolized an act of a retreat: from camera-mugging music-press ass-kissery, from suffocating urbanism, from accelerated modernity. They never came close to topping the charts (unless you count the in-store one at Championship Vinyl), but they had a profound effect on bands that did: in their wake, Radiohead turned more insular, Oasis got trippier, and even Travis started booking photo shoots out in the sticks. To this day, after more than a decade of familiarization and canonization, listening to these early EPs still feels like unearthing some lost artifact whose place and date of origin are difficult to decode.
Those extended players were released in limited editions over the course of 1997 and early 1998, but they locked together into a perfect full-length album sequence when reissued in September 98 as The Three EPs compilation. Now, The Regal Years attempts a similar, if more difficult trick: combining the band’s entire recorded output into a seamless, six-disc listening experience. It’s especially challenging because, over the course of their seven-year existence, the Beta Band were not a band that enjoyed a linear evolution from one album to next. Rather, each of their official albums stand as discrete, often oppositional units, shaped by the particular pressures weighing down on the band at the time.
Most notorious of all is the Beta Band’s self-titled 1999 effort, which deflated the ballooning expectations surrounding the group in the wake of The Three EPs with all the elegance and subtlety of a whoopee cushion. In place of its predecessors’ melting-pot fusion of cross-genre influences, The Beta Band pits them at war with one another, stopping the hypnotic space-rock groove of “It’s Not Too Beautiful” dead in its tracks with a destablizing orchestral sample from John Barry’s Black Hole soundtrack, or fashioning a “Beta Band Rap” that’s actually equal parts barbershop-quartet serenade, proto-“Lazy Sunday” faux b-boy braggadocio, and Elvis pelvis thrusts. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the latter song sees the Beta Band turn into the Meta Band, unraveling two years of carefully cultivated mystique by recounting in painstaking detail the band’s origin story to date, right down to commentary on the free dinners paid for by the Parlophone A&R reps trying to sign them. ("A meal like that, yo/ We never ate!")
That’s just one of many gestures on The Beta Band that blurs the line between being genuinely weird and quote-unquote “wacky,” from the endless chipmunked funk of “Smiling” to the electro-square-dance pastiche “Dance O’er the Border”. “I’m at 90 degrees to the rest of the world,” Steve Mason sings on the charming country-rock ramble, “Round the Bend”, an all-too-accurate advertisement for a record that packs all the hair-pulling complication of a geometry exam. Mason’s actual assessment of The Beta Band was far less subtle; just prior to its release, citing budgetary and deadline pressures, he infamously told the press the album “was fucking awful—the worst album released this year.” But if the record violently vascillates between fascinating and frustrating on a song-by-song basis, its over-arching oddness retains its own peculiar allure. At the very least, The Beta Band stands as a time capsule of possibly the last instance when a group this strange could not just get signed to a major label, but use the company dime to make themselves sound even stranger. (And this is to say nothing of the complementary disc of ambient field recordings that were included in press mail-outs of The Beta Band, but eventually scrapped from the official release.)
The Beta Band never quite recovered their momentum after the self-titled-album stumble. Though they would harness the shambolic qualities of their recordings into a tight and powerful live act (earning them tour invites from Radiohead), their subsequent albums were refined to a fault. It was easy to underrate Hot Shots II at the time of its 2001 release: siphoning off the skeletal, breakbeat skitter and moody atmospherics of The Beta Band’s Bonnie Tyler-quoting highlight “The Hard One”, the album mostly lacked the exuberant eccentricity and percussive grooves of the Betas’ signature works, and proved wholly out of step with popular UK tastes that were shifting toward the more visceral retro-rock pleasures of the Strokes and the White Stripes. (Not to mention the fact that trip-hoppy lead single “Squares” leans on a string sample that felt like an eight-years-too-late echo of Portishead’s “Glory Box”.) But the passage of time has been very kind to this record, which now feels remarkably prescient in initiating a conversation between left-field rock and modern R&B that still continues to this day. And standouts like “Al Sharp” and “Eclipse” presented golden opportunities to showcase the fortitude of Mason’s songwriting in less cluttered surroundings, pointing the way to the intimacty and immediacy of his post-Betas solo records.
Alas, Hot Shots II did little to reverse the group’s waning popularity and diminishing critical cachet, a circumstance alluded to in the self-deprecating title of 2004’s Heroes to Zeros. But The Beta Band hardly sound defeated here. Of all the stylistic guises the Betas had toyed with over the years, straight-up, riff-driven rock was never one of them, and yet Heroes to Zeros evinces a heretofore unleashed arena-conquering bravado and clarity—most audible in the Red Rocks-toppling surge of “Assessment” and the massive Madchester-schooled swing of “Out-Side”—without tempering the band’s idiosyncratic essence. Of course, it figures that, for a group with as troubled a track record as theirs, the Beta Band’s most outwardly accessible effort would prove to be their least successful, the last straw that would lead to their unceremonious break-up in December 2004.
It didn’t take long for Regal to capitalize on the headlines generated by group’s sudden demise—a career-spanning compilation, The Best of The Beta Band, appeared in 2005 as both an epitaph and a catalyst for post-mortem reappraisal. However, now that Mason has established a steady solo career (following a prolonged period of depression in the wake of the Betas’ split), enough time has passed to reapproach the group's work with fresh ears. And while a six-CD box set may seem forbidding to all but the most hardcore fans (who likely still have all of these albums close at hand), The Regal Years arrives with both a very reasonable price point ($42.99—not much more than what I paid for The Three EPs on import back in the day) and a wealth of bonus material. Comprising key transitory non-album singles (like 2000’s Hot Shots II precursor “To You Alone”/“Sequinsizer”), B-sides, demos, radio sessions, and concert recordings, these add-ons—two discs’ worth—will be equally revelatory to long-time enthusiasts and tourists alike.
Despite the disjointed, reactive nature of their discography, the Beta Band’s albums were united by the fact that none of them represented an absolute finished product; rather, their songs were like living organisms that could assume radically altered shapes under different conditions, be it a BBC appearance or a T in the Park gig before a crowd of thousands. A 1997 visit to Radio 1 shows this policy of impermanence in full effect from day one—where “B+A” gets distended into the sort of brown-note funk jam the Beasties Boys would throw down with Money Mark, the once-imposing 15-minute Floydian dub collage “The Monolith” is sculpted into a much more immediate five-minute piece that unearths the melody lurking within its Pompeii-scaled expanse. And this exploratory impulse remained in place until the band’s final show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, which is represented here by six tracks, including an adrenalized “Dr. Baker” and a rendition of “The House Song” that climaxes with a drum-set-crashing duel. (The full concert was featured as a bonus disc in The Best of the Beta Band.) But even more impressive is how deep cuts from the less-illumated corners of the catalogue are transformed into show-stopping knockouts, like the rebirth of The Beta Band’s acoustic trance “Broken Up a Ding Dong” as a synth-buzzed motorik odyssey, or a version of the Hot Shots II stomper “Quiet” that gets loosened into a piano-rolled mambo, or an unplugged strip-down of Heroes to Zeroes’ “Out-Side” that shirks the original’s playful go-go-dancer sway to expose the white-knuckled tension at the song’s core. In this regard, The Regal Years does a thorough job of not just compiling the Beta Band's recorded legacy, but underscoring the real reason why they're missed—it’s not just for the music they left behind, but for the infinite possibilities within it that had yet to be explored.
