Now based in Selby, near the Yorkshire town of Wakefield where he grew up, Bill has just finished recording sessions for two more albums - one with Kate St. John, Roger Eno and Laraaji, which will be the follow-up to last year's highly-regarded Channel Light Vessel debut, 'Automatic' - and a brand new solo album, 'After The Satellite Sings', which marks a return to the incendiary guitar styles of his Be Bop Deluxe days. Despite the critical and commercial successes, however, Nelson still has mixed feelings about the
vagaries of a music industry which has traded art for quick profits. Like a number of other long-established artists, he's lost fortunes through sharp accounting and the practices of those who prey on talent for money. And he's experienced both sides of the contractual coin; the last days of unstinting record company support (during Be Bop Deluxe's tenure at EMI) and the beginnings of the independent ethos (with his own Cocteau label). He's owned Rolls Royces and been forced to sell his guitars just to survive. At times, it's seemed like the title of Be Bop's first album, 'Axe Victim', has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet 'After The Satellite Sings' is a record full of optimism and imagination, betraying a depth of talent which is all too rarely sighted in the current climate of circular hype and empty promises.

Things weren't really supposed to work out this way. As a kid growing up in Wakefield during the fifties, the young Bill Nelson seemed to have an entirely different trajectory in mind. Hooked on Flash Gordon, Dan Dare and comic book science fiction, he'd be kitted out in a space suit and raygun while his playmates revisited the past in cowboy and indian outfits. "Your Billy will be the first man on the moon," the neighbours used to tell his mum. It wasn't until he was 11 years old that the deep, Gretsch twang of Duane Eddy's "Because They're Young" connected Bill to the strings and wires of rock'n'roll. "That was the first single I ever bought," he recalls. "I saw a picture of him posing with his guitar and it looked really cool. I was so fascinated by it that I used to make cardboard guitars for myself in the same shape..."

It was a fascination which continued through The Shadows ("the first time I ever felt bass rather than just heard it") to more technically proficient players like Chet Atkins, Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery. By the time Bill was 15, he was playing guitar himself in local club bands: "One band that I joined was called The Teenagers," he remembers. "They'd been going for years - I think they started when Bill Haley started - but they were a big act locally. Their lead guitarist was well-known as 'the fastest guitar player in Wakefield' and they wanted me to join so that I could play rhythm behind him. But I wanted to share the lead playing so I had to pass an audition with this guy who was something of a legend. I had to play "Sweet Georgia Brown" - the Django Reinhardt version - for the audition. But I passed, and we worked it out so that I played lead guitar on alternate songs. We used to play Emile Ford numbers like "Slowboat To China" and old rock'n'roll things, as well as whatever was in the charts at the time."

Bill's liason with The Teenagers ended after he discovered The Who (the rest of the band objected to his fiercely enthusiastic Townsend impersonations - they thought the windmilling and amplifier abuse was "just too much"). Other bands followed like Global Village, with whom Bill recorded his first single; a jazz trio and one group which concentrated exclusively on Mahavishnu Orchestra covers. "We used to take great pride in the fact that we could play all these blistering things at the right tempo," he explains. "I'd spend days just practising and trying to play faster and cleaner."  During a period at art college, Bill began investigating avant-garde composers like John Cage and Terry Riley. He provided the soundtrack for a college production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt by razor-blading a recording of various 'found' sounds and overlaying an experimental guitar track constructed by laying screws and pieces of glass on the guitar strings and then playing the instrument with timpani mallets. "It was a side of things that I felt immediately drawn to," says Bill. "It wasn't really technically demanding in terms of orthodox guitar playing, it was more a case of searching for sounds and emotive atmospheres that could convey something by means other than technical skill." This willingness to step across the boundaries of technique has continued to manifest itself throughout his career, from the backwards guitar which overlays the Shadows-style melancholy of "Northern Dreamer" (from 'Northern Dream') to the prepared piano of "Blimps" (from the 'Sunburst Finish' sessions) and later albums like Be Bop's swansong, 'Drastic Plastic', or the recent 'Crimsworth' outing on Rob Ayling's Resurgence label.

