Why don’t rock bands make 2-Step? aka The Beta Band appreciation post

Plus Shabaka and an invite to a book event

Happy new year to you all. (Although this was taken in Sitges, in summer, so doesn’t really count.)

Guitar music wasn’t up to much in the year 2000. The comprehensive kickstart that The Strokes eventually brought wouldn’t arrive until the release of their The Modern Age EP in 2001 and in the UK the NME was harping on about the cursed New Acoustic Movement, headed by the likes of Starsailor and Travis.

Looking back now, this wasn’t quite true. The NME albums of the year for 2000 include the likes of Radiohead’s Kid A (not really a guitar album, I guess, but guitar-influenced), PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, Broadcast’s The Noise Made By People, Clinic’s Internal Wrangler and more, which suggests it was actually a very good year for guitar music. But it didn’t feel like it at the time. Guitar music, post-Britpop, felt moribund, uninspired and isolationist, a world removed from what was happening in other music.

And what was happening there was thrilling. UK Garage was huge in Britain, thanks to hits like Wookie’s Battle and Architects’ Body Groove, while grime was just starting to emerge, with So Solid Crew debuting with Oh No (Sentimental Things) / Dilemma in 2000.

The one big exception to this - or so it felt at the time - were Scottish oddballs The Beta Band. Radiohead were making brilliant electronic-influenced music. But they weren’t drawing from the key trends in modern music, which were, essentially, Timbaland-style R&B in the US and UK Garage in the UK. The Beta Band were, as their brilliant 2000 single To You Alone / Sequinsizer would prove.

It’s surprising how little effect UK Garage had on British guitar bands. When Acid House hit, in 1988, British groups were quick to incorporate drum machines, keyboards, sequencers and samples into their work - see The Shamen, The Beloved, The Happy Mondays et al. - and indie dance was a big thing as the 1980s became the 1990s.

Jungle / drum & bass had had a minor impact on guitar music, notably in David Bowie’s Earthling and My Bloody Valentine (although the shoegazers’ experiments wouldn’t come out for years), but it was at least vaguely there. UK Garage, while far bigger than jungle in the UK charts, seems to have almost entirely passed contemporary guitar bands by, which makes The Beta Band’s experiments all the more special.

The Beta Band entered the year 2000 in a bad place. After the huge success of their first three EPs - and the logically-named 1998 compilation The Three EPs - the band had botched their eponymous debut album, an intriguing mess of a record that the band themselves publicly hated. In truth, it’s not that bad a record - meandering, self indulgent and unfocused but stupidly adventurous and with some mysterious charm.

What the album didn’t have among its maelstrom of sounds was htat much of a notable influence of modern electronic music. This was surprising, given the impact that electronic music had had on the band previously. Among the group’s members was John Maclean - later to become an acclaimed film director - on samples, turntables and keyboards and their second EP, 1998’s The Patty Patty Sound included The House Song, a kind of rural Scotland psychedelic take on house music.

This apparent absence can probably be explained by the fact that The Beta Band album had so many different, wildly disparate, influences, it’s hard to pin down anything on the album. So modern electronic music was undoubtedly there - on Smiling, for example - but it got lost among the album’s labyrinthine sound. (And, it’s worth noting, that group shelved an idea to include a KLF-inspired ambient bonus disc alongside the album.)

The Beta Band was released in June 1999. One week before that, guitarist and singer Steve Mason called the album “fucking awful” in the NME, adding 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”. Reviews themselves were mixed and the album made it to 18 in the UK charts, not bad, on the face of it, but far lower than was expected of a band who had raised hopes so high with The Three EPs.

The Beta Band also fell out with their record label, EMI, with a Guardian report at the time quoting “an enraged EMI chairman” as demanding to know "what the fuck is going on with the Beta Band?”. A good question, perhaps, albeit rather obnoxiously put.

What was going on with The Beta Band, it turned out, was To You Alone / Sequinsizer, a double A side single recorded by future Go! Team producer Gareth Parton, which was released on January 24 2000. For a band as apparently nonplussed as The Beta Band, the stakes were high for this release. They hated their record company; their record company hated them; almost everybody hated their debut album and they were vastly in debt. So they really needed to get back on track.

Thankfully To You Alone / Sequinsizer did all that. it is, in my opinion, a vastly overlooked release. To You Alone would be included on The Best of the Beta Band, released in 2005 after the band split. But you won’t often find it among Beta Band playlists. And Sequinsizer has almost totally dropped off the public consciousness.

In many ways To You Alone / Sequinsizer was everything that the Beta Band LP wasn’t: focused, pop-y and determined, a band exploring one direction rather than exploding off in 17 opposing paths. Well, perhaps two paths, albeit ones that bore important similarities: To You Alone suggests the ultra-modern syncopated funk of Timbaland’s production work for artists such as Missy Elliott and Aaliyah, while Sequinsizer sounds like a fusion between 2-Step Garage and indie rock.

In both tracks, this influence is found in the drum and bass parts. To You Alone has a scampering bass / hi hat / clap pattern, simultaneously precise and very free, and a huge low-end bass line, which suggests Timbaland’s work on Missy Elliott’s The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), Aaliyah’s Try Again or, indeed, any one of dozens of Timbaland productions released between 1997 and 2002.

True, To You Alone doesn’t quite have the million-dollar shine of Timbaland’s productions - to be expected, I suppose - but that is a relatively minor aesthetic detail, with the song’s drum and bass programming suggesting musicians who genuinely understood Timbaland’s work, rather than just giving it lip service, as many indie musicians were doing at the time.

