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The Aliens: Space Is The Place

After the Beta Band crashed and burned under a dark cloud of drugs and mental illness, some of its members picked up the pieces to form a fitter, happier psych/pop group called the Aliens. By Neil Ferguson

It’s a balmy early Friday evening in one of the less salubrious neighborhoods of the nation’s capital, and I find myself backstage in a venue called the Rock & Roll Hotel. I’m here to talk to cosmic Scottish three-piece the Aliens, who consist of erstwhile Beta Band members John Maclean and Robin Jones, plus Beta Band founder and occasional Lone Pigeon Gordon Anderson.

They’ve just finished soundchecking on the fourth night of their inaugural U.S. tour and have agreed to discuss their days as art students, the Beta Band and their current incarnation. The Aliens are enjoying widespread critical acclaim for their debut album, Astronomy For Dogs (Astralwerks), a gorgeously frazzled, kaleidoscopic explosion of Day-Glo psych/pop. Right now, however, I can barely get a word in. As they reminisce about how they met, the conversation rapidly descends into inter-band piss-taking, with each member ridiculing the worthlessness of the others’ individual tastes at the time.

“Fuck me, John,” splutters Anderson. “You were into some really bad dance stuff. The Brand New Heavies?”

“Yeah, well,” counters Maclean, “you were listening to what’s quite possibly the worst album of all time.”

Which is?

“Yoko Ono’s solo album (Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band),” sniffs Anderson. “It’s brilliant, actually.”

At this point, both Maclean and Anderson turn on Jones, who’s been silent throughout, and castigate him for his apparent love of prog rock.

“I liked Jimi Hendrix!” he protests.

“Sure, there’s nothing wrong with Hendrix,” says Anderson. “But some of the stuff you were listening to, I mean, really … ”

“Right,” concedes Jones with a faint tinge of guilt. “By the time I got to art college, I was into Emerson Lake & Palmer.”

Maclean glares at Jones with utter disbelief. “Pixie dancing music.”

By now, Jones looks mildly aggrieved. “I can see why it would irritate people,” he says. “It still does have its moments, but I would never inflict it on unsuspecting passersby.”

The Aliens are exactly what you imagine all bands should be like before the music-business crap, the lawyers and the years of interminable bickering. There’s an air of possibility about them, a sense of creative freedom. The very fact that they’re here at all is a minor miracle. Because the story of the Aliens—and, by necessity, the Beta Band—is one of mental illness, depression, near-bankruptcy and, oh yes, demonic possession. A laugh riot, it’s not.

Maclean and Anderson, childhood friends from the seaside town of St. Andrews, encountered Jones at Edinburgh College of Art in the early ’90s.

“It was my first day and they cornered me in the canteen,” says Jones. “They really intimidated me.”

“You’ve got to remember,” interjects Maclean, “that he looked like he was about 13.”

“Really?” says Anderson. “I thought he looked like an 11-year-old prodigy.”

The three became friends, sharing flats together, creating art and, tentatively, music. By the mid-’90s, they found themselves in London, with Jones and Maclean based in Shepherd’s Bush and Anderson in Streatham. Anderson had been joined by Steve Mason, a drummer and friend from Edinburgh who, frustrated by percussive duties, started singing and writing songs. He and Anderson scraped together some cash to buy a couple of four-tracks and began recording, resulting in a rough cut of what would become the Beta Band’s genius Champion Versions EP, featuring instant classic and John Cusack fave “Dry The Rain.” Jones subsequently joined them on drums, then Maclean came on board, offering samples, beats and, more importantly, a sense of focus and direction. Anderson, meanwhile—homesick, broke, drinking heavily and battering back mushrooms, acid and dope at a steady clip—was flitting between London and Scotland, much to his bandmates’ frustration.

“He just wouldn’t commit,” says Maclean. “I was like, ‘C’mon, let’s do this. It could be the best band in the world.’ And [Anderson was] like, ‘Oh, I dunno. I’m not sure.’ We were signed by EMI pretty much straight away; they put us in the studio and wanted us to play our first gig. It all came to a real crunch, whether Gordon was really in the band or not.”

Life, according to Anderson, had become pretty sweet by 1996. He met a girl (“future wife material, you know?”), and the Beta Band had been signed. But his mental state quickly began to deteriorate.

