| Flakk: When did you start recording Practically Wired?
BN: I did it in late November. It was done very quickly, just fourteen
days from going into the studio with nothing prepared other than a concept
and a list of ideas, and in fourteen days we came our with a mixed, finished
album.
Flakk: Nothing prepared? That's really fast!
BN: Nothing musically prepared. What I had was a list of titles that
I felt fitted the ideas that I was trying to do and a list of things to
try. Just lists of different kinds of guitar sounds and different rhythmic
beginnings, and then just looking at the notebook as I went along. We made
each piece as it happened ... direct to tape ... almost spontaneous composition.
Flakk: A few years ago you shifted toward a more keyboard oriented
style of music, much to the distress of the many people who admire your
style as a guitarist. Practically Wired explores some of the areas that
your last album Blue Moons And Laughing Guitars opened, marking your return
to a guitar driven style. What led to this return?
BN: I guess age (laughs). I'm 47 this year, so it's time to re-evaluate
the things I've been doing since 1971 when I released an album called Northern
Dream, which is the first record that came out under my own name. I think
I've done over 40 records since then and it seemed natural to return to
some roots and look at those roots again with the vision of the 90's, if
you like.
Flakk: Could this possibly mean a return to the stage as well?
BN: It's always the cost of mounting the kind of group and live performance
I would like like do just to keep a certain standard flying. I've had a
hard time over the last ten years or more, with business management and
a long ongoing legal battle now, which has been happening for five years,
which should come to some sort of conclusion in October. Basically, I'm
fighting for the right to hold on to my catalog from Cocteau Records as
a result of various things to do with mismanagement. I was divorced a couple
of years ago and I lost my house to my ex-wife. So I ended up back at my
mother's just like a teenager again, starting all over with nothing really
to build on, other than records I couldn't access to earn money from. Things
slowed down as a result of that and there's been a lot of things I've done
in my home studio. The sort of things that were on Blue Moons and Laughing
Guitars, which were sketches for a possible band. The finances weren't
available to put a band together, or the recording contract to do it. But
having said that, things are picking up quite positively. We're looking
at early next year doing a band album with a tour. And the tour would include
both new material and a large amount of material gathered from the whole
history of what I've done. So it will be something like a two and a half
hour show covering a large amount of time. Obviously to find musicians
who can cover that amount of time and do something from every period, you
need very flexible, aware players and they're not cheap. In the meantime,
I'm releasing some material, again from my home recording studio as a double
box set. It is called My Secret Studio and each box will contain four CDs
of previously unreleased songs which [I did] between 1988 and 1992. Then
in August I'm going to record a vocal album for a small label in England
called Voiceprint. It's going to be a vocal and guitar album but I'm going
to try a few experiments out with it. I am going to use it as a kind of
testing ground for possible directions for the band.
Flakk: Are you going to tour with Channel Light Vessel?
BN: There are plans to do a tour in the States. I don't know how close
that is to being finalized, but I know Caroline Records wants us to do
that. If we can get everybody together and do that, then we certainly will.
There is a possibility of a second album as well. The difficult thing about
the kind of music that Channel Light Vessel does, and everybody individually
in it, is it's not for a mainstream audience. [But] I really think it has
a possibility of having a much more mainstream audience if people have
the opportunity to hear it.
Flakk: It's categorized as New Age here in the States, and that can
lead to limitations in terms of radio airplay.
BN: Sure, yeah, I mean there are elements of the Channel Light Vessel
record which could be put in that category, I guess, but there are other
elements that are totally outside of it.
Flakk: Had you worked with any members of the band before this?
BN: Well I worked With Roger (Eno) and Kate (St. John) before because
I produced one of Roger's solo albums, an album called The Familiar. I
played some guitar on that and Kate had done some vocals, so we first met
during the recording of that album.