It was while he was at art college that Bill discovered Holyground Studios in Wakefield's Kirkgate and was invited to play guitar on two albums that were being recorded there, 'A To Oster' and 'Astral Navigations'. As a result he was given the opportunity to record 'Northern Dream'. "The album was really my first serious attempt at songwriting," he explains. "I put the songs together on an acoustic guitar at home and then we recorded them on Holyground's very primitive set-up. I don't think we even used a mixing desk - we just bounced from channel to channel on this old Ferrograph machine, adding an extra instrument at each bounce."

'Northern Dream' was eventually released on an independent label run by the local record shop. It reached the ears of John Peel who was so impressed that he played the whole album, back to back, on his radio show. It also reached the ears of EMI who offered Bill a solo deal. But by August 1972, Bill had formed Be Bop Deluxe with an old school-friend, Ian Parkin. Within a few months the band had become something of a phenomenon in Yorkshire: "It was a really exciting time," recalls Bill. "We were packing places out. People would even stand outside the venues trying to listen through the window. It was a crazy following we had up north. I was just over-awed by the fact that we could generate that kind of enthusiasm."

The excitement translated to London and, after a memorable gig at The Marquee, the band were signed to EMI - a deal which resulted in the six albums which spanned Be Bop's brief, but influential, career and Bill's elevation to fully-fledged guitar hero status. Big Country's Stuart Adamson remembers hearing Be Bop Deluxe for the first time on the John Peel show:  "It was "Maid In Heaven" (from 'Futurama') and the guitar playing hit me right to the very core. I'd never heard anything like it before. It was aggressive and melodic at the same time. It was really obvious that Bill was a technically brilliant guitarist, but his playing wasn't just a technical exercise. There was a point to it. Every guitar part either illustrated something in the song or created a melody in its own right. It wasn't just a run around the fretboard for the sake of it."

Be Bop Deluxe's first album, 'Axe Victim', tumbled out early in 1974. It was a curious amalgam of twists'n'turns which span circles around 'Ziggy Stardust', science fiction, T. Rex and Bill's extraordinary guitar playing. The more confident 'Futurama' followed a year later. But it was with 'Sunburst Finish' that the band achieved their most significant commercial success, reaching the charts with both the album itself and the "Ships In The Night" single. Stretching out across ten tracks, 'Sunburst Finish' sounded like the product of some weird, future jukebox; from the Hendrix stylings of "Crying To The Sky" and the liquid dreaminess of "Heavenly Homes" to the raw, vamped-up punk of "Blazing Apostles". Outside of the band's increasingly obvious "signature sound" it was evident that something special was happening.

Nick Kent once described the way that the new generation of American guitar groups like Guns'N'Roses had stripped rock down to "its absolute pig-iron fundamentals". "There is no imagination at work," he wrote, "no wit, no joy, no irony, certainly no originality whatsoever". Be Bop Deluxe occupied the opposite corner. Their fourth album, 'Modern Music' was recorded shortly after the band's first U.S. tour and had all those qualities in spades.

"The original idea behind Be Bop Deluxe was that each album would be a kind of snapshot of the times," explains Bill. "We were observing different kinds of music and putting them together in an almost Frankenstein's monster form with a sense of humour and a certain amount of irony. which was often lost on people because they weren't that hip to stuff like that in those days. 'Modern Music' came directly from my experiences on the American tour. I'd been exposed to American culture for years, through movies and television and music so I imagined that when I got there it would be something very familiar. But it was so foreign that it seemed almost like being on another planet."

Tracks like 'Lost In The Neon World' and 'Dance of The Uncle Sam Humanoids' connect directly to the sense of dislocation and bewilderment of that visit  Yet 'Modern Music' is one of Be Bop's most lyrical and upbeat albums. And, in an age when players like Stevie Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen have reduced the instrument's art to a paper-thin, single dimension of meaningless virtuosity, it still stands as one of the most profoundly beautiful, and accomplished, guitar albums ever made.

