Acquitted By Mirrors, Issue 5

Many of you have asked for biographical details from Bill. So I sat him down in a pub during a break in recording and said "Tell us all about your first guitar" That always sets him off.

Yes ! That must have been when I was at Secondary School, Ings Road Secondary School in Wakefield. I started playing guitar because Ian had been bought a plastic guitar by an uncle, and he was a bit young to get into it. It had four strings and every string had a different colour because they were plastic. It was lying around the house and I started playing the Third Man theme. Then my Dad who in his younger days before he played saxophone used to play banjo, showed me three banjo chords, which applied to this toy guitar because it only had four strings. My dad tuned it for the banjo and I used to play. If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake, all that sort of thing. Then when I showed interest and kept playing these three chords over and over again he decided to buy me a real guitar. He bought me a guitar called a Zenith, it was an acoustic guitar, and it did not have a round hole it had 'F' holes, like a cello to look at - very old fashioned. It had a certificate inside signed by Ivor Moranz - and I could not play it at all because the strings were thicker than all the four strings on the plastic guitar put together, they were also metal and the thing was huge - I stuffed it in a cupboard and never touched it for about a year.

I dragged it out when I bought my first Duane Eddy record and worked out the first three notes of 'Because they're Young'. The first single I ever bought. And then at this particular school I met up with Ian Parkin(who became the first rhythm guitarist in BeBop many years later) and Ian Parkin and I were about the same level - we both knew a couple of chords. We found it easier because there were two of us, we started taking it in turns. One night we'd be round at my house and we would sit there going through Ventures records learning a few riffs, then round at his house. Until one day we hit upon the idea that instead of us both playing the chords, one of us should play lead. As I had already worked the lead melodies out, I became the lead guitarist. Then we got a guy who played biscuit tins with brown paper stretched over the top of them - the drummer. This was all performances in bedrooms. Our first performance in front of the public was at a Christmas concert at the Secondary School. We were part of the over all concert which was lots of kids getting up playing harmonicas and accordions. We had a three piece little band and we did a couple of Shadows numbers and Ventures numbers - we were called the Cosmonauts. I still have the card 'Young Instrumental Beat Group' it said on the card and it went on from there.

How did your first group start ?

The first 'proper' group that did things for money, played gigs occasionally, was a group called 'Group 66' this was in 1964 We got the title from route 66, the R&B song, because we played R&B numbers Now let me think was that before or after 'The Teenagers' - I played in a band called the Teenagers none of which were teenagers apart from me. I inherited the rhythm guitarists jacket when their rhythm guitarist got the sack - I said I was not going to join if I had to just play rhythm - I had to play lead as well. So they said well we've got a really good lead guitarist who has got a reputation as being 'the' lead guitarist in the area and he won't like someone else playing lead as well. And I said well I'm not joining unless I...I'll share it with him. So they told all this to the lead guitarist and he said well he'll have to come down and pass the audition. Well I had to play 'Sweet Georgia Brown' and swap solos with him - and I did that and I passed the audition and became second lead. He had to go rhythm on some numbers and we swapped around. I can't recall what order they were in - it was probably Group 66 first, I think I took some of the R&B numbers that I used to do into The Teenagers We played Youth Clubs more than anything else and the occasional little village hall type thing. It was basically done for a free Coca-Cola

Lets jump some time. How did you get involved with Holyground ?

I got involved with a co-operative bunch of musicians while I was at Art College. I was playing in club bands at the time but had a very personal ideal of wanting to do something very adventurous. I was heavily into imported west-coast albums. I was listening to Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Love, all that kind of American psychedelia. Well living in Wakefield at that time, there was nobody you knew who was into that at all. I was walking down an area called Kirkgate which is a fairly built up shopping area today. As I was walking down Kirkgate with some friends we heard an American import album coming from a window above a shop. We looked up and there was this gailypainted window in rainbow colours with things stuck on the window. Hippies were not the boring thing they seem to be today - the objects of derision. They were the ultimate hip thing to be. Finding someone in Wakefield into that, was like finding a punk in Scunthorpe a year before the Pistols happened. We were curious, every time we went past this house music was coming out. One day we went round the back, under an arch-way into an alley and then a court-yard round the back and there was a dilapidated door that said 'Holyground' and nothing else on the door. Above the door was a small window with an artificial leg hung in it. We knocked and this guy came down with long hair and a beard, looking very stoned. It turned out that it was a two track studio, but not really, only for friends and they recorded in a guys bedroom. They were all ex-drama and music students and they had a sort of commune there. We said we were into that kind of music and they said if you are not doing anything any night come down. So I just started going down odd nights and got roped into playing guitar. They started making this album called 'A to Austr' the songs were written by Chris Coombes with Mike Levon helping out the songwriting and doing the recording. It was all a bit of acoustic guitar, Hawaiian guitar - who can do this. I just sat in and played. There is a song called something like 'Hawaiian War Chant Love Song', l played a lot-of acoustic guitar and lifted up the bridge of my cheap solid guitar and slid a piece of metal up and down and did all these Hawaiian guitar impersonations.