Flakk: It's amazing the amount of different instrumental effects
that have developed in your music. On the Cocteau label your recordings
were much more organic. You could hear the different instruments and they
were very pure. Now I hear quite a bit of samples, understandably so, with
all the technology that has crept in.
BN: A lot of the things that were done on Cocteau came out of my home
studio, and the technology in my home studio is very primitive. It's nowhere
near state-of-the-art, so you have to work with very raw materials and
there isn't a lot of opportunity to apply that kind of digital alchemy
where you can transform it into other things, so things tend to stay very
basic--but with Channel Light Vessel and with Practically Wired I actually
did those in a proper 24 track studio which wasn't high-tech by any means,
but at least it was a step up from my home recording set-up. So it's possible
then to treat sounds much more and to process the whole thing.
Flakk: I must say, you achieve tremendous effects in your home studio.
I'm sure you're quite humble about it, but it sounds good. What equipment
do you have in your home studio?
BN: It's very basic ... stuff I've had since the early 80's and it's
all now out of date and not made anymore. I have a basic sixteen track
analog reel to reel tape machine and a small mixing desk made by a company
called AHB ... an English company ... and a couple of delay units and a
reverb unit and that's about it. So it's not at all the thing you can find
in the mainstream studios these days. It's a very primitive set-up indeed
(laughs).
Flakk: Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all the choices you have
nowadays?
BN: Yeah ... I'm not a puritan by any means. I'm not one of these guys
[that are] back to mono or anything. I welcome technology. I just wish
I had the financial clout to be able to access it much more often. It's
often frustrating when I hear some very mediocre recordings that have been
done in wonderful studios and the opportunities have been wasted. I think
if I only had that chance miracles would happen (laughs), but I guess that's
the world of pure music versus the world of business.
Flakk: What's your favorite guitar? I've never seen any credits regarding
your instruments. Being a guitarist, I'm always curious and I can never
guess what kind of guitar you play.
BN: That's strange (laughs). My first serious electric guitar, a professional
instrument, was a Gibson semi-acoustic ES 345 stereo. My father bought
me that with his hard earned cash when I was in my teens and I still have
that guitar. I played it on most of the early Be-bop albums up to the very
late '70s. Then it had various repair work done to it, which didn't really
repair it, other than cosmetically. It actually damaged the sound. I should
have left it alone, but I still have that guitar and out of all the guitars
I've ever had [it's] the one that [feels] the most natural and comfortable
to play. After using that guitar, the main guitar I used was a Yamaha SC2000.
I used that until about three years ago and now my main instrument is a
Patrick Eggle guitar. He custom built this one for me. It's an Eggle-Berlin.
It's a solid body guitar and it's very, very good, but I still wish my
Gibson was in its original condition. In some ways, that was a king among
the guitars for me.
Flakk: I know the feeling very well. I have an Ibanez that I had
repaired and it never sounded the same. Your new album is a lot more energetic.
You've really just got a lot of energy going into this one. It's tangible.
Have you been taking vitamins? You've always have an introspective tom
to your records, and this one is very energetic.
BN: The introspective thing is always there. On the material that I'm
assembling at the moment for this box set, My Secret Studio, a lot of it
is very introspective stuff because it was things I wrote during kind of
a crisis in my life. I think I was actually writing them to get a clear
vision of what was going on around me. So a lot of it is that way. When
I came to do Practically Wired, it was the first time I'd been let loose
in a 24 track studio with all the improved technology compared to what
I've got at home. I think there was an excitement in the air because everything
was made spontaneously, straight to tape ... everything was composed as
I went along. So I think some of the energy is that feeling of 'at least
I've got these facilities to do something a little bit more dynamic.' I
can actually let go and let them come out.
Flakk: I don't mean to imply that the record is entirely energetic.
For example Piano 45 was just beautiful. It seemed too short. It reminded
of Satie. Is he an influence?
