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BEATS OF LOVE

44. It's Not Too Beautiful by The Beta Band

AHEAD OF of watching the documentary film Hostile tomorrow, I've dusted down some old VHS videos and had an afternoon on the sofa. 

Reminding myself how thrillingly effective this Beta Band song sounds in the superb One Day In September. Michael Douglas deserves a lot of credit too for his sparse narrative that recounts the sorriest of sagas. Although the film was criticized for being both naïve and gratuitously violent, it recounts a story seldom told and for that reason alone is still riveting.

The song itself best exemplifies Steve Mason's fatigued yet deeply comforting delivery and their squelchy throbbing notes culminate in the most dynamic use of a John Barry sample bar none before building everything back up again from scratch. The band wanted more studio time, but with less always being more, that would've been folly. If you're singing about dusty rooms, you don't want a backdrop of polished sheen; you want this slightly damaged drama. It's perfect.  

At the time of its release, I was expecting redundancy and clearing out dead-files. A dusty room if ever there was and awash with cardboard boxes and choc full of our stock-check documents that stank of stale paper and unsavoury canteen food. Only someone romantically attuned to this song and as anti-social as me would volunteer to spend hours in isolation, pretending to file them away in order. 

By the time I watched the documentary, I was working split-shifts, having been overlooked for the redundancy that was going to kick-start my musical ventures. It seemed everything I watched or read at the time made me angrier and more bitter and twisted. The beauty in the song that I could see so clearly a short time ago was now suddenly obscured.

Luckily, not viewed through the smoky prism of time, this song is now back on the stereo and once again sounding, you guessed it.