Acquitted by Mirrors, Issue 15

Here, at last, is the long awaited A.B.M., as always, way off schedule and dripping with apologies. I can't even remember when the last issue came out, so don't ask me...it's been hell out here folks.

In between the last editorial and this, my personal life has undergone more traumas than I care to remember, moving house being one of them. I now live in a much more modest dwelling, (perhaps for 'modest' you should read 'sensible') which will, hopefully, prove to be a more economical proposition in terms of heating, etc. than my previous home. The Echo Observatory is, sadly, no more, the room above my kitchen having metamophosised into the loft above my new house. This particular musical alchemic laboratory will be known as Studio Rose-Croix, provided I can maintain the now somewhat antiquated equipment which is breaking down at an alarming rate! Anyway, new premises, new hopes...God moves in mysterious ways!

Some recent news: - a miracle almost happened...I formed a new, re-born, re-styled Be Bop Deluxe, wrote 26 songs for the band, rehearsed (at great personal expense) to prepare the musicians for recording, thought up an album title and sleeve, in short, got all hot under the collar and stiff under the strides, only to be betrayed by the usual greedy cowards who style themselves "The Music Biz"! So, what's new? The project may or may not happen in the near future, so don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, Demonstrations of Affection maps the emotional landscape of a near divorce and Simplex, which I hope will be out soon, is, for me at least, the most satisfying instrumental album I've recorded to date. Future releases? An album of Be Bop Deluxe demo's anyone? (1990 version, of course!)

Imagination, Vision, Action and Purpose! Here's to the next decade, it's all or nothing folks!

Happy 1990, your old pal, Bill.

I still don't really understand the root causes. You can never see yourself as other people see you, and the odd insights I do get when I objectively look into myself, I'm horrified. I'd run away a million miles from me sometimes. There are reasons which I suppose are best understood by Jan rather than me, why last year (1988) we separated for 6 months. She went to live with a divorced girlfriend of hers and it looked like we were going to get divorced at one point. I think a lot of it came out of the fact that I'd been working far too intensely, on too many projects at once, under great financial stress as well, and this wasn't helped by the way the organisation is set up. Let's put it this way, I have to be delicate about it, but the way Cocteau Records, etc. and the things around it is run on a business level, it isn't too open and honest to the artist about what's going on, so we were suffering tremendously with the financial side of things, and all the rest. And I was spending an awful lot of time working from the first thing in the morning until 3am on a regular basis, 7 days a week for 3 months on the soundtrack to 'Dream Demon'. And it took its toll. So that's one aspect that I can put the split down to. The other thing is probably whatever happened to my personality during that process of working so intensely and having financial burdens as well. I don't know if I've changed for the better or worse. I know that it was like an ordeal by fire both emotionally and career wise. Maybe I'm growing up late. Who knows? I've no idea. Some of the new songs deal with it in a very specific way, particularly the stuff on the box set. I think if you listen to that you'll probably know what's going on better than I do.

So things are OK now then?

Yes, we moved house at the beginning of the year (1989), in April, and are still developing the place. We have a barn which may eventually become a studio if I can afford to convert it. And if I convert it, I will go to 24 track, or whatever is the best format at the time. I'd use it for myself initially, but if it's up to a standard worth renting out, then I may do so under supervision to certain people I know, rather than just put it on the market place. It would be people I trust, you know. People that aren't hooligans.

I believe you renamed the studio when you moved. What's it like now?

It's now called 'Studio Rose-Croix', and possibly 'God's Loft' from time to time. It's fine, but it's cold at the moment. I've got no heating up there. Mind you, I didn't at the other house either, apart from a gas bottle, but because I'm in the loft now, in the summer it's really hot and in the winter it's freezing. We've got insulation, but it's under the floorboards of the loft, so it's the ceiling of the bedroom that's insulated. No heat comes up from the house, and of course it's just tiles between me and the outside world. So it's great in the summer, but freezing in the winter. So I'm going to have to get a gas bottle for it soon. Yes it's fine. I must get some photographs done. I'll try and tidy it and vacuum it, and take some photographs for you to put in the magazine. It's divided into thirds. The middle third is the studio, and I've got the desk across it. I've built a support between 2 of the sets of beams coming down, and then on that is the mixing desk. The kitchen table from the other house is to one side with the tape machine on it, and the rack of outboard gear, and the keyboards are stacked on the other side, with a little settee across the middle. So that's the middle third. One end is all books going back to the 1920's. It's full of memorabilia. It's like a museum. The other end is space I keep for my magical temple; my stuff is set up there, which freaks people out when they come to look at the studio, 'cos I don't say anything about it. You know, they'll come up to look at the gear and say "Oh yes, you've got an Emax and a DX7 etc., and all the time they're looking over their shoulder, looking at this altar, set up at the far side of the studio.