“I just started to lose it,” says Anderson. “We did a couple of sessions in the studio. I can’t really remember the first one so well, but the second one, I just remember looking into a mirror and suddenly seeing this horrible creature staring right back at me. I really did feel as if I’d been demonically possessed.”

“Looking back on it,” says Maclean, “it wasn’t as if [Anderson] was fine and it just happened suddenly. From my point of view, it was up and down. And up and down, and up and down, you know? He was like Don Quixote. He was running around imagining everything’s fine, and we were really starting to worry.”

The rest of the Beta Band held an emergency meeting to decide if they could continue. Around this time, Anderson headed home to Scotland for good.

“Within a week of me feeling ill and starting to see things, I just needed to get whatever was in my head out of there,” says Anderson, who was diagnosed with acute psychosis. “I really couldn’t stand it. I spent the next three months in bed. I had a Bible and some tapes, and it was three months of absolute hell. I tried to explain to [my parents] what I thought was true—which I still believe is true—and that was that I was demonically possessed.”

Four years of periodic institutionalization were to follow for Anderson. The Beta Band, meanwhile, was taking off and becoming a darling of the U.K. and U.S. music press.

“How did I feel?” asks Anderson when questioned about his reaction to his friends’ success. “I’ll tell you how I felt. Believe me, I had far more important things to worry about. I felt like there was fire shooting up my legs. My skin itched, there were constant voices in my head, I was surrounded by weird people in a hospital, strapped down against my will, absolute hell, absolute hell. About 144 sessions of electro-shock therapy. Nights of torture. My mind was in so much pain, I had absolutely no concern with anything else, certainly not material things. I didn’t think about anyone.”

It was, needless to say, a difficult period all around.

“I’d go up and visit him, just as a mate, a friend,” says Maclean. “You see, the thing was, the Beta Band was a difficult band to be in. Steve had problems of his own. He suffered bouts of depression and would spend a lot of time in bed. Recording the first album was a pretty dark place for him; just talking about it was painful for him. I’d go back up to Scotland thinking it would offer some relief, but you’d visit Gordon … ”

“I didn’t fully understand what was going on with Gordon, to be honest,” admits Jones. “I remember visiting the hospital, feeling awkward and thinking that Gordon had his life stolen. I thought, ‘Well, I hope he gets better—then the band will be really good.’”

Maclean recalls visiting the hospital with a tape of the completed version of “Dry The Rain”: “I played it to you (Gordon), and you were in bed. We were both crying; it was a pretty intense moment.”

“Was it?” asks Anderson

“Yeah, it was. You were just like [in a distinctly under-impressed Larry David tone], ‘Meh. It’s OK, I suppose. You could have done better.’”

But life in the Beta Band was not panning out the way the remaining members had expected. They were critically lauded for their sense of adventure, for the way they mixed hip hop, dub, psych/pop and folk into a seamless whole, forming an antithesis to the white-boy conservativism of Britpop that raged around them. But quality control was never one of the Beta Band’s strong points: For every moment of inspired brilliance, there would be two of indulgent, stoned nonsense. The group’s self-titled 1999 debut was a prime example. Jones, however, is adamant in his defense.

“I thought it was amazing,” he declares. “Best of the lot. Seriously. Not so much musically, just the whole idea of it. No one was doing stuff like it; it was originally gonna be three hours long. There was a whole ambient album that we didn’t include at the last minute. There were just loads of ideas. It could have done with some editing, but it’s just good that it exists.”

“We were a bit too experimental at times,” says Maclean. “A bit too indulgent.”

“Yeah, but at least we did it,” says Jones. “I mean, it wasn’t exactly Oasis, was it? The Beta Band was what it was, and we’re still proud of it. But it was a constant struggle throughout. Being in a band, you still have to survive, and we always felt like we were underwater. By the time we made the last album (2004’s Heroes To Zeroes), we thought, ‘This could be it, this could be the one.’ We could finally get our heads above water. And we got bad reviews, and radio wouldn’t play us yet again. It just became so tiring.”

It all came to a head in Paris while touring to promote Heroes. “[We were] sitting backstage in this wee room,” says Jones. “We were doing TV and radio, and Steve had an issue, because the performance hadn’t gone well. So there were comments like, ‘Well, that was shite,’ and it all came out, you know, ‘I’ve had enough of the band.’”

