I must first tell you, what a weird experience this interview with Bill was. Out of the hundreds of times I have met up and chatted with Bill, I have only ever been nervous twice. The first time I met him, and this time. I can’t explain it, possibly it was because of reading through e-mails from fans all over the world, then it hits you that your talking to the BILL NELSON, not just an extremely nice and intelligent chap that you talk with, over a can of lager.

A big thank you to everybody who sent in questions, we tried to get through as many as possible. So if yours was missed, I do apologise. Different fans inevitably repeated some questions. In such cases, the question was generalised and given joint credits.

Because of the amount of e-mails I received, plus my own input, I ended up recording nearly two and a half hours of discussion – so be warned. This is long! - Jon Wallinger

Well just before you came, I started capturing more stuff from my video camera into the computer. To try and do another video, but I’m digging into footage that I’ve used a lot, unfortunately. There are bits of images I haven’t used, but I’ll have to go out and do some more filming. Although I am treating the things I’ve used before in a totally different way.

Not yet, no. Sometimes I work from the song first, then other times I capture a set of images, then look at them together. Not edited into any particular sequence or with any effects, then look at them and see what they’re saying to me, then I try to find a piece of music that might feel like the right thing.

Well I copied some to VHS yesterday to send to Harold (Budd), I copied twenty, but there’s more. I think there’s probably twenty-four altogether. And that’s in six months.

Well it’s unfounded if I work this way, because what I’m doing is just getting stuff from footage that I’ve taken while I’ve just been travelling around. There are bits of footage from America, England, Japan, from holidays in France. So it’s travelogue footage mostly, or things that have just caught my eye as I’ve been wandering around. I haven’t yet sat down with a plan, like making a video of a performance.

I don’t know. That needs a bit of time and planning, I have to be in the right frame of mind. Basically I’ve used this material as a means to getting to grips with the system, finding out what it can and can’t do, I’ve been experimenting.

Oh yeah, probably early next year. That’s something I’d like to tackle. Ideally, I’ll wait for my new recording gear to arrive, and I make a start into the new record. When I’ve got some way into it, I can choose something that will be a good piece to do, and put a group together to perform it visually. If I’m going to spend a lot of time on it, I would like it to be something new musically as well. Everything I have used for the twenty-odd videos so far, has been pieces of music from the eighties or early nineties, apart from a couple of pieces that are a couple of years old. I haven’t been able to make anything specifically to go with a video, as I haven’t had the recording gear.

Well, when I start making them, I don’t think, ‘I’m going to do a video influenced by this person, or in the style of that person.’ Sometimes a particular image, or a treatment of it in relation to the music will make me think, ‘that’s very David Lynch, that section’, but it’s realised after the event. Talking of influences, David Lynch is a director that I am a huge fan of. His style is something that I don’t particularly want to emulate, because it’s his style, I’ve got my own way of working with images, but his style speaks quite strongly to me.

In the eighties, I did actually ask Mark Rye, who was managing me at the time, to send some of my instrumental work to David lynch, because I thought it might be right up his street. In fact I remember when I did the soundtrack for the movie Dream Demon, and when Twin Peaks came out, there were some similarities. Although the settings and directors were totally different, Harley Cokliss directed Dream Demon. But there’s that sense of the surreal in the ordinary, the way things are photographed just to bring out the strangeness of something that looks quite normal. It gives a new perspective to things, a quite uneasy perspective, unsettling but beautiful for all of that. So when I saw Eraserhead and later Twin Peaks, I thought he would be somebody I could be inspired to do something really good for. I don’t know what happened, at that time I was throwing so many balls into the air, that for whatever reason, nobody ever caught them.

I think it was a compromised film. It was made by Palace Pictures, and the backers I think wanted a straight-ahead horror film. The original story actually had a lot of subtleties in it, particularly concerning the relationship between the two girls, who are the two main characters. There was a stronger feminist agenda in it, and also a possible lesbian/gay element to it. The director was a fan of Cocteau, the opening sequence is almost a homage to Cocteau, with the mirrors and the girl being dressed for the wedding, and the way the camera moves around. So when I worked with Harley, and we spoke about films and stuff, we were both tuned into similar things. But there was a certain amount of pressure, that if it got too arty and intellectual, it wouldn’t hit its target audience. So there are moments that were intentionally gross, in the way that horror films try to be, yet there were a lot of disturbing dream images. Some sections of it worked perfectly well as an art film, while other parts worked as a kind of B-movie, trash horror film. In a sense, there are two films in there, both struggling for dominance.