Talking of Home Studios, can you give us a rundown of equipment currently being used?

Yes. OK. Fostex B16 is the main tape machine. To mix down onto I've got a Sony PCM F1 for digital domain, which is completely broken and has been for the last year and one of these days we might be able to get it repaired. I say it's completely broken, I'm mixing onto it even now, but one side breaks up on quiet passages; so if for example you do a quiet fade in, as it fades in, you get a lot of break up and noise coming in. I've got a Revox B77 which I use for any TV things. I prefer to mix with the digital deck but often for TV they haven't got those facilities to dub, so you have to do something on 1/4" tape, so I use that for 1/4" mixes. An Allen, Heath & brennel Systems 8' mixing desk, with 32 channels. I've got an Akai-Linn sequencer/drum machine sampler, Sequential Circuits; 'Studio 440' which I'm trying to sell, but nobody will want to buy because they don't make them anymore. The drum machine I had previous to that was an AHB which looked like one of those aluminum briefcases, and you took the lid off and it had 8 pads which were large enough to play with real sticks. It was the most brilliant idea, but it was just so faulty, I went and looked at this during the development stages, and it was nearly 2 years after that when I eventually got hold of one off the production line. And they literally discontinued the machine about 6 months after I bought it. Had that worked reliably and been able to sample, they didn't have sampling facilities in it, it was fixed samples. All they had was a port on the back where they were going to do software that you could put in at a later stage, but they never took it that far. So I went from there to the 'Studio 440', and then to the Akai-Linn. The Akai is in for repair at the moment, but its been very reliable apart from one pad which 'went out' recently. They're hand pads which you tap with your fingers. So for the writing and demos of the Be Bop Deluxe stuff, I'm borrowing Nick the keyboard player's Roland R8. So I'm using that at the moment. It's got some nice drum sounds on it. They have 'presence', tough sounding drums. What else? The Rack with the SD3000 digital delay. I wish they'd give these things names like 'Charlie' or 'Fred' or something. A Yamaha SPX90 reverb, Fostex Limiter/Compressor; a really cheap one which I put across the entire mix, but it works alright. I still have my old Eventide Harmoniser, but it doesn't work. I must find out where that is. I lent it to somebody. A Marshall Time Modulator, and I've got an Ibanez multi effects processor which is one of the older analogue ones, not a digital model, which has a stereo flanger on it, chorus, compressor and distortion. It's all basic stuff. It's all semi affordable. Some of it is very affordable. It's only stuff like the Akai-Linn, the desk and the tape deck where it begins to get expensive. Apart from that, it's all basic stuff.

Moving on, can you tell us about the Henry Moore film?

It's a lovely film of an exhibition, just over a year ago, put on at the Yorkshire Sculpture park, near Wakefield, my home town. The sculpture park was founded, and is directed by, my old Fine Art teacher, from Art College days, Peter Murray, who seems to have taken a big hold in sculpture now. Respected enough to be able to get some of the biggest names in modern sculpture, both alive and deceased, to get their work on exhibition. They recently had an exhibition of sculptures by a Frenchman name Beaudelle who was a student of Rodin's. These monumental pieces. And the sculpture park is buying a sculpture of a horse that Beaudelle did for 270,000 pounds. That's the kind of power they've been able to command. They've had some wonderful exhibitions on. Anyway, there was a Henry Moore exhibition and this sculpture park is an open air setting, it is a landscaped park which has these sculptures in it. It's the biggest in Europe, and perhaps the best in Europe. They had a Henry Moore retrospective exhibition, which was filmed by a Scottish film director named Murray Gregor who filmed from Spring through to Winter, at different times of the day and in all kinds of weather, this year long exhibition. It's literally just images. Beautiful, moving, fluid camera work. It starts off at dawn and ends at sunset, but between the start of the film and the end of it, you've also gone through the whole day and the seasons as well. And you see the effect of the weather on these huge bronzes and massive figures of Moore's. So you get raindrops on them and so on, and the trees around them, and just the environment, the sounds of birds, the natural sounds, lorries even, in the distance on the M1. All these things are mixed in to the soundtrack.

