Be- Bop Deluxe. A snappy name for a hand. Deluxe as in top of the range model. A well-appointed vehicle, with the rock'n'pop equivalents of leather-trimmed upholstery, alloy wheels, real walnut fascia and more than a hint of Ghia fastback wedge.

A complete package, covering all options. It's just a question of style. Contemporary and sophisticated. Right for today, ready for tomorrow. A winning style.

The four members of the ensemble plus ensemble tumble into their publicist's office behind schedule. Gaining themselves a couple of hours off between taping 'Supersonic' and 'in Concert' appearances. The machine in motion.

Drummer Simon Fox and pianist Andrew Clark wear velvet jackets, hair midlength and well-groomed. Fox runs through a brief phone interview with easy nonchalance.

"Well, all that kind of stuff like Yes and ELP." he says, "that's dead now, left behind us. We're the new thing." The reporter has his punch line and rings off a minute or so later.

Clark and Maori bassist Charlie Tumahai settle down to tea and a crossword, with Tumahai promptly correcting a misspelling of 'atoll".

Meantime Bebop's leader Bill Nelson emerges from another interview downstairs. Nelson is slightly built, high cheekbones emphasised by the pallor of his complexion, although not to the extent some of the press photos would have you believe. Onstage Nelson favours a well-cut white jacket and bow tie. but off he wears a tightly fitting brown leather jacket. quilted sweater and jeans. His watch is digital. Nelson's manner is earnest. ingenuous, unassuming. Entirely BeBop are Nelson's band and the current line up is at least the second to have gone under the name. It's a longterm affair. Nelson sings, plays guitar, writes all the songs and lyrics, has a hand in album production and sleeve design. He already has a sizeable, devoted following. Fans bring him volumes of Cocteau, his cherished obsession, backstage after gigs. They usually admit to having another copy of their own at home, already read and re-read. Just who is this softly-spoken young man from Wakefield, Yorkshire And who loves him ? . "I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the younger kids in the audience now don't relate at all to the period from [missing line]

"The Woodstock syndrome doesn't mean that much to them. They know about the Beatles and Hendrix and all the rest of it but they're not that aware of what it meant at the time.

"There’s a lot of bands that have started recently, influenced from that period, but they've noticed that there's a need to come out of it and go for the new kids on their own sensibilities and interests. To get them towards something that's interesting both musically and otherwise. It couldn't be any good Yes going out to the kind of audiences that Cockney Rebel draw."

Indeed not. It's rather a matter of the Art School Dance. Both Bowie and to a [missing line] animals. More than just 'head' music. A lot more.

"Yes, that does come into it in a lot of ways because there are similarities-, Bowie and Ferry and quite a few other people have had that art college kind of background, those circles.

"I was at art school for four years as well and at about the same time as they were. We were getting into things like the beginnings of Pop Art, becoming interested in the style of surface things and that of everyday things that were taken for granted - blowing them up, taking the purpose away from them and changing them into something else. The process is one of exaggeration that transcends whatever the originator had decided it was going to be.

"When you get to the stage I'm at now style is a thing which can be used and varied from song to song, from bar to bar so that you're playing around with an apparent surface image, but with a direction and a depth to it. Like Bowie but not so much with Ferry, who's very aware of the style of things but I don't think that once you've dissected all the areas there's any grain of wheat substance underneath.

"Ferry is really dependent on the rest of Roxy for that substance, which comes in a musical sense from Mackay and Manzanera. They play more from the old school with avant-garde overtones. It was all very exciting and very promising at the start but it's slipped into the business thing. But it's very easy to be sucked into that. Thinking 'this works, this sells it makes life comfortable and easy'."

Nelson pauses for a moment, smiles. then expands on his last point.

"To he quite honest I detest the whole music business. How necessary it is that [missing line] to keep the record company pushing us back into the studio. Ultimately we're going to do what we want to do. We're doing what we can do now because of 'x' number of circumstances. It's a real problem. as the people that hold all the cards are within the companies and if you don't show them some kind of potential there's no way you can get in there.

"Unless you do what I did initially which was to do an album on my own locally. It was cheap to do and has since been re-pressed now that the band's getting a bit of attention. EMI bid for it at one stage but the people who put up the money didn't take them up on it, which keeps the record as it was originally - a small thing. In the same way I like the idea of what Eno's doing with his Obscure records and I hope they're going to be successful."