And Astral Navigation?

The second album was a bit more serious - one side was what you would now call a heavy metal band - they were called Thundermother and had an entire 'A' side devoted to themselves. The 'B' side again was things put together by the same people that did A-Austr. I played some lead guitar on that. They were not my songs - I had bits and pieces, but nothing I felt was up to putting on a record. After that I got involved with a religious band for a while. Towards the end of that I found myself so motivated by the ideals that I wanted to start writing songs. It was like finding some point of view. I had written songs before but they were all a bit tedious - a bit like writing situation comedy; Instead of having something that you desperately had to write because it was burning a hole in you. When I started being involved with a religious band; because they had a definite purpose, the gospel thing and it was trying to put a message across, I felt that message was very important - I was personally motivated by the whole thing and the songs started coming from inside as opposed to just from the mind. Then when I got disillusioned with all that - some of the mysticism of it all came out in 'Northern Dream' They were not religious songs, but they were holding to principals and then came the motivation. They were the first real bunch of songs I wrote with any real conviction which ironically were done totally from the heart with no thought for what anybody thought, and they got me the deal with EMI. I maintain to this day that the minute you sit down and try and calculate something, for someone like me, it gets close but it never succeeds because it is not convincing.

Did you ever play with Hendrix ? You are shown with him on a Japanese album family tree.

No. Hendrix died before I became seriously known. I was playing at the time, but there was no way that we would have got together then.

Were you born in Yorkshire ? What can you remember from early on ?

My mum and dad met as my mum was a tap dancer, and my dad was in the band at this particular function. The night I was born in 1948, my dad was playing at the Lord Mayors Ball in Wakefield. She had gone into labour before he had gone to the gig, and she did not tell him because it was a very important gig for him - The Lord Mayors Ball, the week before Christmas and she did not want him not to go to the gig because of having the baby so she pretended every thing was alright and then went and had me. I was born in the attic of my grans house and I swear some times I can remember it. I have still got the basket I was put in when I came out of the womb. My mum gave it me literally a year and a half ago - it's like a mystical object. I have recollections of being in the attic in this basket, it must be pre-three. There are those times where the flashes you get - the pain - and for a second it's vivid - like it was yesterday - then it's gone before you can grasp it and analyse it. My gran's house has been knocked down now - it was one of those alms-type houses around a court yard. Terraced, stone steps stone flags, stone stairs going upstairs, a cellar, stone sink in the corner, very old furniture, small windows, gas - no electricity. The next door neighbour had a set of wind-up Hornby clockwork trains, I used to go around and play with them; and a pedal car the style of which is now probably a collectors item.

I would just like to point out that all the good photos in this issue are taken by Roger Groves, he is based in Leeds and also likes to jump out of planes in his spare time. The Invisibility snap shot and the blackmail corner one are of course not his. Roger worked with Bill on the Flaming Desire Video. Taking stills, some of which are now gracing the front of Chimera. These photos come from a new session this April.

Several people have picked up on the Rosicrucian symbolism in some of your drawings. Can you tell us something about your interest.

