It’s difficult not to feel an affinity towards today’s generation, when I've got children of today’s generation. My son’s twenty next year, a daughter twenty-two and one of twenty-eight. It’s not something that engages my thoughts very much, whether or not I should have an affinity with the ‘modern’ generation. I know a lot of people my age tend to root their personality sometime in the past. Sometimes people quite a lot younger than me have it all fixed, rigidly. From then on, they will only listen to the kind of music that they listened to prior to that period. Anything new seems to be an affront to them. There’s plenty to complain about in today’s cultural climate, but there was then as well. I try not to have any preconceived ideas about the way things are, or were, or should be. But examine things as they come along on their own merits. If I heard a young band doing some amazing music, I wouldn’t have an age barrier to stop me enjoying that music, just because they were young or inexperienced. When I was younger, I never had this thing about anybody over twenty-five being incapable of making any valid musical comment. I've always listened to a wide range of music, played by a wide range of cultures from all round the world, and by a huge range of age groups. I really don’t like that categorisation of, if you're a certain age, then this is how you should be, in terms of taste or appearance or whatever it might be…

No I don’t really. In the late seventies, early eighties, in my ‘rock and roll star’ phase, I had a large mansion house, with river frontage. I used to have a garden tractor, I used to enjoy riding around cutting the grass, mainly because I liked riding on the tractor, it’s maybe a childhood thing. But Emi looks after the garden now, and I think that if I spent time out there I would probably achieve less output musically.

Well I'm no prude and I'm no puritan. Things are as they are, people are as they are, the society we have moulds us. We have the freedom to choose, but unfortunately I think some people have forgotten we have that choice and will be lead by the nose everywhere. I've got a Buddhist basis, to my spiritual life. The way that Buddhism sees it is that people suffer, basically we’re all suffering from the situation of our lives. The biggest point of suffering is that we know our lives are limited, and that greatly influences human behaviour. Learning to deal with that and learning to accept your weaknesses and not let them crush you further, thereby eventually conquering them. A lot of people perhaps don’t have the time to think deeply about that. Often things that are meant to be taken lightly in popular culture, things that are meant with irony, a younger generation can misinterpret. They take it as something that is being advocated as standard behaviour. Ignorance becomes ‘cool.’ Very sad.

It’s difficult for me, I've always been a thinker. Too much so for my own good, often I think. I've always tried to be self-analytical to a degree and self-aware, and that carries a lot of baggage with it. Particularly if you work at being self aware, you see more of the bad side of yourself than you see the good. It can be dispiriting and discouraging and all kinds of things, but I feel it’s a valid cause. More people need to be introduced to that, but I know not everyone’s ready for it.

You have to accept so much, and tolerate so much. Try and look at things with wisdom and not let things get on top of you. Nothing freaks me out to that degree, perhaps because I've read a lot of things and seen a lot of things. But I feel there’s a lot more room in our society for compassion, and for people to respect themselves. When people behave in an antisocial fashion, ultimately it reflects back on themselves, they’re just digging a bigger hole for themselves. It’s sad, but there are all kinds of theories on how to deal with it.

I'm not agreeing a hundred percent with this, but I think there is a glut of information. There’s a tribalism that is clearly defined for young people. You go into the grunge camp, or the Goth camp or the dance thing or whatever. There’s all these pre-packaged tribes to join, you get the uniform, you get the attitude, you walk the walk, talk the talk. Those things just limit where you can go, because you become so immersed in your particular tribe, then end up with tribal warfare, and it’s seperative and divisive, and it’s sad that it happens, but it does. It’s encouraged through advertising. The way to sell to people is to divide them up into categories, and target everything via those categories. For somebody like me, and a lot of people like me that I know, it’s difficult being a participator in such schemes. My interests are really wide, they cover a whole spectrum of things. If somebody wants to target me, they don’t know where to aim, because several things will possibly hit, but I don’t see the value of any one over another, certainly if we’re talking about music. Classical music, for example, has as much or as little value as pop music. It just depends on quality… Who’s doing it, does it work? If somebody asks me for my favourite record, it’s the worst question to be asked. If you have an open attitude to these things, they’re all wonderful, to single one or two out would be impossible, yet the way youth culture is targeted, you have to have narrowly defined parameters and it has to be given a label and so on. Then it can be controlled by market forces. A lot of people don’t see the way that they're being manipulated, and they close off. You can’t get ideas through to them. It’s the problem that is at the heart of the British pop industry. Too much fear, too much greed.