BN. Well, yeah. I used to listen to a lot of Eric Satie in the '70s,
and because of my infatuation with Jean Cocteau's work at that time...l
read so much about Cocteau's life and he was such a socialite in the art
world at that time. It was impossible to avoid people like Satie and all
the older French composers that were around Cocteau. So I listened to a
lot of them in the past.
Flakk: How did your fascination with Jean Cocteau begin?
BN: I was an art student back in the '60s. I was at an art college in
Wakefield studying fine art. That was going to be my profession...to be
a painter ... that was my original plan. They had a library in the art
college, which obviously had books concentrating on the whole of the arts
and I found a book of screenplays from some of Cocteau's earlier films
and the photographs really grabbed me ... the images that he was playing
with. So I started to search out more and more about his life and eventually
amassed quite a collection of books. I have an original letter that he
wrote and I have various lithographs and ceramics. I used to take holidays
in a place called Villefranche Sur Mer, which is in the south of France,
and stay at a hotel which he stayed in, along with various other people
like Picasso. So I really immersed myself in that period of European experimental/developmental
art.
Flakk: The dada/surrealism?
BN: Yeah, Cocteau was never really accepted by the surrealists--they
saw him as a bit of a dabbler because he worked in so many different mediums.
He didn't restrict himself to being a poet (he professed more than anything
that he was a poet), but painted and made films and staged theatre and
worked in clubs with musicians and so on. A certain amount of jealously
[existed] among some of the surrealists that this guy was a bit too handy
in many areas.
Flakk: It's a bit ironic, all of these anarchists trying to categorize
somebody.
BN: Yeah, well this is the thing. I think he felt his whole life was
a creative thing and that poetry wasn't just a thing, a form, but a quality,
and poetry could be found in just the way a person walks or in a bird's
song or whatever. He wanted to celebrate this discovery all the time and
anything that was at hand was good for him to use. It's some kind of very
deep-rooted and underlying quality to every person's life--no matter how
distressed or difficult life becomes, there's still this nagging feeling
that there is beauty, and beauty is an expression of something profound
and eternal and it's somehow a key to making sense of the ugliness of ..
the surface of much of people's lives.
Flakk: Going an to a similar subject, how did you meet Rob Ward?
BN: It was through a place in Wakefield. I was born in a town called
Wakefield in Yorkshire, and near there is a place called the Yorkshire
Sculpture Park. It's an open air sculpture museum and my ex-painting professor
is in charge of this particular museum. I've been in touch with him over
many years and I go along to various exhibitions they have there ... they
invite me to openings. I met Rob Ward at one of these exhibitions and he'd
heard my work and wanted me to be involved in some of his things, so that's
how it started.
Flakk: I've heard Crimsworth - Flowers, Stones, Fountains And Flames,
and I was captured. Actually, I Listened and let it wash all over me. The
second time I listened to it I played it in the next room and it has a
very ethereal quality to it. It's quite beautiful.
BN: The whole thing was conceived for an installation. It wasn't intended
to stand alone and it really was a complimentary thing. There's this space
which people entered and this space was a long octagonal room with no windows
and just one door entering the room. The walls were coated with a special
ceramic wallpaper which was then painted by the artist in very deep colors
and then he flooded the floor of the room with water, and a kind of a walkway
was built out across the water for one person to enter at a time and stand
in the middle, and observe the whole thing reflecting in the water with
the music around it. So it really was an integral piece, but afterwards
someone who had heard it thought that it would be an idea to make it available
as a kind of ambient piece. It's very ethereal.
Flakk: Exactly, I've been listening to groups like the Future Sounds
Of London and they're quite interesting, but I was enthralled by this because
it has a much more natural quality to it. It wasn't obtrusive in any way.
BN: The whole piece was based on an area of natural land near where
the artist lives. The area is called Crimsworth, which is why he used that
title and it's basically kind of a meadow with a stream running through
it and trees. So it reflects that whole kind of quality.
Flakk: What other artists, filmmakers, poets, literary figures do
you find inspiration in?