If anything, the split was something of a relief.

“I think it had been going wrong for the last two albums,” says Jones. “The recording sessions were just so miserable. Too intense. It was probably a massive shock, and it affected us in different ways. (Bassist) Richard (Greentree) had a massive drug problem for the next year, just totally depressed. I was totally wrecked most of the time, I lost my girlfriend, I lost my flat in London. You don’t realize, but you’ve been doing something that intensely for so long and then to come out of it suddenly … ”

Maclean and Jones eventually headed back to Scotland, where Anderson had begun his recovery thanks to a Christian couple from Auchtermuchty, a small town famous as the home of the Proclaimers.

“They told me they’d take me in and pray for me,” says Anderson. “Because I do believe in Jesus, I have faith. And it was good staying with two nice people who cared about me and prayed for me in the morning. Generally, just having a pretty normal life. Within about three months, I was feeling better. I was off the medication; I mean, I’d never really taken the drugs in the hospital anyway, unless they forced me to, which usually consisted of injections in the arse. But anyway, the couple got married, and within about three or four months, I’d moved into a flat in St. Andrews, was recording music and going out drinking and meeting girls. I got better from there on. Mind you, looking back, I’d go to the pub with John or Robin and they’d grab me and say, ‘Gordon, when you’re trying to chat girls up, saying to them, “Hi, I’m Gordon and I’m demonically possessed,” isn’t really the best opening line.’”

He breaks into hysterical laughter.

“The two of them would look at me and say, ‘No, seriously, try not mentioning the demons. Please.’”

Knowing that Anderson was feeling better and back in circulation (he’d even released sparse, stripped-down home recordings under the Lone Pigeon moniker), Jones and Maclean approached him about working together again. Feeling burned out after the trauma of the Beta Band and with Anderson eager to make up for lost time, the trio got together in a small country cottage just outside Edinburgh. They decided to do three or four songs, bang them out for a self-funded EP and watch what happened. Halfway through recording what would become 2006’s Alienoid Starmonica EP, EMI called Maclean to see what, if anything, he was working on. He sent EMI the demos, the label liked them, and the group was once again dragged into the music business.

This time around, however, there’s a sense of optimism. The Aliens are both a continuation of the Beta Band’s anything-goes spirit and something different.

“Well, it can never be totally different,” Anderson points out with a wry grin. “’Cause we’re still using the same gear, the same drummer. John’s still here. They have their sensibilities, I have mine. Mind you, I have been mistaken for Steve quite a lot. Anyway, we’re from the same place, we’ve known each other for years, we have the same music taste.”

“No we fuckin’ don’t!” spits Maclean incredulously. “We all have very different tastes in music, remember? [Deeply sarcastic] I really love the Brand New Heavies, and [Jones] is really into pixie music.”

More than anything, the Aliens are about a return to freedom, expression and creativity. They’re a ridiculously heady mix of P-Funk, White Album-era Beatles, late-’60s Moody Blues, the KLF and all points in between. They’re as far removed from studied cool as you can possibly get, with an almost childlike naivete and an endearing sense of the absurd. (Onstage, Anderson resembles an amphetamine-crazed member of the Hair Bear Bunch.) It is, as Jones notes, almost as if they’ve come full circle.

“The music scene hasn’t really changed a great deal since we first came around,” he says. “We just wanted to do something more human. You know, ‘This is who we are.’ There’s still far too many bands out there doing really crap Lou Reed impersonations. It’s all just really stale and predictable.”

In the meantime, the Aliens are working on a second album, with four or five songs already hashed out.

“It’s going to be crazier, a lot crazier,“ smiles Maclean.

“Darker,” insists Anderson. “A lot darker, more twisted. Not evil, though, just twisted.”

It’s at this point that Anderson makes a confession: During the recording of Astronomy For Dogs, he started to have relapses, hearing voices again.

“It was a bit of a struggle,” says Anderson. “I wasn’t there too much to work on the mixes, and so by the time I got to hear the completed record, I was like, ‘Why did you leave that off?’”
Still, as he points out with remarkable understatement, it could be a lot worse.

“You know what? I can still remember looking out from the hospital and thinking, ‘Will my life ever be like it was?’ And it is now. It is better. It’s like heaven.”