Well, one doesn’t allow things to wear away at ones persona, they just do. Show me a person that goes through life happy-clappy all the way, and when any adverse things happen to them, just to completely ignore it, and I’ll show you a fictional character. It’s just not realistic to be that way. To respond to them, particularly through the diary, which is not the diary that I would write if it was locked away in a drawer at home, it would be a totally different diary. It’s a diary that I write, knowing full well that people scrutinise it. Knowing that means that it is just another means of communication, which what I do is about, ultimately. Allowing some of those feelings to creep in to the diary pages, people can see that these are common things, which happen to them as well.

When people hear what I do on a record, what I aim at is an ideal. It’s easy for all kinds of myths and legends to build up around that ideal. The diary is a means of breaking that down a little bit, making things a bit healthier for the connoisseur of my work. It allows people to see that the music is actually coming from a human basis, from everyday real life situations. Although it may be a strange real life, in the way that my life isn’t the kind of life I had before I was a musician, I'm not nine to five in an office, but nevertheless things affect me. I think the thing that has most profoundly affected me, in terms of what goes into the diary, has been the shock of the physical side of ageing, which is not particularly easy to deal with, for someone who in the past was always photographed in a certain light, in a certain way. Those things aren’t so important to me any more, but because I'm aware of that vanity and that little ego thing, doesn’t mean that I can conquer it instantly. So sometimes things knock you back, you have bad days, you avoid mirrors!

Basically, we are what we are, and what I am makes the music what it is. If you make me a happy, jolly person one hundred percent of the time, and I ignore all these things that bother me. Then the music is going to be different and perhaps more shallow as a result.

I know what he means by that. I don’t solicit so much opinion, because I work alone on everything. Engineering, producing and playing everything, in a room totally on my own. Obviously I play things to my friends, I can get some feedback that way. I can play six tracks to you, and you’d say, "I like that one". So I think it must be better than the other ones, but I know your tastes anyway. So I think, well Jon is saying that, because his tastes are more that style. Then somebody else will say that they like a different one, so I feel good for a while. But then I know that his tastes are more for that style.

If I was doing one kind of music, just one form or style, then it may be a different thing. But because it covers so much ground, the music I make, I cant play an album of mixed things to one person, and expect them to like it all, there’s such a diversity there. A diversity that they probably will not find on the average rock record. That means to enjoy it all, the person listening really needs to have spent some time listening to lots of different styles of music, as I have. To see where these things are coming from, and why they're mixed up the way they are. Some people’s opinions I tend to trust a lot, those are people like Harold, who have achieved some kind of pinnacle of creative work themselves, and can see quite deeply into the process of making music. Ultimately, I'm my own worst critic. If I allowed this critic I have inside me out, there would never be any records made, there’d be one or two tracks existing. The rest probably wouldn’t exist, because I can always find the weaknesses, I can always find the faults and see what I should have done, after the event unfortunately. That doesn’t mean that the works are bad, it just means that I've seen my own weaknesses. They also have a strength, and that is their commitment and their honesty. There isn’t a fake piece of music amongst them, apart from perhaps ‘Ships In The Night’! There’s irony in there, but it’s not an irony that’s a cynical irony, there’s no cynicism in what I do musically at all. So even if I think that I haven’t made the complete picture the way that I really wanted to do, for whatever reason, the intent is powerful enough to balance that out.

So I release as much as I can from my archives at home, simply to expose the process of making music. The process is apparent if you line up the albums, starting from ‘Northern Dream’ and come right up to date. If you had enough weeks to listen to it all, one by one you’d hear and feel a whole person changing and growing and moving, absorbing and giving out something different, taking a side step here, maybe a long jump there. The growth of the musical life that I have is all strung out on this long line. I never think of one track on an album as being isolated from the others, even though there may be diversely different musical styles on one album. The way they are chosen and put together has a purpose to it, there is a reason for that. I never see one album as an isolated piece, I see it as one album in a chain of albums, so it jumps back here, and forward there. For a really dedicated listener to take time, they can find these threads running through all the work, it’s like a highway and it’s a journey, I hope.

I think you’ve leveled this one at me in the past Jon. Because there are times when the right thing to do for a song is to sing it in the old way, or the way that people think of as me ‘singing.’ And there’s times when it’s more appropriate to do it in a kind of hip, gunslinger fashion. Also my voice has changed over the years, as the music has. If I sing now, it has a more mature sound, compared especially to the first Be-Bop Deluxe album, it sounds like there’s a five-year-old kid singing, it just sort of freaks me out. The approach I've been doing with a lot of the things that have been released over the last couple of years, has been less towards melody, and more towards texture and mood. I wanted to get across a more literary and poetic sense, rather than a musical sense. I wanted to explore the more dark, the more beat side of my voice.