I was pleased to do it, because it was my first chance to work on a big movie, and it was an ongoing learning experience, as it went on for many weeks and I quickly found out that nothing’s set in stone. I would receive a video cassette, with a ‘final edit’, and I would spend a week making the music to fit perfectly, timing everything, as this was before I had any kind of sequencing, it was all played real time. So every movement in the scenes were timed to a stopwatch, if somebody did a physical gesture that needed some musical underpinning, I had to know the exact point that it was going to happen in the piece of music. So after a week of doing the music for one scene, then the director and the producer would arrive from London at my house, and bring me another version of the same scene, saying "that old one doesn’t fit anymore, this is the new one". So I was working until two or three in the morning just to keep up with it. Even after the film was finished and shown at the Cannes film festival, there were queries from certain people who didn’t understand certain elements of the plot, the director and producer realised that some of the film needed clarifying. So they re-wrote the film's ending, and re-shot the end sequences. Meanwhile, I thought it was finished and had begun the Henry Moore Landscape documentary film, so I ended up having to do both at the same time, to finish it off. So it was a really stressful and shocking experience, I hadn’t really been up against that kind of challenge before. Exciting, but very, very stressful.

I would, if I could get one that demanded the right kind of music. It’s pointless working with people that want you to be something else. There are a lot of film composers who can turn out anything required, in whatever style. I don’t work that way. I was chosen for Dream Demon because they already liked what I did, so there wasn’t much interference musically at all. To be honest, a lot of the music was fairly abstract and spiky, not very commercial at all.

Okay, films I like as a viewer. I’ve got a lot of film director heroes, because of the amount of years I’ve been watching films. The older you get, the more baggage you accumulate. Things you’ve absorbed and seen and some things you liked when you were younger. So there’s a huge backlog of things. Just naming directors off the top of my head, we’ve already said David Lynch, Orson Welles is a big hero of mine, I’ve read two biographies about his life and watched many of his films. There are some artists that arrive on this planet with incredible passion and vision. They’ve got almost a mission, a task which they have to accomplish, they’re able to see into things in quite a deep way and they have the strength and dedication to take that depth and make it tangible. Make it possible for other people to share that vision. There’s few of those type of people who manage to actually pin it down, Orson Welles I think is one of those. He was worthy of the term genius for me, he’s a huge influence. Citizen Kane particularly, and The Magnificent Ambersons. Citizen Kane is still rated as the best film ever made, even though it was made so many years ago, and it was his first major film. If you go to any serious film school, they’ll go through Citizen Kane virtually frame by frame and say this is the genius of filmmaking.

There’s an English director called Michael Powell, I’m two-thirds through reading his autobiography. His style is very English in some ways. He did 'The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp' and 'A Matter Of Life And Death,' which had David Niven in it. And a film called A Canterbury Tale, which is very, very English. His most well known work was done through the forties and in the war years. He’s just a very poetic man. I think what I look for in film and in music, is a sense of poetry. That doesn’t mean poetry that rhymes in terms of words and literature, poetry for me is a quality, it’s inherent in something, a feeling, a poetic sense or sensibility. So any film that manifests that quality, I tend to gravitate towards. Cocteau is a great example of that, he was a poet in the traditional sense anyway and also a visual artist. When you put the poet and the visual artist together with a camera, you get some magical images. So Cocteau’s films were just pure visual poetry all the time.

Music wise, I think as much as I’ve made music for so long, the music is secondary to what’s going on, on the screen. Even quite average music can still be okay with a film, if the acting and plot are strong enough to carry it. I think mediocre music can ruin a good film, but there’s more of a tolerance in terms of good and bad music, compared to the images, because primarily people see a film and their eyes are engaged, the music is just a punctuation, underlining things. The film composer’s task is to express what action is being depicted and what is supposed to be coming across to the viewer. You can put funny music to a sad scene and it completely twists it. Sometimes it’s not always best to go the obvious route. Sometimes by going against what’s happening on the screen, you can intensify it even more. There are all kinds of possibilities by twisting the rules, but eventually you have to get back to what’s being done and said, and what the audience is supposed to feel.

I’m not sure what he means by ‘film’ footage, there’s been TV programmes which I’ve sometimes had copies of, and unfortunately lost. Be-Bop never made promo videos, they weren’t so widely used at that time. We did do TV programmes. Things like ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ we did around three times. We did ‘Top Of The Pops’ and a BBC In Concert thing. There are some I’d forgotten about, which I notice Mark Rushton has put up on his site. Red Noise did a promo video, for ‘Revolt Into Style,’ we filmed it in a private club bar off Oxford Street. We used some shop window dummies dressed up, a sort of mock sixties fashion style. The ironic thing is if you saw it now, it would look quite up to date, with the amount of sixties revivalism that’s gone on over the last five years. The title of the song comes from a book that was written about that period. I don’t have a copy, Mark Rye had a copy, he got the original one from EMI who had funded it. But it would be on an old system, not a digital system, I haven’t seen it at all, but I’m sure there must be something floating about, knowing how these things tend to leak out from certain sources.

Indeed.

