Zlatan Ibrahimovic might have had an autobiography to sell, but his recent comments about Pep Guardiola and Arsène Wenger reminded us how rare it is to have a sportsman whose character has more colours than beige.

“You only have to watch any old sports documentary, whether it is about Brian Clough or James Hunt or Niki Lauda or George Best, and you look at them and go, f***ing hell these people were heroes,” says former leader of Beta Band, Steve Mason.

“The reason it has changed is high- profile celebrities who are paid all this money are not allowed to have personalities, there is a party line that has to be toed.”

Mason, the man who turned down more than a million dollars to sell Beta Band tracks for car adverts before terminating the group’s contract with EMI owing the label £1.2m, reckons capitalism has touched every part of our daily lives in a negative way.

“Football is the most glaringly obvious example of how something that was the hub of the community for a lot of people has been turned into a greedy, grasping, multi-billion dollar industry, which has nothing to do with community, nothing to do with local pride and passion, and everything to do with maximising profit.”

As advertising money flies in, the humanity and honesty disappear.

Last Of The Heroes, taken from Mason’s second solo record, Monkey Minds In Devil’s Time, opens with Brazilian commentary and the sound of screaming engines, before shuffling drums and down-tempo, staccato bass come in.

Mason is a motor-racing man. He’s sampled the crackled voice from the press box at Donnington race track in 1993. He reckons the race bookended a time of sportsmen with personalities. (Incidentally, English football’s Premier League completed its first season the same year.) Ayrton Senna’s performance that day, starting the grid on fourth and ending lap one in the wet in first, is a marker before Michael Schumacher began to dominate.

“It ushered in a new era of people who repeated the script, were human adverts, walking, talking extensions of the advertising campaign, and every single race was incredibly dull and impossible to get passionate about.”

When sponsors are stood next to drivers at the end of races you are left with a sport muzzled by financiers who control it with money. You end up with “people who appear to have absolutely no personality whatsoever”.

Electronic folk pioneers

Mason, on the other hand, is a man with thoughtful, considered opinions on most things. He’s now into his 40s and seems to be in a good place. His time with hip-hop electronic folk pioneers the Beta Band – at one point in the 1990s the most credible new name to drop – included crippling depression as well as the excellent The Three EP’s, before they disbanded in 2004.

After an electronic side project, Black Affair, made with an ex-girlfriend who shared his love for 1980s electro music, came his debut solo effort with synth-pop producer Richard X, whose credits included Annie, Kelis and Sugababes.

Mason politely cuts our call halfway through in order to bring his washing in; he’s at home in Fife and it’s raining. On his return to the phone, he explains he recorded half the new record in the studio attached to his house and did the rest of it in Hackney with Dan Carey.

His time in London coincided with the riots, which found their way into the record.

“Watching that unfold you realise there is this lost generation of young people for which party politics, the House of Commons, means less than nothing. They have no interest. They think politics is something that happens to other people. They have no power. Every decision in the House of Commons affects them in a negative way.”

For Mason, not enough people in the entertainment industry are talking about society at large, which is why he is tackling bigger ideas than before, even getting “concept” on his fans.

“There has been politics in my music since Hot Shots II, but it was disguised because the rest of the band didn’t want me to go down that road.

“I cloaked everything up but it’s on there if people wanted to decipher it, which not many people could be bothered to do.

Now it is time for Mason to condense all his ideas, “get some form of clarity across about what I feel about society, about our lives and where we are as human beings in the grand scheme of things and who the real enemy is in all our lives”.

He believes it is the corrupt establishment and consumer capitalism and the values it promotes.

“I could talk about how this album is the best record I’ve ever made, but nobody is interested in that. But because of the content of the record I can have a discussion like this with people all over the world, not shy away from it.”