And yet BeBop's third album, 'Sunburst Finish', is a good deal more immediate than either of its predecessors. Especially 'Futurama' with its sometimes impenetrable production and overall cover and lyric concept, which tended towards the implicit rather than explicit. In contrast 'Sunburst' is very accessible, partly because Nelson and engineer John Leckie have produced the material sympathetically and also because a lot of the songs rely on instantly recognisable stylistic devices. A certain broadening of compositional approach. 'Third time round for the Big One ?

"Agreed, but BeBop isn't a short term thing - or at least the ideas that go into it aren't - and I don't want to lose everything I've gained up to now - which is mainly a recording contract.

"It might sound as if I was looking at it all very coldly, but I've got a lot more I want to do than just be a guy playing guitar in a rock band.

"There's a danger that you can become too obscure too early. You have to make certain compromises and the problem was to make the right ones - that comprised musically and not spiritually - to try and make this album that just has to be easier to get into than the other two. So I tried to make the songs simpler and more direct, perhaps a little bit less personal in the hope that we could as you say broaden the audience and justify the record company's faith. And I say it that way round rather than the other . . . it'll all bear well for the future and give me room to expand a bit.

"'Sunburst' is probably the easiest that we're likely to get. I suppose it's not that simple compared to other standards, but compared with what the band - and I want to do it's very straightforward. It's dangerous I know but I feel it's better to compromise now rather than later."

And the guitar theme, emphasised by the album covers and songs like 'Axe Victim' and 'Stage Whispers'. Whether by accident or design, it's a good selling point, a focus.

"It's definitely a business angle, a fairly obvious means of identification with the band. Before I was writing songs I was just a guitar player in a band, behind other singers: the guitar was the first musical thing I got into. Then when I started to write for myself, I felt it was most natural to play guitar, not just stand there and strum it but to make the guitar playing an integral part of the mood.

I'm not against the theme as such, I just don't want other things to get overlooked. Anyway guitar heroes aren't fashionable these days, especially in the world of rock criticism. But you mentioned in your review (SL 7) that the songs aren't going to last. I agree, as they're very stylised and intentionally so, but at the same time there's a spontaneity, a raunchy feeling . . . I never plan my solos, only work around the chords and spaces. Whereas the lyrics are considered, worked out like a little picture.

"I don't go out to promote myself as a guitar player. That element is just natural. If I thought that I should concentrate on the words because guitar heroes are dead then I wouldn't enjoy myself as much as I do onstage. I just get off on the feel of the thing in my hand. But I'm in favour of anything that means more people will listen to the music, as long as we've got something to back it all up. There has to be something that hits you after the music has gone.

"What we aim for is that original starting point which does mean something and then add all the things so that when you do get through all the layers, there's something at the base of it all."

Which brings us to the occasionally vexed subject of Nelson's lyrics. They're not exactly standard rock'n'roll fare, which is something to be very grateful for. Covering an expansive range of subjects: poetic Romanticism, a snatch or two of sci-fi, generally wistful melancholia and so on. As much Art as entertainment.

"There's no reason why all the things that go with 'modern' music shouldn't be stronger and more substantial. Yet they needn't get highbrow. There's a reflective thing through it all, something real.

"I always enjoyed writing at college, bits of prose and stuff. With the songs I've been doing condensed pieces, fitting them into the format. I can only write about things that mean something to me; I can't deal with subjects I don't really relate to. It's no good me writing protest songs because much as I might feel for the cause I can't get that steamed up about it - a horrible thing to say but I suppose it's true. So I tend to write about things that happen to me and not so much because I want to tell anybody else about it but because it feels better getting it out -like being plagued by several demons and exorcising yourself writing songs.

"Obviously I don't want to do it in such a way that I make a fool of myself; I try to codify everything and give it a symbol, a reference to what it means tome. Also to make it as ambiguous as possible so that other people can then put their own interpretations and feelings into it."

Nelson wrote a song for 'Axe Victim' entitled 'Darkness (L'immoraliste)' which he confirmed to have referred to Andre Gide, a French novelist writing at the turn of this century, and his book of the same name. And of course there's Jean Cocteau, also the subject of a song (on 'Futurama'), and the source of much inspiration for Nelson.