Well in terms of commercial success, it’s a loaded the term. The word ‘commercial’ implies mass popularity and huge sales and a financially secure life, and all the rest of it. There are elements of that which would be nice, the financial security for example. However, I don’t have any hankering after what people might think of as pop stardom. It’s perhaps a good job that I don’t because I'm certainly not of an age where that would sit handsomely on my middle-aged person. I tend to be very dismissive of that whole ‘star’ system anyway, always have been to a degree. I don’t like the way that people are set up as tin Gods really, I'm just not comfortable with that sort of approach. At the same time, I would like the music I make to reach a larger audience. Without compromise, that’s the trick. There are degrees of compromise that come in to making things commercially successful. For something to be commercially successful from me, it wouldn’t be the music I want to make.

I’d like to put a band together, I’d like to go out on tour, I’d like to do some of the material from both the Be-Bop period and Red Noise and the eighties solo period, on stage with a band plus some new material. That’s something that I would dearly love to do, the cost of doing that is phenomenal, the cost of moving people around, getting the right kind of people to work with, in terms of musicians and crew. I’m not looking at it in the way that Be-Bop did it, with huge production and presentation. But just to do something that at least isn’t a sort of a pick up band in a pub. Something that’s got a little bit more presentation than that, and just to pay good musicians the wages that they deserve, and all the rest of it, it’s very expensive, and without a major record company to help underwrite those costs, it becomes impossible. The main thing is that, because I don’t have a band sitting there now, I would have to start from scratch. It would be auditioning and learning the stuff and there would be a huge amount of time building the monster to go out on the road. That takes a lot of money, just to pay people to give up their time to rehearse and learn the stuff, and then you have to go out on the road with all the costs on top of that. So it’s almost an impossibility. Sometimes I think well maybe there will be one of these fluke situations, where somebody picks up on one of the pieces of music that I've done in the past, and wants to re-issue it or put it on a movie soundtrack, or whatever it might be, and it brings a wider recognition to the whole picture through one piece. And then there becomes the possibility of raising the funds to do it, as there is some kind of pay back for the people who pay for those things.

Even to do that, even if I had enough mates to get through some numbers, it’s an untried and untested quality, until I put those people together and see what it sounds like. To put those people together means that I've got to give them each pieces of music to learn, they’ve got to go away and learn it. It will mean me giving up my time, stopping recording, stopping making my videos, doing diaries and anything else, and just think, right now we’re going to learn some old songs, some new songs, then sit around and see what happens. I could maybe spend two months testing people out in a band, only to find out at the end, that it’s not good enough. There’s that element of risk and I worry about it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a good enough reason not to do it, but it’s a consideration. To do that , then trail through to Leeds just to do a couple of gigs, and with a band that’s maybe okay, but not great. I don’t know whether it’ll maybe damage the whole thing in some way. I've thought about it, I’m still open to it, and I still think there’s a possibility of it working out.

It would be different if I could think, here’s a list of players, that I absolutely know are going to be so good. Then work it out and say, "this is going to cost £500 a week each", or whatever it is, to do rehearsals, and so much for gigs. At least then I would know that these are experienced guys, they’ve toured a lot, they’ve been with this band or that band, they’re going to be able to get to grips with this stuff really quickly. I’m not going to have to knock it into shape when we go into rehearsals, all I'm going to have to worry about is myself, because these guys are going to have it so tight and so well thought through. That’s more encouraging if you can do that, it means you’ve got a very, very strong foundation, and if I fall, it might not be so bad. But with people with less experience, then the weight comes back on my shoulders, to watch everybody, every minute of the day. It becomes an enormous task for me, it’s not like I've been out playing either. To get my own playing, to refresh my memory, especially of the old Be-Bop Deluxe numbers, and re-learn them to do justice to them, means that I've got to stop everything I'm doing and go back to the roots again. So it’s tricky, there’s all kinds of excuses I can make why it doesn’t happen. The main one is financial, and always will be, until I can bankroll the thing properly. It’s one thing to go out with a bunch of friends, and do a gig under another name, in a little pub, sort of without any focus on it, just for fun. That’s something that maybe wouldn’t be too difficult to do. But stick Be-Bop Deluxe’s name, or my name, or reference any of those things, then people start to expect something, so the workload suddenly increases. You’ve a lot more to think about to do it right.

Well the other thing that I can do, which I'm planning on doing, hopefully not too far into next year, is similar to the things I've done at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the South Bank in London, and the Wakefield Arts Festival, and the Notre Dame church in London. A man and his guitar and tapes. My friend Steve is quite a good keyboard player, he said he would be prepared to come along and improvise on things with me, so it wouldn’t be just me up on the stage, improvising on one instrument all night long. That kind of thing would give me the opportunity for using video, I've used that kind of thing in the past, as you know. But now that I've got my own video making equipment and I can actually put things together here, I can really do something that’s far more personal. I had other people collaborating on the ones I did before, but I could do something this time that could be a really personal vision, and just have those projected behind me all the time.

