• News

• All

Sep 17, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Gavin Watson Steve Mason

It’s hard to believe that The Beta Band‘s The Three EPs turns 20 this month. That EP collection/kinda debut album is still just as fun and challenging a listen two decades later and has just been reissued. But the Scottish band’s former frontman Steve Mason isn’t living in the past, in fact he’s just announced a new solo album for release in the far off land of 2019. The album is titled About the Light and it’s due out January 18, 2019 via Domino imprint Double Six. To accompany its announcement, Mason has shared the album’s first single, “Stars Around My Heart,” via a video for the song. Brother Willis directed the science fiction-themed video, which a press release says is “Spielberg-meets ‘Ashes to Ashes,’” referring to the David Bowie video. And while the decade is right in that description, we get a bit of a 1980s Doctor Who vibe as well, at least in terms of the design of the alien spaceship. Watch the video below. Also below is the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur, The Cranberries) produced About the Light, which was recorded at studios in London and Brighton. It’s Mason’s fourth solo album, following Boys Outside (2010), Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time (2013), and Meet the Humans (2016).

Mason had this to say about the album in a press release: “It’s a beautiful, confident, positive, angry, loving, and gentle album which once again moves what I do forward. David Bowie said that you should always be slightly out of your comfort zone if you want to achieve greatness, and for the first time perhaps ever, I deliberately pushed myself into that place. Who doesn’t want greatness?”

Brother Willis had this to say about the video in the press release: “I’m a long-time fan of Steve’s work so it was an honor to make a video for him. The concept and inspiration were very much a collaborative effort with Steve. We share a mutual love for the textures and warm personality that outdated formats have in contrast to the crisp HD 8K of today. It was an incredible collaborative experiment to shoot on Tube Camera and modern camera and put it all out to tape and back to try and achieve the feeling of watching a beloved sci-fi movie from your youth. And a good excuse to have amazingly talented people build an alien vessel and hone their early ‘80s visual effects skills. We were aiming for an uplifting, Psychedelic Spielberg effect that hopefully we achieved.”

About the Light Tracklist:

1. America Is Your Boyfriend
2. Rocket
3. No Clue
4. About the Light
5. Fox on the Rooftop
6. Stars Around My Heart
7. Spanish Brigade
8. Don’t Know Where
9. Walking Away From Love
10. The End

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.