I like Orson Welles. I'm a huge fan of Orson Welles. There's so many,
off the top of my head it's hard to think of the ones... Certainly Cocteau
and Orson Welles are up there at the top of the list.
Flakk: Name your top three, maybe just one more.
BN: Well, he's not a filmmaker, he's a writer ... William Burroughs.
Flakk: Oh! He's quite inspired (laughs).
BN: I have a very large and eclectic pantheon of gods you know (laughs).
I'd have to really sit down and look at my book shelves and took at my
record collection and all the rest of it to be able to do justice to everybody.
There'd be so many, but they're all brilliant, they're all geniuses (laughs).
Flakk: I've noticed that there is a return to the science fiction
theme here on Your new album. Are you still interested in science fiction?
BN: Yeah, I mean to a degree. I don't read science fiction like I used
to. Back in my teens I was a huge fan of science fiction and I grew up
reading American Super Hero comics. I could read before I went to school
because of Super Hero comics, so it was a big part of my life and certainly
when I wrote Practically Wired there was an ironic and humorous element
to it, definitely a looking back, a retro feel in what I wanted to do.
I wanted to try and grab at not just some of the earlier guitar things
that had influenced me, but the things that were happening outside of the
music to me as well and I still like that kind of kitsch B-movie stuff.
I can't watch all the way through now but there are certain images which
even when they're just removed from that context can have a totally different
identity and a life of their own. So I still get some kind of push from
that I guess.
Flakk: There was a time when you toured here and you got sort of
jaded with the US. Are you still a little disillusioned with the US?
BN: No! Not at all. I'm actually very enthusiastic about it. I was over
in New York about three weeks ago doing some promo work for the record
for Caroline and it was so good to meet people and get some kind of feedback.
I mean partly because of the business problems that [have] been going on
in my life, and then the divorce and all the rest of it. I've gone through
a rather black patch personally, and it's very difficult. You begin to
feel you're working away in a vacuum and to get some kind of feedback is
very encouraging, very important. At the moment I'm beginning to realize
there's an awful lot of people in the States who appreciate what I've been
trying to do and I'd love to come back and do something in terms of a live
concert to show my appreciation of that as well.
Flakk: I can't tell you enough about the enthusiasm you would likely
be met with. A friend went to see Be-bop Deluxe when you came to Phoenix
in '77 and he raved on and on about that show for years. That it was the
most incredible concert he had ever attended.
BN: That was at the Celebrity Theatre. The one with the stage that goes
round. Does it still do that!
Flakk: They closed it down last year (laughs) and the stage still
went round and round. It's amazing you remember that!
BN: I used to love that place. It was so bizarre (laughs). Like being
on a turntable. I'd come play there again.
Flakk: What have you been listening to lately?
BN: Oh gosh, I listen to less music than I used to, but simply I think
because I don't have the available funds to go out and just take risks.
I used to buy a dozen albums in one day, just pick things that looked interesting,
even without hearing them. The price of CDs in this country is so crazy.
I just can't do it. So I don't listen to so much, but there's a couple
of bands in England which are kind of on the verge of being hip or whatever.
There's a band called Portishead, and a band called Tricky and another
band called Earthling. They're kind of doing, ambient dance music but with
very strange ... particularly Portishead, they've got a very, almost melancholy
nightclub jazz feel with samples and electronics and stuff going on. It's
a real mixture. A nice thing is happening at the moment here--I hope it
continues to happen--and that's a lot of barriers are falling between different
types of music and people are cross-socializing things more. I've always
been, from the beginning, interested in this kind of juxtaposition of different
genres and different eras of music. It's something that I've pursued in
my own way, and I think I could develop even further. But I love this wonderful
kind of strange soup that's happening at the moment in some of the new
areas of music.
Flakk: I've noticed ambient, world, and dance music are constantly
being melded together.
BN: The thing is that we now have such access to the world of music.