It’s stressful doing one of those things on your own, because unless there’s a film there, then I'm the only point of focus and it tends to be pretty much tied around instrumental music anyway. So it’s not like you’re watching somebody singing or listening to words. It’s pretty monochrome all the way through, because it’s just a man and his guitar and some tapes, by bringing the visuals in, that helps, and by bringing in at least one person, that helps me tremendously as well.

So that is quite a definite possibility for the beginning of the year. I'm going to try and do this band video thing. I think the secret of the band thing, will be this: - when I record the next album, when the new equipment does finally get installed, and I get to know how to use it, then that will give me an indication, depending on how the album goes, as to what will be the next step. I'm hoping to start the new album, thinking about how this material will be played if it was played live, and not allow it to get too studio orientated. So it might be something quite simple and quite primitive, and quite direct in comparison to the past things. If it works out that way, then the band thing might be more practical, as there would be less needed to reproduce the material. Although you still have a problem when you get to the Be-Bop Deluxe stuff, and all the other stuff I've done as well, particularly the studio orientated material.

Oh, I had lots of great times in America; it’s strange looking back, because I think I went to America with a lot of preconceptions, as most English people do when they go for the first time. There was the fantasy America that I’d been exposed to, particularly movies from the fifties, even forties. That gives you a certain expectation, about what American life is going to be like, and in fact a lot of that was pretty accurate, particularly in visual terms, things were very much like I expected, from the fantasy America I had been seeing.

But what struck me the first time was that it was a foreign country. That despite the fact that we share the same common language, and we’re both exposed to each other’s cultures, I know many Americans are very aware of British culture, that there is fundamentally a different thing at work, a different outlook. Also because I was traveling in America, in the circus that is a rock and roll tour, with all the attendant people that are around you, crew and band, journalists and record company people, managers, agents and you arrive at a place, and you’re taken straight to a radio station to do an interview, then to another for another interview, then back to the hotel. A quick change and on to the concert, and away you go. It’s not the best way to get to grips with what any place is about, because you're living in a kind of a sealed bubble. And that bubble isn’t very pleasant sometimes. I particularly found it difficult dealing with the superficial business elements that you encounter.

My initial impressions after being there a while were modified and it ended up with me writing the ‘Modern Music’ suite, with things like ‘Dance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoids,’ which actually has a parody of a particular record company staff member, who was assigned to us in certain parts of America, to be our ‘man on the spot’. He really ended up being subject of a lot of jokes from the band, because he wasn’t as hip as he might have been. But that produced that whole Modern Music suite, I tried to capture that, like ‘Honeymoon On Mars,’ it was like going to another planet, but a cartoon planet.

Now my feelings of America are much more mature, I've got lots of friends in America and I'm lucky enough to have fans in America as well. There is a lot out there to be envied, although I'm concerned about their new president. There’s an optimism in American people that is only balanced by the amount of cynicism in English people I think. It’s a much more optimistic atmosphere for anybody trying to achieve something. In England there seems to be a grey wall of doom against everything you do, if it’s going to be anything special, or different.

We toured with lots of different bands in America, but we very quickly established places where we were strong enough in our own right, to be able to headline big venues. Initially we were put on with all kinds of people. Some of the worst things were supporting people like Ted Nugent and Blue Oyster Cult, who seemed to draw a crowd that were basically Neanderthals. Or so it seemed at the time. And sometimes we were with bands that were a little bit more creative, we toured with a band called the Tubes, and with Alice Cooper at one time as well. Both those bands had a very visual stage show with a lot of effects and things, and it was a little bit more creative and imaginative, not just a straight ahead gothic rock thing.

We toured with some far more credible people, one was Patti Smith, sometimes she headlined, sometimes we headlined. We toured with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, who supported us. And Iggy Pop we did gigs with as well, I think we swapped with him in terms of headlining as well. We also toured with English bands out there, we did some gigs with Thin Lizzy. Really the majority of the time we did our own gigs, we went out there doing smaller places originally, but doing a large gig as support to a very established band, then the next tour, we’d probably be able to do the big place on our own. So gradually we expanded it so we weren’t actually supporting much at all towards the end.

As far as the Van Morrison thing goes, Kate was in the band at that time, the guitar player had left or been sacked, I don’t know what had happened. And she called me up and said would I like to go down to have a play with the band, with a view to possibly going on the road with them. I thought about it, and at the time, things were quite difficult for me financially. It was in that dark few years with the divorce and the Mark Rye case going on simultaneously. Having to sell the occasional guitar to survive, so the idea of a regular wage coming in from this gig, was something that would have been very useful. But I just couldn’t see me being the right person for the job. I'm not very good at being a full time back up person, I'm okay doing the occasional session for other people, and I think I'm okay with collaborating with other people, certainly people I have a common musical interest with. People like Harold, the Channel Light Vessel people, David Sylvian and so on. As I get older, there seems to be less and less time available to me to do the kind of thing I really need to do, which is to make a personal statement. And it would have been a distraction really, to get into somebody else’s musical mindset. So I passed on it basically.

