Failure is Always An Option

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