- Observer Music Monthly, Sunday 17 September 2006
Gordon Anderson is having a moment. He's been up for two days and is dog tired. Eyes puffy, face ruddy. He keeps brushing away the thatch of brown hair that flops over his eyes. He's frustrated by his inability to stumble in harmony with his bandmates, keyboard player John Maclean and drummer Robin Jones. The Aliens are filming the video to their first single 'The Happy Song' in an east London alley. They have to walk down the road, check their watches, trip up and look behind them. It's a homage to Buster Keaton slapstick that will incorporate all manner of in-camera visual effects carefully planned out by the band themselves. 'It's all about mathematics,' says keyboardist Maclean. In other words, timing. The same could be said of the Aliens' emergence from the ashes of the Beta Band.
In a roundabout way, the Aliens are the alpha to the Beta Band's omega. Hailing from Edinburgh, the three Aliens were founder members of that idiosyncratic outfit, along with Steve Mason and sole Englishman Richard Greentree. But at their very first studio session for EMI in 1997, Anderson began to lose the plot. 'We were only there for a few days,' says McLean, 'and over that time it slowly became evident that Gordon ...'
'I was getting really ill,' Anderson finishes. 'I had this experience of being demonised, this thing had gone inside me. I couldn't understand what it was. But over the course of the three days it was becoming me and I was becoming something else.' Anderson was sent back to Scotland. 'I. I spent six weeks in bed. And almost the next eight years in mental hospitals. I had 144 electric shocks to the head. Just years of absolute hell.'
Without Anderson, the Beta Band made three acclaimed albums, but called it quits in 2004. By then, their lost comrade had largely recovered, found God and even recorded again under the alias Lone Pigeon. (His brother, Kenny, works in the same field, as King Creosote.) Recently, he started the Aliens with Jones and MacLean, delving into thousands of songs that he'd been storing up.
'Gordon's just got a talent,' says Maclean. 'He's not aware of what he's doing, he's just doing it. He's so unselfconscious.' This is what makes the Aliens so refreshing. Anderson's lyrics are either simple to the point of inanity, or questing and philosophical. But 'The Happy Song' is so delirious it sounds too good to be true. Was Gordon trying to cheer himself up when he wrote it? 'Well, I was happy then,' he answers, as if stating the blindingly obvious.
Maclean believes the climate is right for their return. 'The music scene now feels similar to when the Beta Band started with all these slightly retro, guitar-based bands.' The Aliens are looking to the future.
· 'The Happy Song' is out now on Pet Rock/EMI, with an album due in 2007