It’s pretty easy for me to say. There’s been a lot of collaborations. The one that has been the most special and rewarding for me, was when I did the album with Harold in New Orleans. Plus we’ve done some live work together, we’ve toured over in Japan and a couple of quiet concerts over here. The Harold thing was great for so many reasons, I’ve been a fan of his music for a long time anyway, and we did actually get to know each other just as people before we worked together. We met through a mutual acquaintance and got on really well. Then Harold invited me over to work on his album ‘By The Dawn’s Early Light’, and we recorded in Daniel Lanois’s old studio, in the old part of New Orleans, the French quarter. It was in a beautiful Gothic mansion, which really wasn’t a studio at all; the recording equipment was just laid out in the big hall of this mansion. Anybody who’s heard the record will know the group comprised of harp, pedal steel guitar, piano, keyboards, viola and guitar. We played ninety percent of the stuff, maybe more, live. Then just a few embellishments were added afterwards.

The combination of this amazing recording environment, which despite it not being a purpose built studio, was perhaps the best studio I’ve ever been in, as regards pulling out something musically from the people in there. So with that and it’s location in the French quarter of New Orleans, with all its history and its musical history, working with somebody of Harold’s calibre, plus the group itself, which I thought was a marvelous combination of instruments and people… It was a complete joy. I went into the thing feeling very stressed and nervous, because I hadn’t worked with Harold before. I knew that he’d written everything for the rest of the members of the band, he knew I was self-taught and that I don’t read or write music. I have no academic musical training at all. So basically, he just allowed me to improvise and do anything I wanted. That took some of the pressure off, but it also added an extra amount of responsibility. I had to make sure that whatever I contributed, lived up to Harold’s composition. I hope Harold feels that I was on the right track there. So it was a great learning experience, a nice group community experience, and Harold and I became even closer friends after that, we’ve kept in touch ever since. We have a lot of respect for each other’s work, so I’ll put that as the number one thing.

Oh yeah, we’ve recently, earlier this year [2000], done some work in Hull together. A friend of mine called Steve Cobby, who has, not a group, but a project called ‘Fila Brazilia.’ We went out there, Harold and I, for a couple of days earlier this year, and just improvised over some recordings Harold had brought over, some DAT tapes of some piano pieces he had done. In fact only this week, we’ve got some CDR’s of some mixes from that. I’ve had an e-mail this morning from Harold commenting on it. So they may see the light of day at some stage. But I have a different kind of collaboration in mind. If we can get the time to do it, and Harold’s willing, I’d like to really work intensely on something that maybe is quite radical for the both of us, take it somewhere else.

Yeah, why not?

Well the last YMO person I saw, was Harry Hosono. That was when I was living out in Tokyo, in 1993 I think it was. He came to dinner at a friend of Emi’s and mine, the house where Emi and I were actually staying. That was the last time I saw Harry. I was ill, I was suffering from a virus I’d caught, I had to stay in bed through the dinner party and just popped my head through the door to say hi to him. Sandi I saw quite often, when I was out there at that time. She’s fine last I heard from her. Hajime, I haven’t seen for a while. Obviously, I married Yukihiro Takahashi’s ex- wife, so I see her quite often! Oh, and I saw Ryuichi, maybe not last time he came to England, but the time before, which is in the last three years.

I did a few back in the eighties, I think the first one I did was for a company called Centra Hi-Fi and then I did one for Goblin Rio vacuum cleaners! One for American Express, that was when the Olympics were held in Korea. I did three for Toyota cars, all at the same time. AT&T telephones in the States, I don’t think that one ever went out in the form it was intended. Then recently, the Xpedior ads which were shown In America. But that’s it, this isn’t something I’ve gone out of my way to do, people just happen to call up occasionally, saying they’d like me to create some music for an advert. So I do it if it’s an interesting enough project, but I haven’t made a job out of it.

Haven’t heard from David in a long time. I know what he’s up to from the fact we share the same manager. David lives in America now, so I haven’t seen him for a long time, as I don’t get over there, but I do know how he is and that things are okay. He’s a family man these days.

There’s so little that’s worth watching. Often I sit there watching total rubbish, just because I need to be in a stupor for an hour or two, after thinking about music all day. I did like ‘One Foot In The Grave’, possibly because I’m moving towards that age group. I've been watching the re-screenings of that on satellite TV, but Victor Meldrew recently got written out forever from the story, so that’s finished. I don’t know, there are odd documentaries that crop up now and again, I certainly don’t watch any soap operas, I just detest soap operas, I'm hopeless when you get into one of those conversations with people, and they ask if I watched ‘Corry’ last night, because I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. So TV is something that I watch, but it is not something that I'm proud of watching.