"Technique is only important up to a point," maintains Bill. "Things like meaning and content are what it's really about. I've said for many years that, really, any musician, anybody involved in anything creative for that matter, has to work on themselves. In terms of the instrument, you work on certain techniques but there comes a point where the work with the instrument should take second place to the work you do on yourself. Unless that happens then there's nothing to communicate - no matter how cleverly you can manipulate the instrument. If there's no self-evaluated experience to come through then it's just empty noise; it has no meaning and no contact."

It's exactly this kind of reasoning which separates Nelson from all the other wannabe guitar heroes of rock'n'roll. He can wrap a single note up in velvet and major fifths, crunch tight diamond-hard chords and then accelerate an arpeggio towards the speed of light. But it all means something. His solos tell stories; every lick a paragraph. On 'Live! In The
Air Age', recorded during Be Bop's 1977 tour, his playing is simply stunning. Check the clean, sharp funk of "Shine" or the epic lyricism of "Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape" (I've known righteous guitar players who've spent years trying to master just those two incredible, unimaginable solos). It's like his frets are hot-wired to heaven. And more. When he shifts gear out of the languid, mournful bridge on "Mill Street Junction" into a passage of unique speed-thrill intensity, it's hard not to remember his days playing alongside 'the fastest guitar player in Wakefield' or those blistering Mahavishnu Orchestra covers.

'Drastic Plastic', Be Bop Deluxe's final album was perhaps one of the bravest statements ever made by an act signed to a major label. Innovative and inspired, it was nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the band. Cut-up drum loops, dissonant piano figures and lush synth textures combined with a reshaped, ultra-clean guitar sound to create a compelling masterpiece. In retrospect, 'Drastic Plastic' forms an uneasy alliance between the angular, jagged punk of Bill's Red Noise material and the weird, alien synthetics of tracks like "Electrical Language" or "New Mysteries". Back in 1978, it sounded like it had dropped from another planet.

"From the beginning, before Be Bop even, I'd felt that music should be about pushing back the boundaries," says Bill. "I'd had many of the ideas which appeared on 'Drastic Plastic' for some time, but I was locked into this huge, commercial organisation that the band had become. Too many people's livelihoods depended on me not rocking the boat. But eventually it became frustrating - they were thinking of the band as a business while I was thinking in terms of it being a creatively satisfying things to do. We had turned into human jukeboxes, touring endlessly and having to play all the early stuff. It just seemed increasingly irrelevant to me."

"I'd also become a little bored with conventional guitar playing. I got to feel that it had just become a very common language where nobody was trying to say anything different or unusual or fresh with it. Everybody was looking over their shoulders trying to emulate somebody else and what happens when that's pursued to its ultimate conclusion is that you just get a very narrow language which is denuded of all its real content. I'd got wrapped up in the commercial aspects of Be Bop Deluxe and that was making demands that I play in a certain way, so for a while I felt that I had to leave it alone. I didn't completely abandon the guitar, I just looked around at what else was going on. I was using one of the first synth guitars - a Hagstrom Patch 2000 - and I already had a Mini-Moog which had made a big impact. Then, while we were making the album, I got one of the first Poly-Moogs from America. It just seemed like, suddenly, there was a lot of mileage in keyboards. I also wanted to do things which had a more orchestral and dense sound to them, so for a while that became a focus."

The process of reinvention continued after Be Bop Deluxe's break-up with Bill's Red Noise project. 'Sound On Sound' related directly to tracks like "Love In Flames" and "Possession" from 'Drastic Plastic'. But Bill's first solo album, 'Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam', proved to be an even greater departure. Perfect synth-pop gems like "Do You Dream In Colour" and "Living In My Limousine" were laced with dark, unsettling undercurrents while the companion album, 'Sounding The Ritual Echo' (recorded in Bill's home studio) took the first steps in exploring the instrumental territory which became increasingly important to Bill as the eighties progressed. There was still guitar of course, but it had become much more of a textural component.

