Commerce has been triumphing over art for so long now it’s become the only rule of the game; what we once cherished for its purity, madness or cool is now bought and sold sometimes just because it can be, even if the price is a fraction of what conscience tells you it’s worth.
Last year’s reissue of The Beta Band’s Three EPs would seem to have been the obvious springboard for a long anticipated and lucrative reformation for the four space cadets who played the industry for suckers but ended up broke and dissolute; former singer Steve Mason, however, quietly pushed the idea to one side, saying that all the old gang were ‘pretty busy’.
It’s hard to work out whether Mason has more to lose or gain from anything like that, chiefly because the Scot has undertaken a solo career determinedly on his own terms, at the same time gradually recovering from personal issues while both in and out of the public eye. After a triumphant, chapter-closing retrospective at the Barbican in early 2017, About The Light is the fourth album released under his own name, one which perhaps a little peculiarly he claims is ‘the first legitimate record that I have ever made’.
He hasn’t pulled this logic out of the air of course; rather than writing new material alone, this time round the whole live band has been part of the process, whilst veteran producer Stephen Street has admitted to a less-is-more looseness in the studio that’s brought the whole package closer to the experience of Mason’s unmissable shows.
Put into practice on opener America Is Your Boyfriend, the effect is to southern-fry some of his restraint, the song an establishment rattling sermon that holds little back courtesy of some tootling brass, rocked out slide guitar and a large dash of blue-eyed soul. Applying a rootsier aesthetic isn’t anything new, but it brings the singer into touching distance on Stars Around My Heart, funk chops and an ensemble chorus giving us Steve 2.0, while the glorious handclaps and earthy groove of Walking Away From Love are the simplest of gestures from a man who once seemed utterly determined to sabotage everything he touched with an impish punk gusto.
This more basic approach thankfully cuts both ways; when About The Light goes down-tempo the creeping bombast that can sometimes seed insincerity is missing, Rocket and Don’t Know Where not ballads but wearier, stripped back expressions of the singer’s new-found comfort with a real life. Cynics can rejoice as the playfulness of old lurks in and around the surface as well; Fox On The Rooftop has that zesty oddness which made The Beta Band so fascinating, while closer The End amps up a country-blues riff and horns that sound like they’re being blown in direct from Memphis, the whole thing building into one final climactic burst, an act of release that brings the curtain down on a record which understands itself from the first note to the timing of the last.
Self-awareness wasn’t always a quality Steve Mason was renowned for. Now, after years of dancing with the man looking back in the mirror, he’s embraced not the act of looking backwards and the shallowness of flogging a dead horse, but a present full of the possibilities this record gives him a new chance of making happen. ‘Who doesn’t want greatness?’, he’s recently asked himself – a question you’d consider rhetorical if posed by many other veterans of life’s slings and arrows.
Money after all can’t buy you everything.