The next album could really be the other way, really melodic, what you refer to as proper singing. Bob Dylan was always thought of as not being a proper singer and Jimi Hendrix, but they're great vocal stylists, I love their approach. Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, these aren’t pretty melodic singers, but there’s great character and personality in there. I feel comfortable doing it that way, particularly recording at home where I don’t want the neighbours to hear me, so I've got to put the mike up close and get dark and intimate with it.

Well, looking at the style of music that I explored on the Red Noise album, it’s totally different to the Be-Bop thing and also to anything I’ve done since. That sort of strangled punk yelp of the period, it suddenly seemed possible and it was an interesting enough avenue to explore in the context of that band. Even in the Be-Bop Deluxe period, we would bring out an album, then people would ask why I wasn’t doing stuff like the last album, there was always a slight difference between the albums, quite a radical difference in some cases. Then a year or two later they’d catch up.

When I did Red Noise, nobody understood why, then when I started my solo career they’d say, " why aren’t you doing Red Noise". It’s such a cliché, it has happened so many times, then they click and the penny drops and hopefully they understand. So people just need time, they naturally feel that they want to hold something where it is, they're scared of letting it go somewhere else and moving with it. It’s understandable and I sympathise, but it will only ever be whatever it is at any one time.

For a while it’s been this, and I know things are going to be different for the next record, simply because this six month lay off has allowed me to judge more clearly what is needed for the next project. I have been coming straight off the back of one album onto another, never having hardly a pause in between, over the past fifteen years. Now I've had this six-month pause, it has opened up a lot of possibilities. I hope that I don’t fall into any previous traps, not that they're bad, but I've done that now, and I need to move it in another direction again. Where that’s going to be, I'm not quite sure. In a sense it’s going back to guitars, it’s going back to a simpler approach, but exactly what kind of feeling it will have, it may be quite alien sounding music done in a very simple and primitive fashion.

There’s all kinds of possibilities, where it could go, and until I sit down and start laying things onto the new hard-disc recorder, when it arrives, and start playing with the material and see how it shapes up, then I don’t know. There have been a lot of changes in the last six months, because I've been cut off from music and had to think visually, (with the videos.) So my previous thoughts and habit patterns have changed a lot, an interesting year ahead if I can get the gear up and running.

Back in the eighties, Kevin Cann became a friend of mine as a result of him wanting to write a biography and he did a lot of research, even down to tracing old school chums. He got so far with it and we appointed Tony Mitchell, who used to be a journalist on Sounds, to be the editor of it. He felt that the research was very, very good, but the writing needed a lot of time spending on it, to get it to work properly. I was quite busy with other things, so it never got further than that. As far as I know, Kevin still has all the preliminary drafts and notes that he took from people at that time.

I would like to write an autobiography, because I enjoy writing. But I have to be in the right mood to sit down and spend a lot of time writing a book. A lot of the autobiography has crept into fan magazines in the past. I did little pieces in ‘Acquitted By Mirrors’, also in ‘The Nelsonian Navigator’, that related to my biographical past. And I do have quite a reasonable memory for my childhood and teenage years and son on. That may fade in time, so I may need to make notes. In a sense, some of the diary entries have been autobiographical, getting something down in print that I could then refer to later. If I needed to write a proper autobiography, I could then look back at these notes and they would prompt any memories I might have overlooked.

I would like to do it. It would be nice. The diaries themselves, I think there is only a year or so now, but possibly there’s something there that could become a book. It would be nice to see it in a bound form.

The ideal book would be a kind of user’s manual, ‘Bill Nelson – The User’s Manual’. Where you don’t have a book length biography, but just a compact autobiography with a lot of examples of the visual stuff, including stills from the videos. A very comprehensive discography and detailed info on collaborations and perhaps some of the more intelligent and interesting articles that have been written about the music I've made over the years, perhaps gathered from different journalist sources. And a lot of rare photographs, gathered from my own archives, and newspaper cuttings from ‘Northern Dream’ times etc. Some of my own artwork and photography in a kind of gallery section. So if you're sitting with a friend and they ask who you're listening to, you could hand over the book and say, "here’s the guide". So people could read as deep into it as they wanted, from this one source.