And voice over?

Yes. They have some very old archive of Henry Moore speaking about the way he approached his work. They were literally things that were done on a very primitive cassette machine, so the quality of the voice is strange in that it's distorted and has dropouts and all the rest; but they just took pertinent sentences, where you might be looking at a figure of a man, and behind it, they'd sited, obviously, these sculptures in particular places, so that the environment reflected the forms of the sculpture. So you'd see this figure, behind it would be the trees and the camera's moving 'round so you get the figure held centrally, but the trees would appear to move behind it. And into the music would float this line of Henry Moore saying he'd always thought of the human body, the torso, being similar to the trunk of a tree, with the branches and the roots being the arms and legs. And he relates the figure to trees. It would be simply just one sentence, or 2 or 3 sentences at the most, and then he'd drift away again; and the music never stops, it just goes from start to finish. Where there is a break in between, I'd use the sound of rain I'd brought in, or the sound of geese flying overhead, so the whole thing is seamless. It just flows, it's like turning a tap on. It just flows from start to finish.

Is the music on the forthcoming album Simplex from this?

Well, I approached the music for the Henry Moore film in two ways. I did some pieces where I would look at a section or choose a section of the film, this was in the rough cut stage because you often get rough cuts and then finally they edit the way they want it to look, and that final cut is the one that you actually make everything sync to because its got to be on frames, the whole thing tied to SMPTE code. So what I did was a series of sketches if you like, by just looking at a sequence, then turning the monitor off, and then playing music that I felt reflected what I'd just seen, but without playing it to the picture. That produced a lot of the stuff that is on the Simplex album. I then put those on one side. Then when I got the rough cut I then approached everything using SMPTE code, not referring back to this other stuff, but that was a kind of exercise in warming up. When I came back to the 'warm-ups' as it were, they had a life of their own. It's very sculptural, three dimensional music, but it goes wider than being just applied to the film, whereas some of the Henry Moore stuff, you'd need to see the film to see the sense of the music because it's so locked to edits and cuts. Whereas the first version was more just my feelings of looking at this bit. An immediate reaction, but not locked to the technicalities of the editing.

Is that Henry Moore's voice on 'Sleeplessness' by any chance?

No. That's Sir Compton Mackenzie.

Who was he?

I don't know. I remember his name, when I was a lad. He was a writer. Was he a sports writer or something? But it's actually taken from an advert for 'Horlicks'. I've got a lovely video about early British TV advertising, and when the independent channels first opened up and they said "Right we're going to have adverts between programs", and nobody had ever done this in England before, or knew how to do it. A couple of agencies went to America and studied advertising on American TV which had been going a while, but the majority had this peculiar sort of English approach, which has now disappeared. And it was Sir Compton Mackenzie, sat in his study surrounded by books; at night; I remember there was a moon through the window. He's sat there with his pipe, and he's got his dog on the settee at the side of him, and a book on his knee. And he's quite old, with a big moustache, saying "When I have trouble sleeping, I take Horlicks. There's nothing worse than sleeplessness." I can't remember what he says. But it goes on for quite a while. And it's recorded onto a hand cassette machine. The whole ad, and then chopped it onto tape.

I didn't think it was anything like that because it was such a profound statement taken out of context.

