100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #23 The Beta Band – Squares

Released: 2001

I have a memory I’m unable to substantiate, that The Beta Band performed on the long lost music show The White Room, maybe playing Squares, maybe playing something else. In this sliver of recollection the band are all sat down on the floor in a hazy white room playing their instruments, but age and time elapsed since then have erased the rest forever.

Forever of course is a mighty long time and this was something the quartet didn’t have, even if they didn’t know that for sure when their second album Hot Shots II was released in 2001. Whilst it was certainly better received than their self titled debut – which even singer Steve Mason described in retrospect as “fucking awful” – the group’s on/off label struggles and mounting debts would eventually see them acrimoniously split three years later.

It’s perhaps fitting that their greatest song post Dry The Rain would be a slice of gorgeous freewheeling electronica wrapped around a sample from a song called Daydream. Squares was The Beta Band at their psychedelic pop best, a track on which Mason lay amongst the flowers whiling away the time in a haze, disconnected and like my memory, fragmented, distant and quite possibly a figment of lost imagination.