"To a degree, the movement towards instrumental music was a reaction to the pressures and restrictions of Be Bop Deluxe," explains Bill. "But there was a large part of it which was just returning to the kinds of things I'd done at art college. Creatively, I found the discipline of recording at home very fulfilling. I became very addicted to the whole process. In fact, I became very obsessive about it. I'd go up into the studio at ten in the morning, have an hour off for dinner and then go back to recording again. I was producing endless recordings of what people sometimes call ambient or
contemporary composition."

While Bill's fascination with spaced-out pop continued on 'The Love That Whirls' and 'Chimera', layering treated guitar (often with E-bow) against spiky, clipped chords, later releases like the four-album box set 'Trial By Intimacy' and 'Close Encounters In The Garden of Lights' revealed the extent to which he had immersed himself in instrumental work. But he didn't retreat entirely to his own studio. He played guitar for Cabaret Voltaire (on the 'Code' album), Yellow Magic Orchestra and contributed several stunning performances to David Sylvian's 'Gone To Earth' set. Meanwhile, managerial, financial and marital problems began to take their toll:

"I lost a tremendous amount of confidence during that period. As a result I'd go into the studio even more because that was a way of reaffirming my identity - I could put things into the tape machine and then a person would come back out of the speakers that I could recognise as myself. I completed hundreds of tracks, sometimes four or five a day, and I didn't care if anybody heard them or not. If not one single piece of music from that time had been released, the process wouldn't have been wasted because it had nothing to do with selling records and everything to do with self-exploration. The whole thing, for many years now (and I think, instinctively, it was that to begin with) was a means of making sense of myself in relation to the rest of the world."

Some of the tracks from that era ended up on the Virgin album 'Blue Moons & Laughing Guitars'. Others surfaced on 'Luminous' and the box-set 'Demonstrations of Affection' which marked Bill's return to song-writing. Still more appeared recently on the four-album 'My Secret Studio' set released by Resurgence which covers an astonishing breadth of wildfire guitar-playing and intense, emotive song-writing.

"One of the things that's interesting about these home recordings is that they're only ever performed once, and that's when they're being written," notes Bill. "They're performed as they're written and they're never played again."

This approach lends a sense of immediacy and directness to the material. It's a process which has much in common with Bill's approach to the guitar itself. "I've always tried to work towards the point where playing the instrument is the same as speaking to you now," he says. "I don't even think about it. It's an absolutely intuitive thing which is as instant as I can make it. If somebody puts on a piece of music and I pick up the guitar, I'm instantly able to play in that key without even thinking about it - my hand will fall automatically onto the right position on the neck. For my own idiosyncratic way of making music it seems to work because it's the quickest form of communication. Sometimes it's more honest than speech, because there are all kinds of games that you can play with words and their resonances. But with a sound and a note it's like an arrow straight to the target every time. It's so fast that there isn't time to second-guess it."

It's the same 'stream of conciousness' methodology that's more usually associated with the playing of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But Bill has extended the process to include composition as well. Last year's 'Practically Wired' album on All Saints Records was entirely written, recorded and mixed in just two weeks:

"'Practically Wired' is a guitar album - a homage to lots of different kinds of guitar," explains Bill. "It's the only guitar-based instrumental album I've ever done funnily enough. The original idea was that I wanted to refer in some way to the whole history of electronic guitars - including my own personal heroes and influences - but I wanted to do it in an unpremeditated way. So I decided to improvise direct to tape. It's a kind of 'instant guitar sketchbook' really. I wanted to find out what happens when you're put in a studio, with nothing prepared, and you come out two weeks later with a finished album. What happens in that process? What kind of music is produced? I worked out a rule that whatever went to tape couldn't be wiped off. Once the tape was touched I had to leave it and go on to the next step  And I found that what happens is that you get a very 'honest' album - because there just isn't time to contrive anything or manipulate the listener in any way. What was inside came out, naked and unadorned. I didn't have time to cheat or trick the listener into perceiving me in a certain light."