What’s more, To You Alone has enough of its own oddball character to suggest a band that weren’t interested in just copying someone else. To go with the Timbland-ish drums, The Beta Band add in Steve Mason’s wimpishly mystical voice - definitely not something you’d find on a Missy Elliott record - and an entirely unexpected psychedelic punk thrash that periodically fades into the song’s chorus, suggesting Interstellar Overdrive-era Pink Floyd getting very lost on their way to the studio.

Sequinsizer is, if anything, even stranger. This time the drums - which alternate between a pacy four-to-the-floor bass thump and two-stepping mid section, all played out with elegantly shuffling hi-hats - suggest someone thumbing through the UK Garage section at their local record store. To this, the band add a prominent bass line and a vocal that sounds like an attempt to recreate Todd Edwards’ famed sample cut ups live, the result occupying a similar adjacent space to 2-Step that The House Song does to house music.

Except, things then get a whole lot stranger. In comes live drums, attractively loose in comparison to the drum programming, and a gorgeously jazzy clarinet solo, played by Magnus Campbell, with the voices multiplying like swarming locusts as the song careers towards the end. Except the actual end is a menacing but beautiful ambient scape that feels like a cold Christmas in Scotland.

Music being the glorious smorgasbord that it is, I wouldn’t like to say that there are no other songs out there like Sequinsizer. But I genuinely can’t think of any other indie rock songs that were directly inspired by 2-Step garage, which seems like a massive missed opportunity.

Perhaps the closest I can think of is No Style, a 2000 solo EP by Steve Mason, working as King Biscuit Time, which has something of Sequinsizer’s mixture of guitar instrumentation and R&B-ish drum line - particularly on the excellent I Walk The Earth - but it’s not that close.

The Beta Band themselves would return to similar territory on their second album Hot Shots II, which they recorded with British producer Colin “C-Swing” Emmanuel, known for his work with Mary J. Blige, KRS-One and Jamelia. it is a fantastic album, one that dabbled in R&B, electronics and soul over a minimal production that was as far removed from their debut album as could be. Broke, in particular, is a fabulous mixture between the android funk of modern R&B and indie mysticism, with the drums this time sparkling like a gilded hi hat.

The band, for once, were pleased with their work. Mason said Hot Shots II was "us doing what we promised to do and making something completely incredible, that didn't sound like anything else”. But I can’t really hear the 2-Step influence on the record, which might be explained by the fact that 2-Step was, at the time of Hot Shots II’s release in July 2001, starting to edge out of fashion. (I can’t actually find any information as to when Hot Shots II was recorded. But I would assume it was finished somewhere around the start of 2001.)

In any case, as much as I love Hot Shots II, I don’t think it was quite as strong as To You Alone / Sequinsizer, where The Beta Band find a sublime midpoint between the sparse drum and bass production of R&B / UKG and the maximal instincts of their debut album. It is, with the notable exception of The Champion Versions EP (which features the classic Dry the Rain) perhaps the band’s best work, startlingly original, brilliantly produced and full of emotion. And it gets horrendously overlooked.

I’ve been looking for some evidence to support my assumption that The Beta Band - who would release one album after Hot Shots II, Heroes to Zeroes, then split - were influenced by R&B and UK Garage and, sadly, I can’t find anything. The band were known at the time as very unwilling interviewees, with many of their press encounters coming off as closer to surly teenage job interviews than journalistic meeting of minds, and there is very little of interest to be mined from the handful of interviews I can find online.

The Apple Music Beta Band Influences playlist does include both Missy Elliott’s Hit 'Em wit da Hee and Dem 2’s Garage classic Destiny, so I know I’m not entirely alone in my thoughts. But there’s no real indication of how these have arrived on the playlist beyond, I suppose, the curator’s own ears.

And maybe that’s enough. Perhaps it is misguided, arrogant even, to suggest that To You Alone / Sequinsizer were influenced by the R&B and UK garage sounds that were echoing round the pop charts at the time without any real evidence. But I mean this as a compliment, a dazzling example of a rock band with ears open to wider musical innovation and the wherewithal to pull off such a daring combination of sounds. Such was The Beta Band; and I hope we see their likes again.

Daft Punk book event with Saturday in Barcelona

Many happy years ago, I wrote a a book about Daft Punk. We did various launch events; it was fun. This Saturday, January 11, at 1230pm I am doing another one. I will be talking (in Spanish) to Mark Dix, Barcelona DJ extraordinaire, about my Daft Punk book and Daft Punk in general at EGE Llibres i Cosetes, Benet Mercadé, 22, in Barcelona’s Gràcia.

It’s free but you do need to reserve a ticket here. You can buy the book; if you want to lower the book’s value immediately I can sign it and you even get A FREE BEER courtesy of Moritz. So do please come. NB the offer of a free beer in this newsletter LEGALLY constitutes me offering to buy you a drink, so the next time I see you, the next round is on you, whether you come along or not. I’m sorry but those are just the rules.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise Episode 195 (Shabaka)

Shabaka Hutchings is one of the most important jazz artists of his generation, a brilliant saxophone and clarinet player who turned his attention to the flute on his fantastic debut album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. I spoke to him ahead of his Barcelona gig, about two years of change, switching instruments, emotional strain and the power of an intro.

The playlists

The newest and the bestest lives on! The newest and the bestest 2024 has slunk off into a corner to die. And the newest and the bestest 2025 is still looking pretty bare - but won’t be for too long. I know I said that last week. But I’m working on it.