The admiration afforded Cocteau is unpretentious, quite sincere. Nelson came across a collection of Cocteau's writings and found that the poet / dramatist expressed a whole lot of feelings and ideas that Nelson could identify with. In addition the 'Cocteau experience' allowed Nelson to gain self-confidence in writing about himself. All of which is a natural enough process - finding a friend. It can be very reassuring if you're that way inclined. And if you can make use of that kind of connection, with enthusiasm, it (ends to reinforce your own output. Even if you develop your idiosyncratic set of symbols, their latent strength and emotive power has a knack of coming through, using language as an evocative filter. A little bit of mysticism helps at times.

Although leading an up-and-coming band doesn't allow for too many theoretics. There isn't the time, which can prove to be a problem.

"The whole business thing is just total fabrication. It's obvious to the people who work within it and just depends on how greedy they are. 'Me only way I can see of changing it is to work within it, but they're so many variables. It's like walking a tightrope and juggling at the same time. You've really got to be that for the jiffie b4ng your are a product. Yeah, it's a kind of reality problem.

"I've recently moved out of Wakefield into a small village, still in Yorkshire, and have been pressurised an awful lot to move down to London. Because it's easier for travelling and easier to be more accessible there. I refuse to do that. When I get the chance to go home - which isn't often - it's a totally different world: an antidote, and something that serves to point out how crazy the whole thing is. When you get away from it the focus is even sharper.

"We're actually registered as BeBop Deluxe LTD: all the band are shareholders of the company and I'm supposed to consider that side of it as well. I'm sure I annoy the rest of the band and the management as I tend to be the one who's least impressed by the glamour side of it. I'd rather not go to receptions but if I didn't . . . And it's going to get worse in the future. When I was playing tip north I always wanted to tour America but now that it's there and I know that I can go and that I am it no longer has its magic. But I know the others are longing to go…

I suppose I haven't got the lifestyle of a rock'n'roll musician. I enjoy that hour onstage but everything else that goes with it is just one big pain. Particularly being away from the people who stabilise you.

"You simply get completely disorientated from real living. The last six days for instance have been a blur. I'm never very happy with live performances and prefer to work in the studio, where there's the time and space to think about what you're doing. You have to work in a more constructive way in those areas too. Not doing only BeBop songs but recording other music: BeBop's a stepping stone and I'm not selling out by saying that. Because I enjoy what we're doing now. It's fun and at the same time it's meaningfull for me - it's part of a learning process."

It'll be interesting to see whether Nelson can remain faithful to such intentions. The chances are that he will as he's already well aware of the pitfalls, as he retains a deeply felt keening for his native Yorkshire. And the latter remains integral for Nelson's further plans. Before BeBop he was involved with a project called 'Gentle Revolution', which involved making movietracks for quite lengthy pieces of music, using friends, actors, masks and costumes. Filming across Yorkshire landscapes, about which he's already written one recorded song, and has plenty more.

In addition, Nelson envisages employing a brass band on a longer piece, something he experimented (successfully) with in one song on 'Futurama', using the Grimethorpe Colliery Band (who also appeared on Roy Harper's 'When An Old Cricketer leaves The Crease').

"I'd like to try and get over a mood that's not just the cloth cap people think it is but some of the distinct variations that exist. It would probably take up about half a side. It'd have to be set within the right context because it's going to he very different from what people expect. I wouldn't want it to get to the stage where it becomes a pop opera or rhapsody or anything like that. Just a story in music. If you present something in high terms you're immediately alienating so much of your possible audience.

One of the reasons why rock hasn't grown as an art form and never really develops further than it has done is that you have to become the business yourself. You have to reach the stage where you can simply do without the companies and be your own master. Even then people who've tried that have got themselves into the same thing, running up massive overheads and having to sign up bands without much talent, just because they're commercial and likely to get a hit. In a way.

"It's all going to he hard to achieve that but I want to have a go." (another smile) "Maybe - I'll be back where I started being a clerk or something but it's worth a try though."

If Nelson should win himself that degree of independence he hopes to be able to finance some more film projects of his own, some of which he sees as eliminating the need for a support act. The films would be screened as the show's first half, with BeBop performing a soundtrack, either live or prerecorded, with the material differing somewhat from usual practice.

All in all, you can't but respect the man, for his determination and, even more so, his boundless enthusiasm. In the meantime BeBop's current output is enough to be going on with - refreshingly idiosyncratic. Nelson himself has maintained a remarkable creative momentum.

And from now on it's as much a question of endurance as it is of style.

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