The same process was used on Bill's latest album 'After The Satellite Sings' though, since the material is song-based, the time limit was extended to 28 days. Despite this restriction, tracks such as "Deeply Dazzled" or "Flipside" flirt successfully with breakbeat, slick blues and quiet jazz overtones. Like 'Practically Wired', the new album was recorded at Fairview Studios in Willerby, near Hull, with John Spence handling the engineering duties. Percussion was provided by an Akai MPC60 but, because the machine's sequencer was broken, Bill played the kit sounds live, using just an automated hi-hat for time-keeping.

Though his beloved Gibson ES345 did make an appearance towards the end of recording, Bill's main guitar for the sessions was a custom-built Patrick Eggle 'Berlin' which was fed through a rack-mounted Zoom 9050. "It's a really good unit," says Bill. "I'm not into that vintage thing of using amps at all. With the Zoom, the engineer gets an instant sound and you've got more time to actually come up with creative ideas." In fact, all the guitar sounds on 'My Secret Studio' were provided by the 9050's baby brother - the strap-mounted 9002.

'After The Satellite Sings' not only includes great songs but, as you'd expect, some great guitar-playing as well. On "Squirm" and "Memory Babe" guitar lines swoop and soar, sometimes accelerating towards the ether and sometimes curving impossibly around keyboard or vocal hooks. Some of them may even sound familiar...

"Over the last two albums, I've allowed myself to re-explore some of the signature guitar things - my trademarks, if you like - that at one time I would have avoided like the plague. I guess I've got to the stage where I think I've earned the right to rediscover my own past. Now I can let some of those stylistic things, which I felt had become clichéd, act as little calling cards - little signs and symbols dropped here and there through the tracks. It's interesting to be able to make references backwards and forwards in that way, particularly for people who know a lot of the stuff. They're able to spot the allusions and references and, hopefully, it adds another dimension to the music for them. There are still so many people who are heavily into the Be Bop stuff - it's obviously still communicating in some way - and I wanted to figure that out a bit more; just to get some kind of handle on it and see what's left from the past for me."

Two years ago, Bill Nelson described the way that, though Be Bop Deluxe had been laid to rest "beneath a wreath of rocketships and roses" he still felt haunted by "a music that now seems to me to have been made by someone else... did I really worship so feverishly at the altar of rock'n'roll? Are you sure it was me you saw under the blue spotlight, hot-wired to a big guitar and dreaming out loud?" We'll have another chance to find out later this year when EMI release a major new Be Bop Deluxe retrospective. The package is likely to include tracks from 1990's 'Raiding The Divine Archive' compilation together with Red Noise's 'Sound On Sound' and some unreleased material from the various album sessions. Meanwhile, Bill continues to make music "with intent to enchant" - adding to an extensive catalogue which already contains some of the most innovative and exciting guitar-playing ever committed to tape. Outside of everything, it seems like Bill Nelson is still hung up on those silver strings

Now based in Selby, near the Yorkshire town of Wakefield where he grew up, Bill has just completed a brand new solo album, 'After the Satellite Sings', marking a return to the incendiary guitar styles of his Be Bop Deluxe days. Despite the critical and commercial successes however, Nelson still has mixed feelings about the vagaries of a music industry which has traded art for quick profits. Like a number of other long-established artists, he has lost fortunes through sharp accounting and the practices of those who prey on talent for money. And he's experienced both sides of the contractual coin; the last days of unstinting record company support (during Be Bop Deluxe's tenure at EMI) and the beginnings of the independent ethos (with his own Cocteau label). He's owned Rolls Royces and been forced to sell his guitars just to survive. At times the title of Be Bop's first album, "Axe Victim", has seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet "After the Satellite Sings" is a record full of optimism and imagination, betraying a depth of talent which is all too rarely seen in the current climate of hype and empty promises.