Well the Rosicrucian is a brotherhood of people who go back an long way. It is claimed that the whole thing started with the Egyptian Mystery Schools. In Egyptian times there was certain initiated knowledge which was only given to people who proved themselves capable of understanding and using that knowledge to a positive end. The Rosicrucian grew out of that - it means simply Rose and Cross. The cross is not the Christian cross as it predates Christian symbolism. The rose is also a symbol of the blossoming of your inner powers and faculties. The things that material life suppresses. It was also the basis of a very famous occult order that a lot of people will have heard of called The Order of the Golden Dawn and which exited during Victorian times. W.B. Yates, the poet, was a member as were several other prominent artists and philosophers of the time. It is basically a school of arcane knowledge being handed on from one set of people to another and kept very private and not given to everyone to know. It is the science of religion. If you think of science as being the opposite of religion - a popular view. Religion is pure faith and science is explained by proven facts, nothing is believed unless proven. The occult knowledge is a bridge between the two things. It takes Philosophy, Science and Religion and makes them work as a unity by finding common roads between them. The Rosicrucian teachings are very encyclopedic, they present you with all kinds of philosophies and show various possibilities of comparison and the roads between them. So for instance in the Rosicrucian teachings you can practice meditation and eastern yoga exercises allied to chemistry and alchemy. They actually teach scientific principals, one of the things that I find amazing, having been a musician all these years, is that they actually know more about the science of music than I know. I am learning about the rates of vibrations in certain notes and how those vibrations actually ally with certain human feelings. That is why certain keys and pitches of music appeal to you more than others; or have a certain effect on you. Some make you feel very up and bouncy and yet the same chord in a different key will make you feel melancholy. These people have all this detailed knowledge, they are doing things that Stravinsky and Schaumberg were into, and writing about it all in a very casual way, telling you vowel sounds that you can chant that they have analyzed with a spectrumgraph and they can tell you that at this frequency a feeling of joy is experienced, whilst at half the rate a feeling of lethargy occurs, double it and a feeling of anxiety occurs. Between them you can achieve a point of balance. Now if you play music that has these frequencies, you can see the results. It is all in mathematics. Now what science says is we know why something happens - but what they are saying is why. We have to know how, when we know that, then we can take it one step back and discover the cause. There is no such thing as it just happens by chance; that this whole world, that our consciousness, our abilities and our talents and our appreciation of beauty and music and art (which are nothing to do with the material world what ever) just happen, by a random coincidence, is not believable. The Universe is too vast and it is working too well for it just to 'happen' If we have a mentality and an intelligence, it is against all that to believe otherwise. Now whether you want to call it God or just a force that forms things - there is an ultimate course. Now that course is probably beyond knowledge, but it is there and you can approach it more closely than science alone does, and religion alone does. A combination of the two with philosophy and reason and intellect allow you to get the closest. Now the Rosicrucian teachings are encyclopedic they cover a huge amount of ground. It is a work that will last you a life time. In fact it will last longer than your lifetime, if you start on it now and devote time to it through out your life; it will pay off in the next life. Reincarnation is part of it - bodies are just forms that are inhabited by a force, not just the conscious but also the subconscious. We are living this life, here, under a set of laws that have evolved over the years. Some are good and some are bad, good and bad happen, and as you sit here and watch it going on around you, there is always a little bit of you that is absolute. That sits back and occasionally gives you a quick glimpse. The Rosicrucian teachings tell you how to balance these things. How to control the two thirds of your mind that you do not use, how to get that two thirds in operation. It also teaches you how to use that third, how to open the gates so that some of it comes through. None of this is in the way that drugs open it up in a random fashion, a barrage of information that your conscious mind cannot control. This is in a way that is tutored. The teachings are in stages, they take you through a little bit at a time. It is this mixture of philosophy, science, religion, art and you learn them in stages like a school. Art is very important and comes very heavily into it. Most of the prime Rosicrucians of the past have been some of the greatest artists and scientists of the century. Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Debussy. The reason that I became interested in it all was because most of the people I admired were involved with the Rosicrucian. One of the things that I still find interesting, is that it does not admit people of lower intellect, and it does this out of choice, because the knowledge that is embodied in the teachings is beyond the casual thinker. It only makes itself known to people who wish to explore.

All I can say to anybody who is interested is there are lots and lots of books. There are good shops that specialise and care about it. There is a shop in Leeds called The Sorcerers Apprentice that covers the whole range, from positive to negative, without any kind of moral judgement. It is not something to be toyed with, it is not a badge to wear, it is very personal.

