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Review: the Beta Band, O2 Academy – ‘As playful and wilful as ever’
We’re in bits before the Beta Band even play a note.
Twenty years since they split and their O2 gig starts with a visual montage – the ghosts of their younger selves spoofing and goofing in old promo videos and home movies. They look like a gang, a comedy troupe. Whatever happened to bands, my friend asks.
Intro music – Bowie’s Memory of a Free Festival – then dials up the nostalgia, the sense of a special time gone forever, of what could have been.
This isn’t fair. We’re fifty, FFS. It’s our youth up there too, you know.
But there’s a musical template in that Bowie hat-tip. Floaty folk, the mid-song dissolve, that escalating mantra. It’s kind of where they started, and they go there again tonight.
Inner Meet Me is a rush of melancholic euphoria. On She’s the One, John (who plays keyboards and occasionally scratches a turntable) twangs his mouth harp against a chorus of Laughing Gnome high-pitched voices as the song circles its way to nirvana.
If the Beta Band intended a metaphor for how their debut album almost derailed their career, then playing its best track (and only one tonight) next is a pretty good one.
It’s Not Too Beautiful sounds, according to my friend, “like Hawkwind on really strong cannabis” (I wouldn’t know – I’ve never heard Hawkwind).
Halfway through, inexplicably, the band stop and a sample of the score from The Black Hole swirls around. It’s funny and disarming. Dancing is impossible. Those who aren’t confused stay patient. Just as we did back then.
It’s a set dominated by The Three EPs – we get all but two of the twelve songs from that early, head-spinning late 90s moment. There are just two songs from Hot Shots II and one from last hurrah Heroes To Zeroes. A quick look at Spotify shows it’s an emphasis people probably want.
Push It Out is glorious as it mutates into a remix of itself, bongos and synth replacing the stately piano. Needles In My Eyes is as defiant as ever, and as delightfully ramshackle.
In fact, there’s a charming casualness to proceedings in general. The band switch instruments regularly, but at their own place. No one is rushing around. The stage is too stuffed with equipment and pot plants.
You also sense that having waited two decades to be played, these songs won’t mind waiting a few more bars for the guys to be in position.
Dry The Rain is enormous, of course, almost cathartic, that languid shuffle and thick, sinewy bass building inexorably to the song’s terrace-scale chorus.
It’s made even bigger by the full-throated singing and air punching that outlast the band’s playing. They’re forced to bring the groove back under the crowd’s chorus. It is exhilarating. The band look a little stunned. The energy goes up a notch.
It’s a brilliant launch pad for Broke to close the set with its tumbling rhythms.
The encore is I Know, Squares and The House Song, during which Steve raps nonsense and Richard’s bass twists its way under Robin’s funky drumming.
By the end the band are all beating the hell out of two drum kits and countless bits of percussion. Their own form of catharsis, perhaps.
As we leave, I swear the DJ plays Video Killed The Radio Star. It’s so very Beta Band: bookends of Bowie and Buggles, the transcendent and the trivial. Cerebral and silly.
Two decades on, the Beta Band remain as playful and wilful as they ever were. We wouldn’t have them any other way.
All images: James Caig
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