As a kid growing up in Wakefield during the 1950s, the young Bill Nelson seemed to have an entirely different trajectory in mind. Hooked on Flash Gordon, Dan Dare and comic book science fiction he'd be kitted out in a space suit and raygun while his playmates revisited the past in cowboy suits and indian outfits. "Your Billy will be the first man on the moon", the neighbours used to tell his mum. It wasn't until he was 11 years old that the deep, Gretsch twang of Duane Eddy's "Because they're young" connected Bill to the strings and wires of Rock'n'Roll. "That was the first single I ever bought" he recalls, "I saw a picture of him posing him posing with his guitar and it looked so cool. I was so fascinated by it that I used to make cardboard guitars for myself in the same shape ..."

It was a fascination which continued through The Shadows to more technically proficient players like Chet Atkins, Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery. By the time Bill was 15 he was playing guitar himself in local club bands. "One band that I joined was called 'The Teenagers'" he remembers "They'd been going for years and their lead guitarist was well known as 'the fastest guitar player in Wakefield'. They wanted me to join so that I could play rhythm behind him, but I wanted to share the lead playing. I had to pass an audition with this guy who was something of a legend. I had to play 'Sweet Georgia Brown', the Django Reinhardt version - for the audition. But I passed and we worked it out that I played lead guitar on alternate songs."

Bill's liaison with 'The Teenagers' ended after he discovered The Who (the rest of the band thought the windmilling and amplifier abuse was "just too much"). Other bands followed, like Global Village with whom Bill recorded his first single, a jazz trio, and one group which concentrated exclusively on Mahavishnu Orchestra covers, "We used to take great pride in the fact that we could play all these blistering things at the right tempo" he explains, "I'd spend days just practising and trying to play faster and cleaner". It was while he was at art college that Bill discovered Holyground studios in Wakefield's Kirkgate and was invited to play guitar on two albums that were being recorded there, "A to Austr" and "Astral Navigations". As a result he was given the opportunity to record "Northern Dream". "The album was really my first serious attempt at songwriting" he explains. "I put the songs together on an acoustic guitar at home and then re-recorded them on Holyground's very primitive setup. I don't think we even used a mixing desk - we just bounced from channel to channel on this old Ferrograph machine, adding an extra instrument at each bounce".

"Northern Dream" was eventually released on an independent label run by the local record shop. It reached the ears of BBC DJ John Peel, who was so impressed that he played the whole album, back-to-back on his radio show. It also reached the ears of EMI, who offered Bill a solo deal. But by August 1972 Nelson had formed Be Bop Deluxe with an old school friend Ian Parkin. Within a few months the band had become something of a phenomenon in Yorkshire: "It was a really exciting time" recalls Bill. "We were packing places out. People would even stand outside the venues trying to listen through the window. It was a crazy following we had up North."

Be Bop Deluxe's first album "Axe Victim" tumbled out early in 1974. It was a curious amalgam which span circles around Ziggy Stardust, science fiction, T-Rex and Bill's extraordinary guitar playing. The more confident "Futurama" followed a year later, but it was with "Sunburst Finish" that the band achieved their most significant commercial success, reaching the charts with both the album itself and the "Ships in the Night" single. Stretching out across ten tracks, "Sunburst Finish" sounded like the product of some weird future jukebox. From the Hendrix stylings of "Crying to the Sky" and the liquid dreaminess of "Heavenly Homes" to the raw, vamped-up punk of "Blazing Apostles". Quite apart from the band's increasingly obvious signature sound it was evident that something special was happening.

Tracks like "Lost in the Neon World" and "Dance of the Uncle Sam Humanoids" connect directly to the sense of dislocation and bewilderment of that visit. Yet Modern Music is one of Be Bop's most lyrical and upbeat albums. And, in an age when the instrument's art has often been reduced to a paper thin, single dimension of super-fast virtuosity, it still stands as one of the most profoundly beautiful, and accomplished, guitar albums ever made.

