Steve Mason: 'When Johnson was in power it felt like every day you were walking into a new reality'

Nonetheless the former singer and guitarist with much-missed Scottish indie group The Beta Band is determined to look for positives where he can find them. “I suppose I’m a believer that there are more things that connect us than pull us apart,” he says.

When it comes to the current Government, however, his appraisal is withering. “You’ve had a political party in power for quite some time now that are more interested in amplifying differences and trying to tear communities apart in order to shine lights very far away from their own devious activities,” he says. “They’re more than happy to blame the more vulnerable members of our society for all of the country’s problems, up to and including very desperate people trying to get across the English Channel in broken old boats, women and children, young men.”

He suggests things reached “some new level of madness” when “someone like Gary Lineker points at the Government and says ‘Look at what they’re doing’ and the Press react as you would almost expect them to react about the act that the Tories are actually doing”.

Then there was Boris Johnson’s three years as Prime Minister. “When Johnson was in power it felt like every day you were walking into a new reality where you’re expected to go along with this idea that we live in a democracy when just by his very existence, he was proving that wasn’t the case any more,” Mason says. “When you can lie unaccountably in Parliament, to me that is not a democracy, that’s something else entirely. And when you have a huge Tory party donor who’s now head of the BBC, and you see what’s going on there. The Tories want to get rid of the BBC, they have done for a while, so what is going on there with all this Gary Lineker stuff?”

The day before we spoke, much attention had been focused on Boris Johnson’s appearance before a cross-party committee of MPs investigating whether he had deliberately misled the House of Commons. Mason, it turns out, was not one of those glued to his TV. “I don’t ever feel the need to have him on my television again, I’ve known what that guy was from the very start,” he says. “I know people that worked with him when he was the Mayor of London and they told me that he was fundamentally uninterested in work, fundamentally uninterested in the job, and fundamentally uninterested in making any sort of rational decision based on weighing up the facts and listening to advisers and gathering as much information as you could before you made what you thought was the best decision.

“He was prepared to make any decision whatsoever and whatever the consequences were that was (that), because the consequences of those decisions will never affect him, other than he will lose popularity, but the consequences of him and this group of gruesome individuals ram-raiding their way through this country and crashing the country onto the rocks, they’re felt by the 98 or 99 per cent. We’re going to have to deal with these consequences for generations to come. So I don’t feel the need to have him in my home in any way, shape or form.”

Mason says he feels “embarrassed about (his) own naivety” that social progress made since the 1980s on issues such as racism, homophobia and misogyny is being undone in current times. “You like to think of yourself as someone who’s read a bit and knows a little bit about what’s going on in the world, and likes to also think that society is naturally progressive and that people want to move towards some kind of Utopia where society is very compassionate and loving and people are looking out for each other and taking care of themselves regardless of race, creed, colour or sex,” he says.

He considers his own personal journey from being a car mechanic “very much involved in that kind of toxic male way of being” to holding very different views today. As a young man he says he “never felt comfortable” with sexist attitudes, then he discovered art and artists “and realised that the men who behave in a pseudo macho way, when they talk about women in a certain way, they’re generally homophobic, generally but not always racist, and that way of thinking and those attitudes come from a very weak mind, from someone who is desperate to blend into a group rather than have the courage to step outside that group and perhaps do some criticl thinking of their own”.

“When I met artists I realised how much bravery there was in something like writing a poem or writing a song about how you feel and performing it in front of other people,” he says. “I just became far more interested in that and quit being a car mechanic and went full-time into trying to become a songwriter.”

Mason argues that Brothers & Sisters is “not really a party political statement”, adding: “It’s really about trying to find spirituality in the face of society and politics in general globally trying to divide everyone. It’s more about trying to find courage within yourself to stand in the face of all the horrors that we’re being presented with and refuse to weaken in your resolve that you’re going to love all your brothers and sisters the same. The differences between us are minute. Ultimately everybody wants the same thing – they want some form of shelter, some form of heat, some form of food and to be happy – and every difference that follows that is generally very small. We live in a country where we should be perfectly capable of providing those things for everyone who’s here.”

Among the array of musicians on the album is the singer Javed Bashir, who features on the song Brixton Fish Fry. Mason says he has a long-held interest in Hindi music that was first inspired by a former girlfriend. “I just couldn’t believe what I’d heard – the melodies, the instrumentation, the sonics, more than anything, the way they’d been recorded was just so raw, and I’m always drawn to raw things rather than polished things. It was always my intention at some point to try and bring in some of those things that I loved from Indian and Pakistani music, but it’s got to be the right time and right set of songs.

“With the context and content of the album in mind, I thought that this was a good time to do a large amount of collaborations and bring in some of the things that immigration and having a more global view have brought to me and had a positive impact on my life, so I started to think about who would be great to have on a vocal. On YouTube there’s Coke sessions where they went to India and Pakistan and filmed these seasons of sessions with all different types of musicians and one of them that I was watching was Saieen Zahoor, his vocal is breathtaking but he’s really getting on a bit. I thought this guy’s had a log, illustrious career, I wonder who the younger people coming up are. The next session I happened to watch featured Javed Bashir singing alongside Saieen Zahoor, I thought wow, that’s my man.”

Brothers & Sisters is out now. Steve Mason plays at Sheffield Academy 2 on April 21 and the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on April 27.