I am interested, but my family is somehow lost in the mists of time. There’s only really my mum and my brother alive from the immediate family. I've got recollections of my father telling me things about his life as a young man and so on, still quite vivid with me. He was brought up in Newcastle and worked in the shipyards briefly, then moved away to Yorkshire as a young man, and cycled all the way, sleeping in hedgerows. They were always fantastic stories that he told me, which I tend to believe were true. I don’t really know much beyond my immediate parents, I've got vague recollections of my grandfather, which I think I've written about in a diary entry one time. My grandmother survived some way into my teenage years. The distant ancestry is a deep and dark mystery, although my father told me we were related to Admiral Lord Nelson.

The older you get, the more nostalgic you get. You start to think about the golden age, or what you perceive as your own golden age. I do try to keep nostalgia at bay with a sharp fork, because I think you can end up wallowing in it too much. At the same time I've learned the hard way that in pinning too many hopes on the future, you end up being disappointed and bitter and twisted. So I try to make whatever is happening today the focus of my energies.

Well I bought the very first Pink Floyd album, when it came out. I first heard about Pink Floyd, when I read about them in an underground magazine called ‘International Times’. At that time, the hippie ‘revolution’ hadn’t really happened, but was beginning to happen. There was a lot of things happening on the West coast of America, based around San Francisco and the psychedelic culture that was starting to emerge there. That was filtering into England, and bands like Pink Floyd were picking up on it. There was a club in London called the UFO club, reviews from this club were often published in the International Times. English people my age will probably remember this, but for anyone else, it wasn’t a newspaper in the traditional sense, it was a magazine in a newspaper format. It covered the alternative or counter culture. The thing that had grown from the beat generation, the fledgling psychedelic generation. They covered things like Alan Ginsberg’s famous poetry reading at the Albert Hall. I read about this band called Pink Floyd and it sounded very exciting.

I eventually got to hear the record and I saw them on TV, Syd Barrett was with them at that time, before he had his breakdown. I liked that incarnation of the Floyd more than any other, the first album is very prophetic, I think he was a vital ingredient for the Floyd’s thing at that time. Later Roger Waters became a stronger person, the music shifted slightly when Dave Gilmour came in, it mutated and grew and went different ways. But that first period I really liked, I actually went to see them play at Leeds Town Hall, in the later sixties, when they had this thing called an azimuth co-ordinator. Which was basically surround sound, they had speakers all around the hall, and the sound were moving all around, so it was quite technically impressive.

But what I remember the most about that particular gig, and I've still got the program for it upstairs. So if there are any Pink Floyd fans reading, that want to buy an original sixties Pink Floyd program, throw money! But what I remember about it was that I took my girlfriend at the time, whose name was Lynne. My parents were away at the coast, in their caravan. I said I wasn’t going to go with them because we wanted to see Pink Floyd, we had the tickets, we told her parents that my parents weren’t away, and that she was staying over at our house that night, basically so we could stay there, just the two of us, and have frenzied adolescent sex together. It was very memorable on both counts!

Yeah, I believe he wanted to buy it at one time, but I've sold both of them since, but not to him. At the time he wanted to buy it, I didn’t want to sell it.

Well I don’t listen to Be-Bop Deluxe albums for pleasure. I listen to them when I have to do for a particular purpose. It might be to choose a track to play at a radio interview, or to discuss it in an interview, or if I had to sit down and learn it, I’d have to put the record on!

I’ll sometimes play a track to someone who maybe hasn’t heard Be-Bop Deluxe and asks what it was like.

As far as the other band members, Charlie Tumahai was the last person from the band that I had contact with. I remember when I was recording the ‘Getting The Holy Ghost Across’ album, I was down at Surrey Sound studio, and Charlie came down to see me. It was just before he moved back to Australia or New Zealand. I got the occasional card from him at Christmas. Simon I haven’t seen for a long time, or Andy. My biggest failing is communication with people. I'm really bad at remembering to keep in touch, or to make a call or to even think to make a call. It’s a terrible weakness I have, it’s not meant in any negative way, just that I get wrapped up in things that I'm doing and the social scene isn’t my strong point. I regret losing contact with them, I’d love to see Simon and Andy again, even if it was just to meet up in a pub and reminisce about old times.

Andy I understand lives in Bath and has his own little recording set up, he was doing jingles and library music at one time, I don’t know whether that is still the case, he’s done a lot of sessions for people. I would really like to meet him again and speak with him.

Simon, well it’s a long, long time ago since I last heard from Simon. He was with a Canadian band called ‘Blazer Blazer’ for a while; I just don’t know what’s happened to him or where he is. Again, I liked Simon very much. I'm much more fond of the ‘human’ side of what went on in Be-Bop Deluxe now, than some years ago. Simply because in those days I was so intensely wrapped up in music, to such a degree that I sometimes missed out on the fact that I was very lucky to be with those good people, who were helping me make that music. It’s not that I treated them badly, or anything like that. But I tended to be absorbed in the work all the time, people seem to slide away, years go by and I suddenly realise that I did enjoy being with those people. Simon was good fun to be around, I liked his soul. So I’d love to see them again.