"Technique is only important up to a point" maintains Bill. "Things like meaning and content are what it is really about. I've said for many years that, really, any musician, anybody involved in anything creating for that matter, has to work on themselves. In terms of the instrument, you work on certain techniques but there comes a point where the work with the instrument should take second place to the work you do on yourself. Unless that happens then there's nothing to communicate - no matter how cleverly you can manipulate the instrument. It's just empty noise, with no meaning and no contact."

Nelson's solos tell stories; every lick a paragraph. On 'Live! In the air age', recorded during Be Bop's 1977 tour, his playing is simply stunning. Check the clean, sharp funk of 'Shine' or the epic lyricism of 'Adventures in a Yorkshire landscape' (I've known righteous guitar players trying to master just those two incredible solos). When he shifts gear out of the languid, mournful bridge on 'Mill Street junction' into a passage of unique speed thrill intensity, it's hard not to remember his days playing alongside 'the fastest guitar player in Wakefield' or those blistering Mahavishnu Orchestra covers.

'Drastic Plastic', Be Bop Deluxe's final album was perhaps one of the bravest statements ever made by an act signed to a major label. Innovative and inspired, it was nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the band. Cut-up drum loops, dissonant piano figures and lush synth textures combined with a re-shaped, ultra-clean guitar sound to create a compelling masterpiece. In retrospect, 'Drastic Plastic' forms an uneasy alliance between the angular, jagged punk of Bill's Red Noise material and the weird, alien synthetics of tracks like "Electrical Language" or "New Mysteries". Back in 1978, it sounded like it had dropped from another planet. "I'd become a little bored with conventional guitar playing. I got to feel that it had just become a very common language where nobody was trying to say anything different or unusual or fresh with it. Everybody was looking over their shoulders trying to emulate somebody else and what happens when that's pursued to its ultimate conclusion is that you just get a very narrow language which is denuded of all its real content. I'd got wrapped up in the commercial aspects of Be Bop Deluxe and that was making demands that I play in a certain way, so for a while I felt that I had to leave it alone. I didn't completely abandon the guitar, I just looked around at what else was going on. I was using one of the first synth guitars, the Hagstrom Patch 2000 - and I already had a Mini-Moog which had made a big impact. Then, while we were making the album, I got one of the first Poly-Moogs from America. It just seemed like suddenly there was a lot of mileage in keyboards. I also wanted to things which had a more orchestral and dense sound to them, so for a while that became a focus."

After the break-up of Be Bop Deluxe the process of reinvention continued with Bill's Red Noise project. 'Sound On Sound' related directly to tracks like "Love In Flames" and "Possession" from 'Drastic Plastic'. But Bill's first solo album, 'Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam', proved to be an even greater departure. Synth-pop gems "Do You Dream In Colour" and "Living In My Limousine" were laced with dark, unsettling undercurrents, while the companion album 'Sounding The Ritual Echo' (recorded in Bill's home studio) took the first steps in exploring the instrumental territory which became increasingly important to Bill as the 80s progressed. There was still guitar of course, but it had become much more of a textural component.

Meanwhile, managerial, financial and marital problems began to take their toll: "I lost a tremendous amount of confidence during that period. As a result I'd go into the studio even more because that was my way of reaffirming my identity. I could put things into the tape machine and then a person would come back out of the speakers that I could recognise as myself. I completed hundreds of tracks sometimes four or five a day, and I didn't care if anybody heard them or not. If not one single piece of music from that time had been released, the process wouldn't have been wasted because it had nothing to do with selling records and everything to do with self exploration. The whole thing, for many years now - and I think instinctively, it was that to begin with - was a means of making sense of myself in relation to the rest of the world."

