Pitchfork

When the Beta Band broke up last year, the smart money was on frontman Steve Mason as the Band member most likely to succeed in a post-Beta world. Now, he's got the chance to prove it, with the forthcoming debut album from his solo project, King Biscuit Time.

Mason released two King Biscuit Time EPs while the Beta Band were still going strong, 1998's Sings Nelly Foggits Blues in "Me and the Pharoahs" and 2000's No Style. The latter EP shares its name with the record label Mason recently started with his manager, legendary Creation Records honcho and current Poptones bigwig Alan McGee, to distribute King Biscuit Time's music. So far, No Style has released one single, the politically-charged space dub "C I Am 15" in September.

It's no surprise that Mason wanted to strike out on his own; the Beta Band's troubles with their former label have been well documented. "When the Beta Band finished I really didn't want to sign to another major label," Mason told Pitchfork last week, on the phone from his home in the Scottish town of Pittenweem. "It just doesn't make any sense, you know? Apart from the instant up-front cash, there's nothing they can really give me that I can't do through my own label. So I spoke to my managers about it. We can do it real easily because they've got all the things in place for the Poptones label."

"It's just a matter of not having that advance initially, so you have to wait for that money to come through. But when it does come through, it's actually my money, I don't have to start paying someone back for anything. So, I think it's going to be a lot more satisfying, and hopefully might make considerably more money than I would through a major label."

Mason is optimistic about going the independent route. "There really is a big resurgence in indie labels over here," he said. "Through the Internet and stuff like that, people are realizing that the major labels are just these huge lumbering dinosaurs, and you can do things on your own which take a major label six months to do, when they DO do it. Ninety percent of the time they kind of get it wrong anyway."

However, Mason thinks that the major label system is less broken in America, and he hopes to sign with the Beta Band's former home, Astralwerks (a subsidiary of EMI) for Stateside distribution. "Astralwerks, to be honest, it's quite a small group of people you actually work with-- it's only two or three people. So, for me it's always had that atmosphere of being a very small label anyway, and they are really enthusiastic about music and they don't have that kind of major label "blaséness" about things."

King Biscuit Time's debut album, The Crunch, is tentatively scheduled to be released by No Style in the February of 2006. A second single, "Kwangchow", is due in January. Mason wrote, produced, and played almost everything on the record, and he said that the majority of its tracks don't sound anything like "C I Am 15". "It sounds more like a band," he said. "I wanted to make 'C I Am 15' quite stripped down and more concentrated on the vocal and beat and the bass, but the rest of the songs are more densely packed melody-wise and a little bit more kind of like stuff I've done in the past."

Here's the tracklist for The Crunch:

01 C I Am 15
02 Izzum
03 Impossible Ride
04 Kwangchow
05 Lefteye
06 All Over You
07 Way You Walk
08 Paperhead
09 Rising Son
10 Metal Biscuit

King Biscuit Time has one show scheduled for the remainder of 2005, a benefit concert on November 30 at Club Ego in Edinburgh, as part of the One in Four festival to raise awareness of mental health issues (Mogwai are also performing during the fest). Mason hopes to tour extensively next year, including America.

But recreating his dense soundscapes on stage is no easy task. "At the moment, since I don't have any money, I can't afford to pay a full band," he explained. "So at the moment, we take out a Mac laptop and run it off that. Then I've got a friend that plays bass and guitar and then another friend who runs the laptop and plays piano and does some percussion."

"I really didn't want to play too much live in King Biscuit Time, I just wanted to be more concentrated on the singing. So it's very, very simple live, although it sounds pretty big. It's almost like karaoke. It's such a total opposite from the Beta Band."

Speaking of which-- what does Mason think of the recent Best of the Beta Band collection? "I haven't actually listened to it," he said. "But there's a few omissions and a few things that I wouldn't have put on, and also one track that we did for the album which didn't end up on there. It's never been heard, and it's a quite good one. It's called 'All Alone'. It's a very slow, sad song."

Mason said that he still keeps in touch with Beta Band bassist Richard Greentree, who is currently working as a carpenter and finishing a solo album. He doesn't speak to his two other former bandmates, drummer Robin Jones and turntablist John Maclean.

In addition to King Biscuit Time, Mason said that he's been working with Scottish composer Paul Leonard on a project, as well as composing the score for a short film entitled Bowl Cut, featuring Scottish actor Charlie Creed-Miles.

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