That's right. I've spotted things like that. Things jump out. I am interested in the imagery that is used in advertising, because it's pertinent to popular music. I've toyed with it all in the past. Before Be Bop even turned pro and we had the original line-up, before we ever thought about making a record, when we were just doing things on a local level, I would 'seed' the area with images that had to do with the band. I've still got a lot of it left at home. One of them, for example, "Teenage Archangel" was a development from a little handout that I had, which had "Angels of teenage decadence" I think they'd put on it, and it was a pair of girls legs in remarkable platform soled shoes. it was like a 'Robert Crumb' style thing, and it said "Back to Mono" on it. I've got hundreds of them still. We had them printed up at the local printers. And I'd hand them out on the street, and leave them in shops and things. And we'd do things like that without anybody knowing what it was about. Selecting certain images. And it was always toying with stylistic things. Where they become so reduced that they're nothing more than just a stylistic device that they become strange and surreal to the intellectual mind. It's like Andy Warhol's soup cans. To the man in the street they're just...soup cans! But the concept that goes with it, the reduction, and the fact that it becomes something else. They ARE soup cans, but you can't get soup out of them. And I like doing things with certain elements of 'Pop' music. The album's got a fair but of this in it.

Which album?

Oh, the Be Bop one. Which the Red Noise and certain other ones did as well. Where you take something which sounds, on first listening, fairly familiar. But when you start to think about it and you hear it again, and analyze what's going on, something has been removed from the cliche, that fractures it in a way, and it becomes something else. I've always been attracted to music that comments on itself, in musical terms, not necessarily commenting on itself with lyrics, but the stylistic devices within the piece of music. Referring to its own history. So that in my work you'll find references to earlier work I've done and you'll find references to the history of popular music. As I've been exposed to it. From my father being in a big band and everything else. To me its all up for grabs. It's all there to be twisted and played around with. There's a lot of things, for instance, on the new record that the so called hip would say, "Well, that's really unhip." But the real hip would see how cool it really is, because it's going one beyond the hip. It's like...twisting that back on itself. And I like those kind of mind games, art games if you like.

So how is the Be Bop project progressing

I've been rehearsing over the weekend with the band, and in between desperately trying to write more material; I've about 20 songs now, for this new project. But the trouble is, as soon as we got in the rehearsal studio, and put the band to it, it started to sound more like a Rock thing than what I wanted, so I think, along with a couple of people that made the same observation, think that it might be wiser if I just went in and built the basic track up myself then just added people when and where necessary, so that if it needs proper bass playing put that on; if it needs a bit of extra keyboards or whatever, then you use the techniques that I've used to write the songs for the demo tape to just establish the backbone of it. So it's been a bit traumatic because I've been trying to teach the band the numbers, and yet needed to learn to play it as well because all I've done is play it a track at a time onto the tape, then to suddenly try and translate this to something to play with a group of people, to sing as well and listen to what everybody else is doing, it's been a bit of a nightmare.

You say it's got more of a Rock feel than you wanted. Were you after more of a YMO/technopop kind of feel?

Well no, I wanted something that was organic, but was also very stylized to a degree, and of course it's a while since I've worked with a band on my songs in the context, and as soon as you start doing that in the rehearsal room, I don't know if it's something to do with the sound in the room or the dynamics or whatever, but it starts to get, for me, a little bit too ordinary. We've got a keyboard player who's complaining because he thinks in terms of the recording studio all the time, layers of sound and the way that things might fit together, which is the way I work in the studio with keyboards. He's got one keyboard there live and says that he feels like he's reduced to being a rock and roll pianist because he's having to fill in a lot of things with one particular sound. It's just a basic rehearsal setup, we haven't got anything complicated. Having said that, we were supposed to go away originally on the 4th December to Brussels to start the album and then it got put back to the 11th because it is a brand new studio and they hadn't finished the area where you would play, and they said that they couldn't accommodate the band until the 11th in this open room. But then John Leckie, who's co-producing with me said that if he and I went over on the 4th as planned and just worked in the control room on the strictly more "techno" stuff, so we're laying down anything that might be like drum machine and keyboards, and then do the rest as overdubs when the band come in on the 11th, so that looks like the plan of the day. It's been exhausting this last week, having to find rehearsal space, equipment, transport and all the rest of it, because there's no road crew or anything yet; the band are doing it themselves. I think it will work out very well live; I mean what we were doing in the rehearsal room where we got 4 songs off in 2 days I think would have translated very easily to a live environment, but I think for recording I want to try to keep a little more control over smaller details. It'll start out as a solo project and become a band in stages as it goes through the album.

