An Evening with Steve Mason - Waterstones Deansgate

We are delighted to welcome Beta Band frontman Steve Mason to Deansgate, celebrating the release of his long-awaited biography, Failure Is Always An Option.

"Over the course of these pages, I will airdrop you in – and implausibly – extract you out of some of the most interesting moments of my life. I will try to stick mostly to the truth, or my truth anyway, but I never ever let the truth get in the way of a good story so, you know, think on."

The musical maverick tells all in this firsthand account of the fiercely independent band that set the 90s music scene alight.

Doors at 6pm. Ticket with Book option includes a copy of Failure Is Not An Option, to be collected at the event.
About Failure Is Not An Option
“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.

“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
About the author
STEVE MASON is a founding member and front man of the Beta Band and a critically acclaimed Mercury Music Prize-nominated solo artist who has released five albums under his own name.He lives in Brighton.

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