Now based on the south coast of England, Steve Mason is excited to return to Fife for the first time in a while to headline the Music All-Dayer at Dunfermline’s Outwith Festival this weekend.
The sometime Beta Band member, now a prolific solo artist on the same label as Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand, grew up in north-east Fife.
It was between there and Edinburgh that the Beta Band were formed, and Mason admits he misses it.
“My mum moved out of Fife about six or seven years ago and my dad moved back to his hometown of Leeds a few months ago,” he says.
“I’ve been away for about ten years, so other than to see my mates, I don’t have much reason to go back. I really miss it a lot, I’m constantly looking at property to see if I could move back – as if I could persuade my wife to move!”
Mason currently lives not far from Brighton, where his daughter is settled at school, so he doesn’t think any move is imminent.
In fact, he says England’s south coast is much like the coastal part of Fife he’s used to.
“It’s a good mix, it’s a little bit like where I grew up in Fife, in that you have the sea, and you also have really nice countryside, with the South Downs. Still, there’s something really amazing about Fife, I was very lucky to grow up there.
“It’s got so much amazing coastline, then the countryside on the interior is really pretty. I guess it’s a lot to do with familiarity too, because I know every single road and every single little town in north-east Fife.
“There’s something really nice about appreciating something you took for granted when you were a kid, then you go away, and when you come back you think, this is a really magical place. That’s got a lot to do with it.”
First ever Dunfermline gig for Fifer Steve Mason
For such a well-travelled musician, Mason has surprisingly never played a gig in Dunfermline before.
He’s excited about that too, to perform in “a city dripping with history”, and at a diverse festival whose bill also features director Andrew Cumming’s Highlands-shot Palaeolithic horror film The Origin and an appearance by former PM Gordon Brown.
“It’s funny,” he says. “I used to see Gordon Brown on the train in Fife quite a lot, before he was in government.”
Mason is appearing at the Music All-Dayer alongside Welsh-American indie dream-pop outfit the Joy Formidable, breakthrough Fife singer-songwriter Cammy Barnes, Bristolian rockers Phoxjaw and Kirsten Adamson, daughter of the late Stuart Adamson, who has developed a powerful and distinctive voice of her own as a celebrated singer-songwriter.
He will perform songs from this year’s Brothers & Sisters, his seventh solo album and fifth under his own name.
“During Covid people were asking me, are you writing your lockdown album?” says Mason.
“In all honesty, who the hell wants to hear an album about my experiences of Covid? Everybody just wants to bury that and forget all about it, so I never had any intentions of doing that.
“What I wanted to do instead was create something like an oasis in the middle of all that fear and uncertainty, so I went back to spiritual feelings – not necessarily feelings connected with organised religion, but that essence of what it means to be a human being.
“Those spiritual things which bind us all together, whether we realise it or not, and the fact we’re all going through a very similar experience, to lesser and more extreme degrees,” he continues.
“I found myself listening to a lot of American gospel music from the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s, and what I like about that stuff is, you don’t have to subscribe to any religion to get something from it. It cuts into something very spiritual which lies within us. It doesn’t require you to subscribe, it just requires you to listen and feel and be moved by it.
“So I wanted to try my take on how that might sound, coupled with my own musical sensibilities. I guess it’s about looking inside yourself for answers, and realising you have more strength within yourself than perhaps you realise.”
Mason has performed this album with a five-piece gospel choir, but for this show it will be a stripped-down entourage of just him and a keyboard player.
“It’s still a powerful thing,” he explains. “I don’t know what it is, maybe the feeling behind these songs or the positivity, but there’s something incredibly enjoyable for me about singing them live, I’m able to lose myself in the performance in a way I’ve never really done before. They haven’t failed to move a crowd yet.”
Outwith Festival 2023 is a triple threat
Following its closure due to Covid, this will be Outwith’s second annual festival back following a team of dedicated volunteers’ efforts to revive it last year.
It clearly went well, because – as festival organiser Michelle McWilliams explains – this year’s programme is three times bigger than in 2022.
As well as arts gigs like Kieran Hodgson’s new stand-up show Big in Scotland, Tommy Smith playing jazz in Dunfermline Abbey and poetry with Scots Makar Kathleen Jamie and Peter Mackay, it involves food and foraging events in Dunfermline Glen and a range of creator-led masterclasses, including Victoria Mackenzie on historical fiction, Glow Up’s Yong-Chin on makeup and Cora Bissett on acting.
“Outwith is a small, friendly wee festival that people can fit in with their lives,” says McWilliams.
“It’s culture that’s really accessible because it’s in a city centre, people can come by bus or train and do other things while they’re in town. We want it to be for as many people as possible.”
The Outwith Festival is at various venues in Dunfermline until Sunday September 10. The Music All-Dayer takes place on Saturday September 9.