Invisibility Exhibition 1983

Overleaf is a very rare photograph of all the participants of The Invisibility Exhibition '83. Rare because it proved very difficult to keep all the participants together. In fact close inspection of the photo shows that it is missing a few 'actors'

The shows took place in Britain in February and March of this year, and were intended as an alternative to the "decadent myth of the popular music tour"

We tried to cover as many towns as possible within the short period - but did, I am afraid, miss out some areas that we really wanted to play. The extravaganza was booked in each local area by a local promoter, in some areas we could not find a venue or a promoter who understood our intentions. When that happened we were unable to play there. The music that Bill performed was "written, played and recorded on low-tech domestic equipment at the home studio 'The Echo Observatory' and were specially written for the '83 Exhibition. Not to be thought of as mere 'backing' tapes but as an integral part of the performance

The running order of the participants was: The Yorkshire Actors performing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Frank Chickens from Japan with a varied set of traditional Japanese insight Richard Jobson a different set every night, poems, stories, cat calls, masterful. Bill & Ian Nelson 'The Imagination Chamber' improvisation to pre-recorded backing tracks. Bill: Guitar, Marimbas, Percussion, Keyboards. Ian: Sax and clarinet.

Films were used back-projected onto a screen and shown on the banks of TVs they were taken from The Man Ray Shorts, 2001, Blood of a Poet, Dreams that Money can Buy.

Stage lighting was kept to a minimum and for large parts of Bill's performance the films and the TVs provided the only light

The full date sheet was: Manchester 23rd Feb. Bournemouth 24th Feb Huddersfield 25th Feb Leicester 26th Feb

Glasgow 1st March Edinburgh 2nd March Leeds 3rd March Liverpool 4th March

London Dominium 16th March

Bill and Ian then played the same set but minus film and TVs at a small French art gallery on 18th March in Paris. This was the first time Bill has ever played in France. Strange fact that isn't it.

To coin a phrase,

Hello and Welcome !

Bill has spent the first part of this year with a mixture of The Invisibility Exhibition and producing records for other people. He finds it an interesting and educational sideline, and at times, harder than everything else. People who have fallen under the spell so far this year are: A Flock of Seagulls (one track on their new album a re-recording of 'Talking') Bee ( a song called The Boy, All music written and played by Bill) Fiat Lux (Two new tracks for Polydor to whom the band have now signed) Gary Newman (at the time of going to press - three tracks started, soon to be a major album)

I shall now retract everything I said in ABM 3 about the BBC Video. They have not yet reached any conclusions ( and you thought we were slow) I suspect they need some encouragement, so if you are interested in acquiring on video all the BBC footage of BeBop, Red Noise and Bill's solo output then write to: BBC Home Video, Bilton House, 54/58 Uxbridge Rd, Ealing, London W5 2TF

Still on the video front, Double Vision are putting out a video compilation in about six weeks and we have decided to let them have 'Flaming Desire' for inclusion. Other participants are believed to be PTV, The Box, Marc and the Mambas, Yello, Clock DVA, The Residents, Devo, Phil Barnes, John Savage, Neville Brodie and others It should be purchasable from Double Vision, 30 Chatsworth Ave, New Basford, Nottingham. If you write and mention the club you will get some kind of a discount they say.

Whilst the mini album is being released in Europe as 'Chimera', in USA, Canada and Japan we are intending to add two tracks from each of the last two vocal albums, so that we have a ten track album. This is because record companies in those areas find the concept hard to market, and we wish to be marketed well. The re-packaged album will be called either 'Sensoria' or maybe 'The Book of Splendour' or possibly even a combination of the two. It will have a new sleeve and notes but probably no un-released tracks.

There is a shop called 'Elpees' who appear to have copies of 'Sound on Sound' still. Not a lot so it is first come first served They also have a few of the Airage EP's. Write to 271 High Street, Drpington, Kent. or phone Orpington 22606

Chimera is pronounced K-eye mera we are led to believe. You can look up its meaning in the dictionary

Your club badge for '83 will be in the next issue. Bill has still to draw it. Your club EP contains three tracks from the BBC David Jensen session that Bill recorded specially for him. One track from the broadcast has not been included here as Bill was unhappy about the final quality. It will probably be re-recorded.

The next issue will have all the 'Chimera' lyrics, an interview with Ian Nelson, New discography etc any suggestions ?

Blackmail Corner has managed to get its hands on the Nelson scrapbook this time !! This one is of 'Young Instrumental Beat Group' - The Cosmonauts. Note the Beatle jackets and boyish charm ! !