Some of the tracks from that era ended up on the Virgin album 'Blue Moons & Laughing Guitars'. Others surfaced on 'Luminous' and the box-set 'Demonstrations Of Affection' which marked Bill's return to songwriting. Still more appeared recently on the 4-album 'My Secret Studio' set released by Resurgence which covers an astonishing breadth of wildfire guitar-playing and intense, emotive songwriting. "One of the things that's interesting about these home recordings is that they're only ever performed once, and that's when they're being written," notes Bill. "They're performed as they're written and they're never played again." This approach lends a sense of immediacy and directness to the material.

It's a process which has much in common with Bill's approach to the guitar itself. "I've always tried to work towards the point where playing the instrument is the same as speaking to you now,- he says. "I don't even think about it. It's an absolutely intuitive thing which is as instant as I can make it. If somebody puts on a piece of music and I pick up the guitar, I'm instantly able to play in that key without even thinking about it - my hand will fall automatically onto the right position on the neck. For my own idiosyncratic way of recording music it seems to work because it's the quickest form of communication. Sometimes it's more honest than speech, because there are all kinds of games that you can play with words and their resonances. But with a sound and a note it's like an arrow straight to the target every time. It's so fast that there isn't time to second-guess it."

It's the same 'stream of consciousness' methodology that's more usually associated with the playing of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But Bill has extended the process to include composition as well. Last year's 'Practically Wired' album on All Saints Records was entirely written, recorded and mixed in just two weeks: "'Practically Wired' is a guitar album - a homage to lots of different kinds of guitar," explains Bill. "It's the only guitar-based instrumental album I've ever done, funnily enough. The original idea was that I wanted to refer in some way to the whole history of electric guitars - including my own personal heroes and influences - but I wanted to do it in an unpremeditated way. So I decided to improvise direct to tape. It's a kind of instant guitar sketchbook really. I wanted to find out what happens when you're put in a studio, with nothing prepared, and you come out two weeks later with a finished album. What happens in that process? What kind of music is produced? I worked out a rule that whatever went to tape couldn't be wiped off. Once the tape was touched I had to leave it and go on to the next step. And I found that what happens is that you get a very honest album - because there just isn't time to contrive anything or manipulate the listener in any way. What was inside came out, naked and unadorned. I didn't have time to cheat or trick the listener into perceiving me in a certain light."

The same process was used on the new 'After The Satellite Sings', but since the material is song-based, the time limit was extended to 28 days. Despite this restriction, tracks such as "Deeply Dazzled" or "Flipside" flirt successfully with breakbeat, slick blues and quiet jazz overtones. Like 'Practically Wired', the new album was recorded at Fairview Studios in Willerby, near Hull, with John Spence handling the engineering duties. Percussion was provided by an Akai MPC60 but, because the machine's sequencer was broken, Bill played the kit sounds live, using just an automated hi-hat for time-keeping. Though his beloved Gibson ES345 did make an appearance towards the end of recording, Bill's main guitar for the sessions was a custom-built Patrick Eggle Berlin, which was fed through a rack-mounted Zoom 9050. "It's a really good unit," says Bill. "I'm not into that vintage thing of using amps at all. With the Zoom, the engineer gets an instant sound and you've got more time to actually come up with creative ideas." In fact, all the guitar sounds on 'My Secret Studio' were provided by the 9050's baby brother - the strap-mounted 9002.

'After The Satellite Sings' not only includes great songs but as you'd expect, some great guitar-playing as well. Some of it may even sound familiar...

"Over the last two albums I've allowed myself to re-explore some of the signature guitar things - my trademarks, if you like - that at one time I would have avoided like the plague. I guess I've got to the stage where I think I've earned the right to rediscover my own past. Now I can let some of those stylistic things, which I felt had become cliched, act as little calling cards - little signs and symbols dropped here and there through the tracks. It's interesting to be able to make references backwards and forwards in that way, particularly for people who know a lot of the stuff. They're able to spot the allusions and references and, hopefully, it adds another dimension to the music for them. There are still so many people who are heavily into the Be Bop stuff - it's obviously still communicating in some way - and I wanted to figure that out a bit more; just to get some kind of handle on it and see what's left from the past for me."