Be-Bop was the foundation of my professional musical life. That was the time when it was established that this is what I shall do for the rest of my life. The band members all contributed to that being possible, so with a wiser and older head on my shoulders, I can look back and say that those people were generous in being around me at that time.

I've no idea what Harold’s intention was with that, I think it was something that Andy and Harold hatched together. I do know John Foxx, I spoke to him on the phone two or three years ago, my album ‘Chimera’ was recorded in the studio that he owned at that time.

Andy Partridge, I've been out for a meal with, I've been to a couple of his gigs and once spoke quite often with him over the phone. One time he suggested to me that he and I do something together, and I never got round to following it up. Andy is a tremendously talented musician.

No.

A guy who was involved in writing a biography of Gary’s asked me to contribute something, my reminiscences about recording with Gary on the Warriors album. But I couldn’t really think of anything positive to say about the experience. I'm not blaming Gary for any of that. Gary is Gary, and I am who I am, but I think as he noted in his autobiography, we have a totally different approach to music, different views on what music is and isn’t. Whilst it was an interesting experience doing the album, there was a lot of friction in many ways, and I didn’t feel as comfortable as I might, I had no real desire to go further with it. So when I was approached about this particular thing, I thought it best to leave it where it was.

Are you a John Coltrane or Pharaoh Sanders fan?

Yes. To both.

Well the original plan was to do it through DGM, but the whole DGM set up is changing at the moment, which is best not for me to comment on really. Those changes mean that there aren’t the resources to release the back-catalogue, which was the original plan when I went with DGM. So I plan to try and do a little bit at a time, through the ‘Toneswoon’ label, which is a coverall name for anything I release independent of a proper record company. These will be made available through Lenin Imports, bit by bit. If a better opportunity comes along in the meantime, to get them out in a much more heavily marketed manner, then the option is to do that. But we’ll carry on a little bit at a time.

‘Simplex’ will be out soon, the next step after that will be ‘Noise Candy’, which isn’t a re-issue at all, but a ‘new’ old piece. Then we’ll look at what might be the next back-catalogue item after that. It’s unpredictable and very typical of the kind of times we live in, you can’t really make hard plans any more, you just have to take opportunities when they arise, and make the best of what you have.

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.

My mother was always emotionally supportive, through the early days of bands and things. My father was a musician as well, so he tended to be coming at it from a different angle. He bought me my first guitars, including the Gibson I used with Be-Bop Deluxe, and still have. So he was tremendously supportive. He was a working class guy and the Gibson in particular was a lot of money in those days.

When the psychedelic era came along, prior to Be-Bop in the mid sixties, I was really into people like Hendrix and Beck, Townshend and Clapton. They were the four guitar people that I listened to the most, although there was a lot of jazz people on the side I was listening to as well. He saw that kind of music as being sort of bizarre and said I’d never get anywhere with that sort of music, writing my own songs etc. He thought I should be doing standards and things people could sing along to. So for a while in the early days of Be-Bop he was hyper critical about everything I did. Then there’s this story that I've told many times.

We did a half hour TV special on the BBC with Be-Bop Deluxe playing in a studio, live. I went round to my mother and father’s house when it was broadcast to watch it with them, and I was really nervous about watching it with my dad. I thought he was just going to be picking holes in it all the way through. When the programme finished he was really quiet, then he said, "I take it all back, I don’t know where that all comes from, but I think it is incredible". That was everything that I wanted to hear from my father, because he knew what he was talking about. He gave me all kinds of advice in the early days, to do with music. A lot of which I didn’t take, because of my youth and my ignorance. But some of it I did take. It was all spot on, generally!

It’s nothing to do with any of that really, although integrity does come into it. There’s no way you can guarantee a pop hit. There are so many things that have to be in place to make a record a hit, most of those things aren’t actually anything to do with music at all. It’s to do with marketing, targeting age groups, media exposure and often, musically, to do with mediocrity. You only have to watch ‘Top Of The Pops’ to see the level of mediocrity that music has sunk to. So it’s not possible, to expect somebody to sit down and guarantee a hit, it doesn’t work that way. Not unless you have a lot of machinery in place to go with it, and a very clear cut point of view of what a popular piece of music should sound like, and I have no idea of what people want to hear. I only know what I want to hear, and it’s not what is on ‘Top Of The Pops’…

I’ve used different approaches at different times. When I was working in my ‘day job’ before Be-Bop Deluxe turned professional; I wrote all the lyrics for ‘Axe Victim’ at my desk at work, or even in the toilet at work! Then I’d go home and get a guitar and try and figure out some kind of melodic thing to go with it. In latter years, it’s been more dealing with the rhythm first and adding things a layer at a time. Using it more like a piece of clay, rather than having too fixed an idea to start with, I just have a couple of starting points, then see where those starting points lead. It’s like having a key to a door, but you’re not quite sure what’s in the room until you get inside. The starting points are the keys, it may be a title for a song or a mood that I want to get across, a subject matter or some little quirky thing I’ve observed. But that starting point is enough until I get into the room and start exploring. There is no hard and fast rule, it could be one of several methods.

