Be Bop: Cocteau The Night Away
by Angus MacKinnon

Be Bop Deluxe: Sunburst Finish (Harvest SHSP 4053)

Be Bop's third record, the best so far, the one that'll clean up for Bill Nelson and Cohorts.  Inexorably.  For Be Bop are perhaps the most interesting example of current British 'new wave" rock'n'pop.  And it's EMI-Harvest Mafia affair, even if Be Bop aren't yet as big as fellow mobsters Queen and, to a lesser extent, Cockney Rebel.  Androgyny and innuendo are here to stay, for the time being at least.

All the pale, pretty young things.  Bright boy too, crowding in the luminescent wake of Bowie and Roxy.  Come and get your culture, come and learn your style.  Tomorrow's bands today: future songs.

Furthermore, Be Bop's leader Bill Nelson has something of an edge on both Mercury and Harley: he's doing it two ways.  Appealing to 'the new kids' and to the hoary old guitar hero syndrome.  'Axe Victim', 'Futurama' and now 'Sunburst Finish' - the obsession positively gleams.  It just can't fail.

Be Bop are good now, one day they might be great.  The music is catholic, reasonably complex, superbly conceived and arranged, very well played.  As with Bowie you can dance to it, sit down and listen hard to it, hope that it sells a bomb just because it is that serviceable and enjoyable.  It won't last, but who cares?  Not much of the competition will either.  So love it now whilst stocks last.  Jean Cocteau the night away, live it all to death.  And that's got nothing to do with art for art's sake.  Bill Nelson obviously gets off on what he does, and it shows.  That's never too bad a thing.

'Sunburst Finish' is a clean sweep.  'Victim' didn't have the necessary support musicianship.  'Futurama' lost out heavily on overproduction.  Neither problem is anywhere in evidence here.  So what goes down?  Well, little needs to be said about Nelson's guitar playing save that it's fast, uncluttered, extremely lyrical and not without feeling.  Sometimes it's outrageously inspired.  It dominates proceedings throughout.

Nelson's voice is high-ranged and, like the man himself, fragile (but then Be Bop's not groinrock so it doesn't matter); it's enigmatic and above all unambiguously clear.  A voice entirely suited to is subject material.  The lyrics here are 'poetic', crammed full of crystalline imagery, definitely bidding for serious literary status.  But never inaccessible and anyone who works this hard to avoid hack rock'n'roller cliches (even if they're dealing with much the same kind of situations) deserves a favourable vote.  Nelson isn't so much blue as anguished, a Harlequino figure wandering around moonlit gardens with a rose in his hand and nobody to offer it to.  It's good to see melancholy and romanticism under fresh wraps - so winningly sad.

Meantime the dream soundtrack's been radically overhauled since 'Futurama'.  Ten new songs and all sorts.  Some will zip past in a Slavonic rush, but mostly they're an inebriating cocktail of fave raves and almost anything else.  Taking in Yes, Todd Rundgren, Hendrix, early Sixties doowop and much more.  It's an alchemical brew, and rapidly accelerates beyond its more obvious influences.  Toons and technology, with Nelson collapsing, compressing disparate bits and pieces into some kind of real coherence.  Clever stuff.

So in 'Fair Exchange' you'll find a Stones' riff thrown up against the hookline.  In 'Ships in the Night' a lick of ska.  In 'Blazing Apostles' a conception that's 200 per cent ('Close To The Edge') Yes.  But whereas Anderson and Howe take up a side to get their 'themes' together, Be Bop throw theirs around and lick them up no less than a quarter of the time; none of the songs run for much more than three or four minutes.  And despite their synthetic construction (musical mobile homes), the songs end up sound like nothing else.  Plenty of contrast as well, with slower frames like 'Crystal Gazing' taking up the slack.

No problem hearing what's going on either: Be Bop have eased up on the tape trickery - it's so much more effective when used in restrained fashion - and their studio sound is now (courtesty of Nelson and John Leckie) much less brittle.  Support and now imaginative encouragement come from Charles Tumahai (bass), Andrew Clark (keyboards), and Simon Fox (drums), all purposeful musicians.

Yes, Be Bop are there and well away.  Let's just leave it all at that.

Angus MacKinnon (1976)

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