Could you run through the band lineup?

Yes. There's a guy called Bogdan Wiczling on drums. He played with Adam & The Ants. He also played on "The October Man" and a couple of things on EPs. On bass is Ian Denby from Leeds, who was on the "Holy Ghost" album. Rhythm guitar is Leon Phillips; he's mostly worked as an engineer with me and is kind of confidante, a good close friend. Saxophone, Ian Nelson. Keyboards, Nick James, who has engineered at Marcus studios for many years but is now concentrating on his keyboard playing. For gigs we'll augment that with various people. I'm hoping to get Martin Ditcham on percussion, who was with Man Jumping and Sade. Possibly Andy Davis, who toured with me on the last American tour. I think again despite me originally setting out to write something that was capable of being played with a couple of acoustic guitars, then just dressed up a bit, I think I'm just too long in the tooth to get out of old habits or whatever, but I've ended up constructing it from the writing as if it was a specific studio project; and there are lots of little interlocking guitar parts although they're all very simple, the songs are incredible simple, but they're made up of tiny bits so that if you just played one of them, it doesn't make sense, but when you fit it in with all the others, they suddenly start popping in and out of holes and making sense. So we'll probably augment live with a couple of backing singers as well, maybe another keyboard player or two.

You mentioned before about doing older material as well from right through your career, how do you plan on bringing that into the live shows? It sounds quite rigid, what you've constructed there.

Yes, I mean what we will do is break it up into a kind of chronological order, I think. We may start with something from Northern Dream and just work on from there. I don't know yet. That's for April/May-ish (1990), so there's time to think about that. I don't think it will be a great problem, just a little bit of care in structuring where what tunes occur. We may not play the most obvious things people might want to hear. I doubt very much if we'll do Ships In The Night, then again we might; it depends how perverse I feel at the time.

Completely rearrange it, perhaps?

Yeah, that would be the thing. I think it would sound obviously different 'cos it's not the same group of musicians and we have different technology available in 1990, so there's no point in going out there and trying to reproduce something that was done back in that time. I'll use the songs as songs and then see what we can do with it in modern terms; keep it close to being as recognizable as possible obviously; not twisting it around to the point where nobody can tell what they are. I think they'll have a different flavour, there will be a date on them revised in a way, which might be interesting. We'll do a couple of "covers" as well hopefully. I want to do "His Latest Flame", the old Elvis Presley number. I heard it on the radio the other day, and it suddenly came back just how good a song it was. I remember that coming out when I was at school so I think that would adapt really well with brush drums, guitar, and acoustic guitar, with the Bo Diddley beat, so we tried that as well and did some strange things to it.

Are you going to do "The October Man"?

Well we've got the right drummer anyway.

How difficult is it to keep up that E-Bow solo all the way through?

Live, it's nearly impossible. I mean there would have to be a compromise.

It must be difficult not to repeat yourself.

Well it's not so much that, it's playing it and singing it and then getting back into chords. The E-Bow is a difficult thing to immediately get out of your hand and just go straight into chords, you have to change the sound of the guitar; it's necessary as well to make the E-Bow work well, it's a big difference. Either that or you should sing and just keep it in your pocket, then bring it out and play a solo. If the band is strong enough to be able to carry the rest of the guitar stuff without me playing then I can just sing and play the solos which isn't so much of a problem. It's when I have to sing and play other parts on the guitar and then get to the E-Bow that there's trouble.

Put a bit of Velcro on it and just put it on the guitar body.

Yeah. That's a point.

How do you manage to get the harmonics with the E-Bow, for example on "Sleep Cycle", is that controlled?

