The Beta Band
Roundhouse, London
3rd October 2025

Back after an absence of 21 years, The Beta Band remain one of the live arena’s most beguiling and bewitching propositions. Steve Morgan tuned in to the urbane spacemen.

It’s one of the great crash-and-burn stories from a lost rock ‘n’ roll universe: a galaxy that now seems far, far away. Feted by both Oasis and Radiohead, The Beta Band could – should – have been massive. Instead, through a cocktail of wilfulness, capriciousness and downright bad luck – think Velcro suits, commissioned to the tune of £4,000, but accidentally left on the Tube – it didn’t happen.

In 2004, following three glorious EPs and a further three studio albums across eight years’ graft in a beguiling, ever-shifting soundscape, their live shows an orgy of instrument swapping and experimental percussive wig-outs framed by deliciously wonky, off-beat home-video backdrops – this in a time long before TikTok – their race was run, spiralling debts called in, the party well and truly over. The facts, however, always tell a reductive tale. On this second sell-out Roundhouse night on a reunion tour of the UK and North America, it is abundantly clear how loved they remain after 21 years’ absence. It’s also starkly obvious how quietly influential their playful, psychedelic smarts – think space-tinged folk meets a Scottish pastoral Beastie Boys – have proved.
If none of the material – 10 of the 15-song set is culled from that glorious rush of early releases collected as 1998’s The Three EPs – seems to have aged, that’s because it was timeless to begin with.

If anything, it sounds as attractively ‘other’ now in an age of stark, by-numbers conformity; as different as it ever was, to misquote Talking Heads.

Those now experiencing it twice in a lifetime are much in evidence tonight, but the throng contains a healthy number of fresh-faced internet seekers. Resplendent in their trademark boiler suits, the band take to the stage following a sweet, nostalgic montage of goofy old clips and to the strains of their own reworking of David Bowie’s Memory Of A Free Festival. Tall ferns populate the stage, naturally enough brimming with a large array of things to hit and strum.

They open with the languidly addictive, acoustic stoner chug of Inner Meet Me, replete with cowbells, bird whistles and swirling bleeps. It’s a fine calling card before they dive straight into She’s The One, a slow-lane Krautrock journey climaxing in a welter of beats. The ever-changing musical chairs are already firmly in evidence. Vocalist/guitarist Steve Mason hops up to survey the crowd atop a small footstool, another time-honoured piece of stage paraphernalia.

As the slightly muddy sound clears, so the mood perks up. Only two songs from the first and last studio albums make it – She’s Too Beautiful is next up, before the haunting, skeletal guitar-led Assessment, opening salvo from farewell album Heroes To Zeros – memorable for its jaw-dropping, Kubrick-esque video (if you haven’t seen it, you really should). The band choose not to show it behind them, instead the warm beach glow is switched for a backdrop of ice-blue cartoon mountains.

We’re in the belly of the beast now, as audience and band begin to mesh. We get the full gun from here, the band loosening up through the four-part harmonies of Alleged, into a brilliant, floaty rendition of Push It Out. Dr Baker – with its odd, mournfully jarring yet strangely tuneful piano riff, redolent of early Pink Floyd – is outstanding and still unnerving, a door kicked open to a view of a strange, uncharted vista. Another old live favourite, B+A, with its wonderful wah-wah guitar chops follows, the band all at the front of the stage against a swirling backdrop of Three EPs artwork.

An epic singalong of Dry The Rain and the fabulous, deep-soaked sub-bass finale of Broke bring things to a head, before the three-song encore, which features a mass hand-clapping conclusion to Squares, arguably their closest thing to an actual hit.

Although there is next to no chat with the crowd, at least beyond an appreciative “Cheers” after every song, “Hello London!” and an evening of reminiscing was never really on the cards. Despite emerging amid an age of lairy lager drinking, this was a band grooving not gurning; one more suited to quiet acclaim through their craft. That circumspection has served them well in the long run – it certainly lends an extra weight to Mason’s parting shot “See you in 20 years”, ahead of a terrific seven-minute version of The House Song. Typically, Mason finishes this not out front, milking the love, but instead under a towel, bashing the drum kit for all his worth, as Richard Greentree and Robin Jones’ funky bass and drums, and John Mclean’s turntable trickery build the mood towards one more last, blissed-out percussive-driven crescendo, all four banging something in a winning series of ‘gotcha!’ endings.

Older, wiser, still very much themselves. The band that forgot time, rather than the band that time forgot. Still light years ahead: the urbane spacemen.

You can find The Beta Band online Website | YouTube

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All words by Steve Morgan, you can find his archive here 

All photos thanks to Lee Ramsey, supplied