Because I’ve done such a lot, I think it needs to be gathered together somehow. There’s fragments of work I have done here, there and everywhere. It would be great if somebody could pull it together, or help me pull it together into a publishable, large, bound, hard backed tome.

Well I don’t have any problem listening to music from my past, but I don’t choose to go out and put it on to listen to for pleasure. It tends to be for other reasons. If I was in a public place, and somebody put one on, I’d say, "Take that off, I can’t stand that one". But I can’t think which ones I would say that about, without going through the collection, looking at every single song title and deciding whether or not I like it, there’s so many songs there.

On that level, I do them and that’s it. Once the piece is created, it has a life of its own, it gets up, it walks out the door and it either gets a job or lives in the gutter.

There are probably lots of pieces from several albums I could gather together, to make one which I could say was my favourite album and contained my best work. But because of the vast quantity of material, to boil it down to just ten or twelve tracks would be almost impossible for me, as there would be so much I’d have to leave out. If there was less music, then it would be easier to choose!

It’s like some people want me to reform Be-Bop Deluxe, but that’s impossible. Even if Charlie was still alive, and we all got back together, we are all much older than we were then and we’re bound to have a different feeling about our music, so it wouldn’t sound the same. Particularly if we went to do a new record, it would sound totally different from Be-Bop Deluxe, because we’ve all moved on.

Red Noise would be the same, something that had its time, had its place, it made its statement and that’s where it stays. It’s not relevant to now. Everything has changed, the recording techniques are different. So even if you went into the studio with a bunch of late seventies sounding songs, and did them in the studio today, with all the new equipment, it would sound totally different.

You wouldn’t ask an artist to knock out another picture exactly like the last one he did. Music has a life of its own, it goes out into the world and then you start making new music. Learn to let it be what it is.

I've no idea how a younger audience will greet anything that I do really, it’s in the lap of the Gods. This thing about ‘back to guitar,’ I've never really left it alone for very long. The records that I made in the eighties, that people remember as synth-based albums, there was still a lot of guitar, just that the guitar was quite heavily treated. I was using e-bow a lot and it wasn’t as instantly recognisable as that clichéd rock guitar sound. Again, it’s because of the amount of material I've done. I had the room and space to do purely non-guitar based albums, along side some of the guitar based things. So I've never really gone away from it, it’s like anything else, peaks and troughs. Sometimes I can be more passionate about it, other times I can take it or leave it.

But certainly, my current feeling with this next new record, if a can master the new studio equipment, the recording standard should go up tremendously, because I will have automated mixing. With it being digital, the sound should be cleaner, whether that means it will be less warm, I don’t know, I've got to get to grips with that. Also with this lay off, I don’t really know which direction I will be pulled in. I was thinking at one stage to do a more ‘Northern Dream’ type album, not necessarily an album full of those type of songs, but maybe something with that acoustic, folksy approach, a rootsy approach. If I think about wanting to do an electric guitar type album, my current feeling is that it will be quite strongly guitar based, it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘heavy metal’ sounding guitars with full on distortion. It might mean something quite ethereal. I don’t know until I start to deal with it. The guitar at the moment is in favour with me, it’s on an upswing, so anybody who likes that aspect will probably be more than happy with what comes next.

I think I was one of the first people to really get into the e-bow, in terms of recording artists. I used to use it with Be-Bop Deluxe, it’s something I've always found fits me. There is a danger that you can overuse it. I try these days to moderate the use of it, rather than use it just for the hell of it. I have rediscovered my passion for guitar, that twangy, bright crystally sound, ‘made in the fifties’ almost. The current guitar-sound cliché, is just that fuzzy wall of distorted-chord-rhythm thing that so many bands do, I find that sort of sound uninspiring.

Most of the guitar that’s on any of my recordings for the last, God knows how many years now, is processed. I've got two digital processors in a rack. The Zoom 20-50 and the Digitec Valve Effects, which is a digital unit with a valve front end. I just plug straight into them and they go straight into the desk in the studio, or straight into the PA system if I do live work. There’s no amplifier at all, and I think they're great, I have no desire to go back to my old pedal board with all its clunky clichéd sounding analogue effects. I can tweak the digital things and get my own thing going with them, it’s easy to cart around. Particularly if I'm doing the tape/guitar show, it’s just a rack and a couple of guitars to take.

I do have some old amps in my studio, and I would like to try them when I get my new studio set-up, so that I can off-set the digital feeling of the actual recording system with something analogue happening going in at the front end. So I may start miking up an amp or two for then, but not using Marshalls and Fenders, but using these quirky old amplifiers, just to see what textures I can find.