That’s a good point I think.

It’s at the same stage as last time I saw you! Now I’ve got my printer, I might be able to try something with the artwork. I’ve been trying a few experiments, putting my hand in the scanner and fiddling around with the different controls.

‘Noise Candy’, I possibly perceive as being commercial, simply because a lot of the tracks are ones which were left off other albums because I thought they were a bit too commercial. ‘Sunflower Dairy Product’ is the most light-hearted ‘Poppy’ song based album. When I recorded them, I thought them too commercial and I didn’t want that to be a major statement at the time. ‘King Frankenstein’ is also possibly quite commercial, it’s a kind of psychedelic ‘heavy’ rock. The psychedelic bit is very important to it, because it’s quite trippy, it’s not ‘AC/DC’ by any means, there’s a lot more going on. But I think it’s commercial in the respect that those people who like the guitar, the more ‘stunt guitar’ side of my music, will go for that perhaps.

I think from it, one really strong album could be distilled. That was both commercial and had integrity. But I’m not the person to do it because I’m so close to it, I’m so sick of hearing it, I just couldn’t tell you what’s good, bad or indifferent. This is why it has taken me so long to get the artwork together. I really want the record out, but it’s such an uphill struggle to get motivated to do it. It seems it belongs to the person that I was when I did it, and I’m about to change and mutate again with the new studio. There’s something new down the line and I don’t know what it is, but I’m more interested in that, than the past. I know I have to discipline myself and sit down and finish it and get it out the way.

I never presume really what people are going to ask. There is that clichéd one about "Why don’t you reform Be-Bop Deluxe?" "Why don’t you play guitar anymore?" Lately it has become "Why don’t you sing anymore?" So I guess they’ve got to be contenders. People really can ask what they want, and I’ll try to answer it the best I can.

Can I give you a million pounds and the key to Greta Scacchi’s room?

What makes anybody buzz? It’s real things, not necessarily things to do with my career or music. Suddenly realising that somebody values me for the person I am, genuine friendship. Creatively, lots of things, you’d have to walk round with your eyes shut not to get a buzz. The world, despite all the complaints and problems that it has today, it’s still an incredible buzz just to be alive. To have all that possibility of input into yourself, then to be able to churn it around in the alchemical furnace and out it comes as music or painting or whatever.

Smile is probably the same as buzz really, something to tickle your fancy if you can see the funny side of it.

Angry? I try to contain anger, it’s a negative thing, but it’s impossible not to be stirred by those things from time to time. The thing that makes me angry the most is unfairness, if I come across people that are very unfair in a conscious and deliberate way, when they really won’t shift on something, they know somebody is going to lose out and it’s not going to be them. That riles me when they can’t see the other person’s point of view, when there’s a compromise to be reached in a human situation – injustice.

It’s a long time since I’ve shed tears, although there were plenty around the time of the divorce and Mark Rye’s case. I think if I ever feel a real deep sadness, it tends to be brought on by some work of art that’s actually touched the real depths of what the human condition is about. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a morbid subject, that milks the sentiments superficially. It would more likely be a movie that has a moment in it that shows the vulnerability and tenderness of ordinary people, in a very small and simple way, and just shines a little lamp on it for a second. It can touch you really deeply, music can do that. I still find it difficult if I go to York Minster and listen to evensong, some pieces in there are so beautiful that my eyes just fill up, sitting and listening to it. It’s not because it’s sad or about death and mortality. I’m just so touched by the fact that human beings, for all their faults and anger, bitterness and fear, are capable of creating such total beauty that sweeps you off your feet. That contradiction, from a creature that can do terrible things to its own kind, can also create something that really moves me.

I’d like to be able to say that I had finally managed to find the funding to go out on the road with a band, and record an album with some excellent musicians. Collaborate with some fine people. Score another movie. Have an exhibition of my visual work somewhere and not be worrying about financial problems.

But, if I had to choose between that, or just to be alive and healthy in five years time. Then being alive and healthy would take first place, because you can have all that other stuff and be living in hell. If I could say to you that I had spent the last five years actually getting to know more about how to live, it would be a great achievement. It would be a bigger achievement than making another dozen records.

Thanks for all the questions, some very good ones in there. Thanks for the patience with ‘Noise Candy’; it will come out eventually. Have a good 2001 and I hope it will bring some musical surprises.