As suspected, The Beta Band are playing Dublin this year.
It’s nearly 10 months since the Scottish band announced their return shows to the US and UK to coincide with the reissue of The Three EPs.
Today, Foggy Notions announced a long overdue show for the band at Vicar Street in Dublin on Wednesday July 22nd this summer featuring the classic line up of Steve Mason (guitar / vocals), Richard Greentree (bass), John Maclean (samples / keyboard) & Robin Jones (drums).
Tickets €42.20 plus fees on general sale Friday 6th February at 9am.
on general sale Friday 6th February at 9am.
he Scottish group who were active from 1996 to 2004, were known for their releases The Three EPs, the dizzying eclectic self-titled 1999 debut and two subsequent albums 2001’s Hot Shots II and 2004’s Heroes To Zeros.
They featured in a key needle drop in Nick Hornby film High Fidelity starring John Cusack, but remained a cult favourite of mine and many others for their slanted experimental mix of folk, psych, electronica, trip-hop and rock.
The band wound up in December 2004 and played their second last show in Dublin’s Ambassador.
Talking about getting back together for the tour, the band said:
The Beta Band, as everyone knows, is an institution, like Bedlam, or the RSPCA, and as such has its own indelible stain on the bedsheet of Western culture. It was the great John Noakes who said “you have to shake it out at least once every couple of decades, if you want to know what the moths did”. So with both those facts in mind, we realise the time has come to show the wall the Luminol, kill the lights and hit the UV.
Irvine Welsh wrote this about The Beta Band:
I discovered the Beta Band, like I discovered a lot of great music, basically through eventually surrendering to the enthused urgings of a mate who was cooler than me. He continually evangelized about the EP’s. I was lost to the concert hall and firmly ensconced on the dancefloor by then and highly resistant but quite taken by the idea that a band would bring out extended plays rather than singles. When I did check them out, I was instantly smitten by their originality and power.
The band, therefore, were pivotal for me in terms of my own musical journey, in that they represented a gateway back into indie guitar music, which I’d basically given up since becoming obsessed with rave and acid house.
The Beta Band were definitely a band for the cool cognoscenti- like my buddy- the ones you make a bit of a tit of yourself trying to convert quite straight boring people to. The emotions they induced were a kind of throwback to school days when you were very pompous and prescriptive about what you liked, and derisive towards non-believers. It’s a testimony to the power of the music that they could take me to the raw state of the younger man.
I took it personally that they didn’t hit the mainstream commercial base. At least two of the three albums they made deserved quadruple platinum status. Hot Shots II and Heroes to Zeros are permanently lodged very high in my top one hundred albums of all time. So, the return of the Beta Band has me moving into the same mode of immature, adolescent anticipation. Everyone should have the Beta Band albums and EPs in their collection. It still kind of annoys me – in fact it bugs the shit out of me – that most of them don’t. And that really is something.
Irvine Welsh – February 2025.
Anyway, here’s some of their best tunes:
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