When I began playing music, I used to have a small plastic transistor radio
which I'd tune in when I went to bed [after] my parents were asleep. I'd
put it on underneath the bed sheets and listen to a station called Radio
Luxembourg in England and you heard things like Duane Eddy and Bobby Vee
and the Everly Brothers and so on and so forth ... Elvis. It was one particular
genre you know, and there wasn't that availability ... we had no idea that
any of the kind of contemporary music existed, but now we have access to
so many things and it's a natural outcome of that access that people broaden
their listening scope and they can enjoy more things. I've always liked
music of any kind. The only thing I don't like is music that's insincere
or unimaginative or not very brave, but there's such a lot of good music
hidden away and this kind of attitude [that] the whole world is your oyster,
and you can take different influences and respond to them in some way,
I find very exciting.
Flakk: It's an unlimited amount of choices.
BN: And that's where it gets difficult, because then there's this line
about how much of it is plagiarism if people are stealing samples from
this record or that record. But there's a lot of choice--really, the ones
who do it well are exercising creative taste, and in exercising that taste
they're creating something new.
Flakk: When you lift a whole four bars in sequence, I think that
verges on plagiarism. Some bands I've heard get away with murder, ripping
off practically a whole song. Vanilla Ice springs immediately to mind.
BN: Yeah, it's a new idea for discussion for many people because of
the way technology has changed the way we can access music and reproduce
it. Not just for public consumption, but as reproduced music for making
further music from. There's a lot of questions to be answered about that.
Flakk: I've noticed that some of the most creative individuals use
very tiny samples...indistinguishable. You'd have to know the song intimately
to recognize it.
BN: That's right, if you knew it very well you'd recognize it. But there
you go, that's the '90s!
Flakk: That's where it's going. In the '80s you put out an album
called Vistamix an Portrait Records and I was curious how you ended up
on that label?
BN: The deal with Portrait, which was CBS back then, happened because
I was producing a band called the Units. The Units had recorded for a small
label in San Francisco and I'd gone over to produce some tracks for them.
Those tracks were heard by CBS and they wanted to sign the band. I was
put in to do some tracks with them and I was recording them in a studio
in Wales, in England--a studio called Rockfield. The A&R guy came over
from CBS to see the band as we were working and it turned out he was a
fan of my music and he signed me to CBS. The Vistamix album was basically
kind of a retrospective of that time, a combination of things that had
been available on previous albums. Then I did an album which in America
was called On A Blue Wing. In England it had a different title, Getting
The Holy Ghost Across. It was just those two albums I did for Portrait.
I lost the deal at the end, because of my ex-manager who somehow had managed
to annoy the record company and they refused to deal with him and I couldn't
get myself out of the situation--so I kind of suffered as a result. But
that's a fairly common story sometimes.
Flakk: Managers can be the most dangerous part.
BN: Yeah, you've got to get the right one.
Flakk: Are you working with anyone right now?
BN. No, basically my time at the moment is being spent preparing this
eight album set of two boxes of CDs from the archives. I've been just compiling
and going through stuff, in fact I've been working on that this evening.
Flakk: would you anticipate that coming out?
BN: It's really up to Caroline Records. If they come up with the budget
then I can do it. The sooner I can get started the better. I've got lots
of ideas which I'm saving for the possibility of having that kind of facility.
So if that happens, maybe the recording will be at the end of this year
or the beginning of next year, and we are looking at spring or early summer
I guess for a release.
|
In the 1970s few bands could match the songwriting or musical prowess
of Be Bop Deluxe. As founder, vocalist, guitarist and sole songwriter,
Bill Nelson was peerless. He created Be bop Deluxe in '72, and after six
impressive albums, he left to embark on a solo career that included several
albums for Portrait Records in the US, and a long string of ambient works
on his Cocteau Records label. The multi-talented Mr. Nelson also established
himself as an adventurous and respected producer. More recently he founded
Channel Light Vessel with Roger Eno and released a collection of sketches
called Blue Moons And Laughing Guitars.