“Politics can often waylay even the best musicians, but it seems to have the opposite effect on Mason here, inspiring him to create some of his finest and most thought-provoking material”
Drowned In Sound (on Monkey Minds In Devil’s Time)
Steve Mason one of the Britpop generation’s few genuinely brilliant and original song smiths and has been delivering since The Beta Band’s The Three EP’s – the masterpiece which introduced his extraordinary talent to the world – was released in 1998. These very first Mason releases had a massive impact on the UK pop landscape and quite literally altered the way music was made, bringing a fresh, playful, genre-busting spirit to the deployment of new technology and traditional instruments
After the Beta Band split in 2004, Steve went to ground in his native Fife, firing off wonderfully unconventional records under a series of pseudonyms – most prominently, King Biscuit Time and Black Affair. It was in the wake of his last project, Black Affair, that Mason began to toy with the idea of a new approach. He decided he had had enough of all the aliases and to record under his own name. The resulting ten songs which made it on to the his Steve Mason debut ‘Boys Outside’ are sparse, haunting arrangements packed with inventively sculpted sounds and sublime melodies, and shot through with a rare emotional honesty. In autumn 2009, the finished album won the hearts at the folk at Domino who immediately offered him a deal to publish and release the record on their Double Six imprint. Its widely acclaimed follow up ‘Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time’ was also released by the label last year.
