Failure Is Always An Option: Glorious Adventures On The Beta Band Front Line And Other Tales

“Self-destructive pop saboteurs who did it all wrong in all the right ways. Utterly brilliant” NME

Steve Mason is a Scottish singer songwriter and founding member of the Beta Band. Formed in 1996 the band were quickly embraced in the media as The Next Big Thing and hailed by famous fans from Radiohead to Noel Gallagher. They were an idiosyncratic, self-contained, self-sabotaging Dadaist counterpoint to the bloated Britpop corpse as it metastasized in the late ‘90s. The band split in 2004, owing their record label £1.2m.

The book focuses not only on Steve’s music career but his battles with depression that tore the band and his personal relationships apart. “It’s a story of youth culture, failure, success, sadness and redemption” Steve Mason, August 2025