Yeah. I've used that on a few things. Basically the easiest way to do it is: Say you're playing on a "G" string, for example playing a line that ends in an open "G" so that the "G" string is ringing, as the phrase ends and you're on the open "G", hit the harmonic at the 5th fret, and then that'll jump up and it'll keep going. If you then hit the 12th fret the note that happens is still that harmonic but further up the neck so then you can put vibrato on it and then hit that and you get the one above that still; so it's like you sound it first on the 5th, and by just fretting the 12th fret, that harmonic continues somehow with the E-Bow to sound as if you haven't moved; as if you're still on the 5th, then you've got a fretted 5th harmonic on the 12th fret which you can then put vibrato on. It sounds as if you've hit the "G" at the 5th fret and off at the 5th and then picked up at the 12th fret seamlessly, you don't hear the jump at all, but it's the intensity of the drive from the E-Bow that allows that to just keep occurring. A very bizarre effect. I've got the knack of controlling it, knowing just where the hot spot is to really let it to go.

Whipping it back across the pickup can do that.

It depends on what kind of pickups you use, though. There's a spot where it's the most intense vibration and you'll get harmonics very easily from that. It's a while since I've used the E-Bow. I went onto the E-Bow as a kind of alternative to the thing I was doing with the plectrum guitar in that I felt that the plectrum style of lead guitar playing with the sustain thing got so overblown that everybody was playing the same common sort of phrases. So the E-Bow broke me out of that. It was a way of dealing with the guitar that I felt was less.....common or less ordinary.

That was around the "Drastic Plastic" period, wasn't it?

Well, yes. That's when it started, really. So for a while, like on the "Love That Whirls" album, apart from a few chords all the solo stuff was done on E-Bow, there's no plectrum stuff at all. Now I'm actually discovering again the joys of playing standard orthodox guitar which is nice.

So the new material should put paid to comments like "Why doesn't he play guitar anymore?"

Well that's happened before. I think I mentioned in an interview in the States about the "Love That Whirls" album'; they said, "How come there's no guitar on the album?" I said there's more on this than there's been on any previous album for a few years. He said, "Well I can't hear it." and when I pointed it out to him he said, "No, that's a synthesiser" but it was guitar, you know. You'll tell it's guitar on this one, though. It's almost "roots" guitar playing. It's back to the blues, back to folk, it's nearer to "Northern Dream" than anything I've ever done I think.

Are you feeling pretty good about your music at the moment?

I like the songs very much. I'm a bit uneasy about how to go about recording them. I wanted this group approach which I don't think suits the way I've written the songs. What I should have done is not to have finished them so thoroughly and just taken a basic stab at them with maybe an acoustic guitar and a voice, and then sit down with the band and develop it but by bit; but what I've done is I've taken things which sound already like they're finished recordings and everything's nailed down. There's no room for anybody to invent anything 'cos as soon as you do that it doesn't sound like the demo and, for instance, John Leckie and even the members of the band that are having to deal with it say, "you're not going to get it any better 'cos you've done it already," it's so complete on the so called rough sketch. The other thing is that I've destroyed all the 16 track masters because I thought that's all they were, just sketches, and that we'd be doing it better later on, and John Leckie rang up last week and said "bring the 16 track masters and we'll do a transfer across to 24 track and just build up on top, keeping the rough vocals you've done because they sound really warm and communicative." Of course I'd not recorded them with any great dexterity, I'd not looked at meters to see if they were peaking or anything. It was just basically get it down, take it into the band and work on it; and then I was short of tape so I kept on going over the same bit of tape, so none of the 16 track masters exist, apart from a couple I've done in the last 2 days which I've kept after John had said that, so I thought right, "I'll keep these, maybe we can transfer them and build up on top, and take out what doesn't work."

So you're feeling a bit more relaxed without the usual pressure from record companies?

Yes, but I think there's always pressure. For me to have dealt with all the instrumental music that I've done over a long period of time and then suddenly start writing songs again to be put in front to the public, I think there's a kind of pressure you put on yourself. There's a worry. Are you going to be understood? Is this still in a form that makes sense to people musically? Is it going to communicate? Are my preoccupations too personal? All these kinds of pressure come into it. It would be easy to sit down and do a very obscure vocal album, very obscure. It would be very strange indeed and probably wouldn't do more than reach the kind of people who are already committed. And I would like to reach an audience that goes a bit wider. I would like it to be a bit more easily received in the ears of people who might not normally look at what I do. For two reasons: I feel there is a time at the moment, a space where some of the kind of things I do can be put in a form which is palatable to a bigger public, and also that its a sensible move because if I'm to continue funding the other things I need to have something that does sell a bit more.

