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Failure is Always An Option: Glorious Adventures on the Beta Band Front Line and Other Tales
A
Best Pop Music Book of 2026 -
The Herald
‘Pretty marvellous. A fabulous autobiography’ Irvine Welsh
‘Full of beautiful, mad stories’ Huw Stephens, BBC Radio 6
The long awaited autobiography from the musical maverick, polymath and Beta Band front man.
‘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, 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. Since 2004, front man and songwriter Steve Mason has forged a singular, highly lauded solo career, releasing 5 albums under his own name and in April this year the Beta Band reformed to announce their first shows and the UK and U.S in over twenty years.
‘I see this book as a picture of someone who was lost, with zero confidence and had no idea what he was supposed to do to with his life. But through music, he found something approaching belief in himself which carried him over the next 30 years into all manner of success, failure and adventure. All the while battling the demons on constant patrol in his mind until, after they nearly finished him off, he focused his full attention on purging them from of aspect of his life. It’s a story of youth culture, failure, success, sadness and redemption’ Steve Mason, Brighton, August 2025
‘Pretty marvellous. A fabulous autobiography’ Irvine Welsh
‘Full of beautiful, mad stories’ Huw Stephens, BBC Radio 6
The long awaited autobiography from the musical maverick, polymath and Beta Band front man.
‘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, 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. Since 2004, front man and songwriter Steve Mason has forged a singular, highly lauded solo career, releasing 5 albums under his own name and in April this year the Beta Band reformed to announce their first shows and the UK and U.S in over twenty years.
‘I see this book as a picture of someone who was lost, with zero confidence and had no idea what he was supposed to do to with his life. But through music, he found something approaching belief in himself which carried him over the next 30 years into all manner of success, failure and adventure. All the while battling the demons on constant patrol in his mind until, after they nearly finished him off, he focused his full attention on purging them from of aspect of his life. It’s a story of youth culture, failure, success, sadness and redemption’ Steve Mason, Brighton, August 2025
- GenresMusicNonfiction
336 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 23, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 10, 2026
Endearingly ramshackle, jumping about and picking out selected highlights and lowlights from a life. It’s not particularly focused on the music but that’s ever-present as a bubbling undercurrent. Mason writes amusingly and insightfully with a raw honesty about the industry he found himself part of and doesn’t let himself off the hook for occasionally ill advised shenanigans. His insightful exploration of his mental health over the decades is inspiring in a way that’s not cloying and pretty moving.
July 12, 2026
“Failure is not an option” is a frank and forthright autobiography by Steve Mason, who remains best known as the leader of The Beta Band - the brilliantly wayward Scottish psychedelic adventurers who became a by-word for self-sabotage.
Perhaps the best passages are where Mason describes growing up immersed in Mod & Scooter culture, and he is commendably candid about his battles with depression.
He does seem over-enamoured with retelling tales of practical jokes played on unsuspecting members of the music industry, which doesn’t come across as slyly subversive as Mason evidently thinks he’s being.
“Failure is not an option” is a curious snapshot of the 1990s /early 2000s Indie scene, but the book is probably of main interest to Beta Band obsessives (although there are few other bands from that era as worthy of obsession as The Beta Band).
Perhaps the best passages are where Mason describes growing up immersed in Mod & Scooter culture, and he is commendably candid about his battles with depression.
He does seem over-enamoured with retelling tales of practical jokes played on unsuspecting members of the music industry, which doesn’t come across as slyly subversive as Mason evidently thinks he’s being.
“Failure is not an option” is a curious snapshot of the 1990s /early 2000s Indie scene, but the book is probably of main interest to Beta Band obsessives (although there are few other bands from that era as worthy of obsession as The Beta Band).
October 11, 2026
If you get the chance to see Steve Mason when he tours, you must. It’s pure magic ✨
May 28, 2026
The unknown author is Steve Mason, singer songwriter and leader of the Beta Band.
This is his entertaining autobiography, charting the meteoric rise of the Beta Band, and his lifelong battles with mental illness.
Intimate, funny and at times painful, this is a candid and heartfelt account of what it was like, fronting the greatest British band of the 90s, when that achievement was dwarfed by the crippling anxiety and self sabotage that has plagued Mason for his whole adult life.
As a huge fan of the Beta Band, and as someone who has worked in the industry a long time, it was always apparent that Steve Mason was troubled by his own personal demons; only someone suffering acute anxiety and manic depression could so wilfully sabotage their own career with such regularity.
Mason explains the feelings that have troubled him and how they impacted upon his life and his career as the front (and main)man of a widely and critically acclaimed band.
We also get the perfunctory tour shenanigans, pranks and pitfalls of every rock n' roll bio. These are entertaining and as idiosyncratic as you'd expect from a band as experimental and indulgent as the Beta Band, but for me the meat of the book is Mason's personal adventure and exploration of Steve Mason.
The style and humour of the book reminds me of my own writing and Julian Cope's Japrocksampler and bios; intimate, conversational, and with one eye clearly focused on a parallel dimension to the one you know, the author as field reporter from another frontier.
This is his entertaining autobiography, charting the meteoric rise of the Beta Band, and his lifelong battles with mental illness.
Intimate, funny and at times painful, this is a candid and heartfelt account of what it was like, fronting the greatest British band of the 90s, when that achievement was dwarfed by the crippling anxiety and self sabotage that has plagued Mason for his whole adult life.
As a huge fan of the Beta Band, and as someone who has worked in the industry a long time, it was always apparent that Steve Mason was troubled by his own personal demons; only someone suffering acute anxiety and manic depression could so wilfully sabotage their own career with such regularity.
Mason explains the feelings that have troubled him and how they impacted upon his life and his career as the front (and main)man of a widely and critically acclaimed band.
We also get the perfunctory tour shenanigans, pranks and pitfalls of every rock n' roll bio. These are entertaining and as idiosyncratic as you'd expect from a band as experimental and indulgent as the Beta Band, but for me the meat of the book is Mason's personal adventure and exploration of Steve Mason.
The style and humour of the book reminds me of my own writing and Julian Cope's Japrocksampler and bios; intimate, conversational, and with one eye clearly focused on a parallel dimension to the one you know, the author as field reporter from another frontier.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews