The Beta Band burst on to the music scene in 1997 with the first of their three EPs, kicking off with this tune, Dry The Rain.

The film of High Fidelity, transferring Nick Hornby’s million-selling novel from Holloway to Chicago, put its finger on the pulse of music nerdery.

My abiding memory is of Rob, the broken-hearted record store guy, putting on a Stiff Little Fingers record to demonstrate to a Green Day that SLF (and The Clash) were their influences.

The punchline arrives as another customer immediately asks: “Is this the new Green Day?”

The gag is referenced again when Rob puts on this tune, Dry The Rain, and confidently predicts that he will immediately sell five copies of The Three EPs. Inevitably, another customer inevitably informs Rob that “It’s good.”

Because he’s a music nerd, and a record store guy, he instantly replies, barely suppressing a sneering eye roll: “I know.”

I can’t remember if that was the first time I heard The Beta Band but it may have been. It’s a better story if it was, so let’s stick with that.

For a lot of us, The Beta Band’s story began with a single scene in High Fidelity. Musically, the turn of the millennium was a bit of an in-between period, without a single defining style.

The Beta Band, formed by three friends from Edinburgh, reflected that in their eclectic melange of post-grunge balladry, breakbeats, funk, folk, psychedelia, electronica, trip-hop and acid house.

Some say they inaugurated the “folktronica genre” while the band’s Steve Mason saw them as a reaction against the banality of BritpopUnder it all lay some Madchester undertones, which made them as popular with Oasis and their fans as with Radiohead – with whom they toured – spanning both diverse sides of the late-Nineties music scene.

I would love to have seen their first gig at the Water Rats in 1997 when they premiered Dry The Rain, with its distinctive trumpet riffs by Jonathan Levien.

I never felt their subsequent albums matched the impact of those first three EPs so I’m glad to know that the recently reformed Beta Band are currently on tour playing those songs.