I think most people would agree that your mainstream records have always been accessible, it's just lack of airplay.

Lack of promotion. There are some really nice little bits on some of the newer material. I can give you some of the titles. There's one called "Waiting for the Midnight Chime" which is the rockiest of the lot. It's almost like the Rolling Stones. It's like the Stones put through "fallout from Chernobyl" I suppose. Mutant Rolling Stones! Then there's one called "The Human Rodeo", which has a Cajun accordion on it and has a sort of reggae feel. There's one called "True Reflection" which is a nice sort of yearning, melancholy, metaphysical song. "Her True and Perfect Serpent", which is going to be a big epic of acoustic guitars, a wall of acoustic guitars, very Phil Spector-ish. And I'm hoping to get some orchestration on it. Harold Budd came to visit me 2 weeks ago but he's moved back to the States now. He's coming over to Brussels and he wants to orchestrate this particular piece of cellos, etc., so we may have an orchestra and choir on that one. "Burning Down" which is a kind of....I was going to say Prince meets Jimi Hendrix, but he's already done that I suppose, but this is more authentic in the Jimi Hendrix department. There's one called "She's So Metaphysical" which is very "Red Noise".

It certainly sounds like a Red Noise title. Where do you get your ideas for your titles from? Do they just come to you?

Overhearing conversations, headlines in magazines and newspapers, phrases from books and just things that pop into your head out of nowhere.

A little bird told us you've got a book full of titles.

I've got a few books. I haven't got them with me; they're up in the studio at the moment because I've been writing, so it's all set up there. When I get stuck, I go through it. Sometimes titles that I've written down might become a phrase in a sentence in the song itself. But yes, I've got several books with stuff that I've never used, that I've not plundered. I've a really "wacky" one I did the other night which is not 'wacky' musically, but the chorus and the title are. I don't know how some people might take it but in the magical fraternity one of the things in the Hebrew Qabalah is a diagram which is known as the "Tree of Life" and it uses all kind of Hebrew lettering which also has numerical values. In the ancient Hebrew system there is a name for 'God' which cannot be spoken, allegedly. And it's known as the Tetragrammatan, which is the 4 lettered name, and its 4 Hebrew characters (YHVH) and they're pronounced Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh. Each one of the letters relates to an element: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, each one has a specific meaning. It's used a lot in magical procedures. So I've got this song called "Believe It Or Not" and then in brackets it's called "The Tetragrammatan Toodleoo". And the chorus, it's like a disco groove with the chant of "Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh", the Hebrew name of "God", I said "Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh" and it's just like this groove. I mean all the Rabbis are going to go absolutely apeshit. But I use it within the magical context and it's a little bit flippant doing it this way, but they say that any serious magician, his two most potent weapons are his cynicism and his sense of humour. I've both of those in spades. I was talking about this to Leon the other night, we were rehearsing until very late, and it was tremendously foggy and we drove the one hour from where we were rehearsing to my home 'cos we had a hire car with all the gear in. And I said to Leon, "Stay over because it's not safe to drive back to Leeds, where he lives, the weather is so bad." So we sat down talking and we got round to this thing about the amount of stuff that I come up with, and we were saying "Where does it come from?", and I said, "Well that's what scares me because I don't really know." And it becomes obsessive, and you wonder whether you've getting a little bit near the edge of being a little bit crazy, because there's this tremendous surge of creative ideas. It's like an oil well that's suddenly been uncapped and set fire to. They've got to bring Red Adair in to stick the lid back on it. I've worried if that sort of intensity of working and wanting to work on the music hasn't taken its toll on me as a person. I'm sure it has, and perhaps it was partly responsible for taking its toll on the marriage. I find it very hard to switch it off unfortunately. I never tire of it. I realise that with lots of things that I'm going over the same ground again. Some of these songs I'm doing on the album are definite links to other things. There's one song which actually makes references to other pieces of music I've done. It's intended to do that. It's like a painter reworking a theme and trying to perfect it to his own satisfaction. Stripping it down in some cases and dressing it up in others, but it's the same thing at the core. It frightens me. I don't like it.

