Gig review: Beta Band at O2 Academy Leeds

“This is for the old-schoolers,” Beta Band’s Steve Mason announces before another choice selection from the Scottish cult heroes’ eccentric back catalogue.

It’s safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of tonight’s sold-out crowd were already tuned in to the Scottish four-piece during their initial run of activity, before the band’s initial creative triumphs and the ensuing buzz soured due to overwork, financial issues, tetchy relations with the press and stress. It’s undoubtedly a partisan crowd: low-resolution footage of a digger on the large screen at the back of the stage elicits a cheer for reasons that may remain obscure for the not fully initiated.

However, there’s barely a whiff of cosy nostalgia or staleness suggesting a band going through the motions to bag an overdue payday on show tonight.

Twenty-one years since they initially downed tools, Beta Band (dressed in boilersuits on a stage decorated with foliage and enough percussion instruments to launch a music shop) remain as uncompromisingly ramshackle and unpredictably eclectic, forever precariously balancing on the edge of disjointed messiness in order to unearth transcendental grooves, as they were when they first emerged from St Andrews in the late ’90s to help hose away the last remnants of Britpop’s backwards-gazing, self-congratulatory smugness.

This unexpected but welcome reunion has been pitched as a celebration of the band’s debut album-length release, 1998’s The Three EPs, which arguably remains Beta Band’s definitive statement and rightly dominates tonight’s generous, 16-song setlist.

An attempt to capture the loosely-knitted, densely layered, genre-bending (folk, psychedelia, funk, space rock, hip hop, dub) cut-and-paste patchwork of the band’s finest works leads to moments of mind-bogglingly prodigious mid-song instrument-swapping, whilst someone is heroically keeping track of triggering the samples that are often a necessity as four multi-instrumentalists tackle recreating studio constructs that pack in countless parts.

During She’s The One (an early highlight in a set that gets gradually more and more assured and hypnotic), Mason strolls casually from mid-stage tambourine-shaking to rattling an elevated percussion before finally settling to bash out a groove on the bongos while keyboardist John Maclean (also a renowned film-maker, which may help explain tonight’s striking and endearingly idiosyncratic visuals) plucks away at a mouth harp, with the song’s disorientating web of ricocheting harmonies and unstoppable forward-momentum gradually taking flight around them.

Elsewhere, there are disarming reminders of just how strong the material beneath the band’s genre-defying, still fresh-sounding musical collages really is. During the final section of the locked-in mantra Push It Out, Mason sits again at the bongos to truly emphasise the song’s beautifully pleading melody line, previously buried underneath a claustrophobically dense mix, rendering a propulsively and murkily funky tune profoundly and unexpectedly moving.

Arguably the band’s best-known moment, a generously extended cruise through Dry The Rain turns into an euphoric singalong that no one seems that keen to let go of: the four-piece are limbering up to start the next number as the ever-enthusiastic capacity audience start to belt out the refrain again at top volume, to the visible amusement and appreciation of the band.

That’s not the end of tonight’s generously portioned show: in fact, a glowing take on Squares (off 2001’s Hot Shots II) during the encores suggests that Beta Band may have procured even more anthemic material than their trumpet-enriched, Hollywood-approved (the song featured in 2000 film High Fidelity) evergreen.

However, the refrain of Dry The Rain (“say it out loud, it’ll be OK”) provides not only warily optimistic balm for these troubled times but also a neat summary for a triumphant, joyous show that proves comprehensively that reunions don’t always pale next to the original model.