I've been aware of themes being repeated in some of your work, but I believe that's because you release so much instrumental material. On "Trial by Intimacy" you said that they were sketches. So if that's all they were, just sketches, then you are bound to hear them again in the finished article.

At some stage, yes I suppose so. But often I'll refer thing across to each other. There's a lot of cross referencing in my work, I cross reference things, even going back to the early days of Be Bop. It's a signature. An artist that has no signature hasn't really arrived at his own self thing yet, whatever that might be. And I always like to think forward, and see what the next song is going to develop. At the same time I'm unable to remove what is that signature, that stamp for me, because it's just a personal thing for me.

Do you want to?

No! Not really. There's times when other people say, "Why don't you do something totally different?" If I did something totally different, it wouldn't be me. It would be somebody else.

So are you looking forward to playing live again? It's been a while, hasn't it?

Well recently I was at the Hilton Hotel in Leeds, with Reeves Gabriels, the guitarist with Tin Machine, and there was a chap sat at the bar called Bill Byford, who recognized me and introduced himself, and said "I have a band called 'The Rhythm Sisters', and here are the 2 girls sat over here." They were going to be produced by Kevin Armstrong, who was Tin Machine's stage rhythm guitarist and had also done work with Bowie before; and he was lined up for production. They hadn't got a record deal definitely, but they'd got lots of interest. So he introduced us and we sat and talked. I never heard anymore, until I had a letter from this Bill Byford, a while later, and he said, "We'd like you to work with us in a number of capacities, what do you feel?" I said that I'd like to hear what the band sounded like, 'cos I hadn't heard them, so I went down to a rehearsal, and was persuaded to take a guitar with me, and heard them play, and sort of joined in. They've got Bruce Foxton (ex-The Jam) on bass, and Steve Jones who was with the UK Subs on drums. And the rest are local people. So then I ended up going in the studio and doing a demo for them; well, three. We finished one, I've got to go back in, hopefully before I go away, to finish off the other two. We did a song called "Liverpool", and I did a George Martin-style cello arrangement on it. A sort of "Eleanor Rigby" cum "Penny Lane." They then had a deal offered from "One Little Indian", and have since decided that other people are still interested, and are going to finish off the other demos, and offer them around other companies as well, to see what happens. So that they can take the best thing that comes along. In the meantime, they wanted me to play the Futurama festival in Leeds, which John Keen, a local promoter, does every so often. That fell through because the venue fell through. The gig went ahead in other places but the band pulled out because it wasn't the original scale that it was going to be on. But they'd also got 2 charity gigs line up, raising money for Child Cancer. One of which was at Leeds Polytechnic, and one at Queen's Hall in Bradford. So I went along and played on those.

Anything else?

There was Monk Frierston, which is a village near where I used to live. That was last year (1988), that was for a friend who was a chef at his parent's pub, and they were selling up and moving out, somebody had bought the place; so they said could I put something together. I said, "There's not time, I need to rehearse with a band, and it's costly and time consuming and..." all the rest of it. So they suggested I bring an acoustic guitar in, and I said, " I don't really feel confident enough after not performing in front of an audience." being so studio oriented for such a long time I didn't feel confident enough to do that. Then it came to the night before they were having their final session in the pub, before the family moved out, and I rang round a few local musicians I'd given advice to, and listened to demo tapes from. Rung some old friends from art college days, and some current friends. Ended up with a 9 piece band who hadn't rehearsed, never played together before, and had a brilliant time. My friend put posters up calling us the "Dream Demons", and we had a good time. But then I did another pub gig. After the two gigs I did with the Rhythm Sisters, I came down to London to see John Leckie and we ended up in an "Irish" pub in North London...., I still don't know where it was. Playing country and western music. So you never can tell where I might turn up!

So there you go. That's where we ended the interview. There are some fascinating and amusing anecdotes about Bill's illustrious career that will hopefully be included in the next issue which will definitely be out before the Be Bop Deluxe album and tour. We reluctantly said goodbye, thanking Bill for his time and patience in dealing with two novices in their first attempt at journalism.

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