"In essence, the music is a tool for understanding myself, a mirror for figuring out who I am, a method of self-exploration."

*

There was Joey, Timmy and Wak, all off Plumpton, and I got to know them through Harry, who they tolerated because, already over six feet tall at fourteen, and with a 'tache, he could buy the drinks at the Bali Hai bar upstairs in the Mecca.

They wore crimpelene v-necks festooned with star motifs, Ben Shermans or Fred Perrys, and beige bags with army pockets and multiple pleats, elephant turn-ups swaddling crepe-stacked platforms or Docs.

Harry introduced them to me because I had a guitar. It was a futuristic-looking German model, a Framus, with a steel-engineered tremelo and a plethora of controls that may as well have triggered death-rays for all the difference they made to the instrument's muffled fuzzy tone.

I knew a little bit about music, at least more than they did. They told me about the Skeleton Man, who lived at the bottom of Joey's street, where the air was forever heavy with the smell of chemical-tinged bread from the bakery on the corner, under the shadow of the prison.

Joey and Timmy rolled an oil-drum into the Skeleton Man's door one night and he came out bare-pigeon-chested in angry pursuit. They'd push their ears against his windows to hear the weird guitar music coming from inside. I did the same once, and heard Bill Nelson and his group rehearsing a song called 'Mill Street Junction' inside the tiny terrace. It was like hearing the muted trumpets of heaven.

So Joey, Timmy and Wak wanted to form a group too, and now they had my guitar, on which we all took turns trying to master the chords to 'Silver Machine' for a couple of weeks.

Then, one aimless, cider-stroked twilight, we stumbled across the Wakefield Greyhound Stadium, which had recently closed. It wasn't thieving as such, because the place was completely abandoned, but piece by piece, we took out the PA system – two metal-cased valve amps and a row of mismatched speakers (bracketed at intervals around the concrete pillars), a bulbous 50s microphone, spools of wire, boxes of  spare valves and sockets, and rusting spotlights and filters. Everything worth stealing back then weighed a ton. Even the boxes were metal.

When it was all finally back at Joey's, we returned to the Greyhound Stadium and smashed every single pane of plate glass in the place. That was like hearing the trumpets of heaven at full blast.

For the next three months Joey's front room was constantly full of harsh feedback and burning incense. Wak had mastered the chords to 'Silver Machine' and was half-adept at 'Ziggy Stardust', which was a good thing, since Timmy, having abandoned all hope of ever achieving the most rudimentary chord, had started painting stripes down his face, and was turning, rather prematurely, into a primma donna. Joey wanted to do things with a blow torch and Wak wanted to play Quo. Tall Harry would turn up with a Deep Purple album and be handed a soldering iron.

It was a cauldron of invention, Joey's front room. He had very understanding parents, really. We painted the walls purple, and there were cardboard strips revolving over the spotlights. We even had biscuit-tin drums, as if we still watched Blue Peter. The old valve amps were constantly broadcasting police messages and taxi directions and the microphone screeched whenever a hand approached it. The guitar-count was now up to three, with the addition of two fifteen quid Hallmark planks from Woolworths, all plastic emulsion sunburst in chocolate and caramel. There was a plastic fuzzbox too, to which Joey added additional imput and output sockets so that we could all use it at once.

We were three or four years too early for the punk rock revolution.

The Skeleton Man, meanwhile, moved out. And then Be-Bop Deluxe released their first album. 'Axe Victim'. A group from Wakefield, on the Harvest record label, with quotes on the sleeve about art as a priesthood by some French poet. On the back, Bill Nelson was posing with a German Les Paul copy, a Hoyer, which I later bought from Wakefield's only music shop (on Silver Street), and sold-on, at a handsome profit, to Stuart Adamson, (of the Skids, and later Big Country).
There's a time in your life when, suddenly the doors of opportunity are wide open, and it's because other people have made an impact in ways you never believed possible. Bill Nelson did that for me, and I've been wanting to pass that feeling on, somewhere, somehow, ever since.

We never got to have a name, but inevitably Joey, Timmy, Wak and me, that potential group, split up, sooner, rather than later, due to artistic differences. I'd like to think these concerned heated debates on the intriaces of trying to figure out the chords to a Be-Bop Deluxe track versus the joy of playing endless variations of 'Caroline' by Status Quo, but in reality, the actual rock'n'roll probably played a much lesser part than the advent of sex and drugs.

*

Bill Nelson belongs here in this book for two prime reasons. Firstly, his path has been a distinctly individual one and he's stuck rigidly to it, regardless of what anyone else might think. Secondly, the influence of the region runs through his work like a river, from a starting point of pastoral songs such as 'Adventures on a Northern Landscape' and 'Jets at Dawn', all swooping runs over strummed chords and birdsong, through to much of the spatial, ambient work recorded at his Echo Observatory studio in Selby, in splendid isolation. Moore saw his major works as belonging outdoors, and I don't think it's too pretentious to say that the most effective of Nelson's music does too.

He is primarily known for his Be-Bop Deluxe output in the 70s, but this constitutes only a fraction of his work, having put out over 40 solo albums since then.
Ths son of a semi-professional sax player – alleged by Bill's brother Ian to have played on the 1958 hit 'Hoots Mon' by Lord Rockingham's XI – his first album 'Northern Dream' was recorded at the local Holyground studios – a flat above a shop on Lower Kirkgate – and funded and sold through Wakefield's Record Bar.

The first Be-Bop single, a limited-edition run of 'Teenage Archangel', was also promoted in the same way.

The live performances which earned Be-Bop a strong local following and a contract with Harvest were documented on 'Axe Victim' in 1974. A patchy, if loveable affair, it served as a showcase for Bill's breathtakingly fluid guitar style which, while echoing the flash and feedbackery of Hendrix, usually eschewed the blues notes in favour of lightning jazz-tinged major scale work-outs.

A change of line-up led to the astonishing 'Futurama', on which Nelson's vision was given the full kitchen-sink treatment by Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker. Top-heavy with massed guitars and melodic ideas pursued on a whim and just as quickly abandoned, it nevertheless contained two of the most perfect singles never to climb the charts – 'Maid In Heaven' and 'Sister Seagull'.

Be-Bop toured with Cockney Rebel and then in their own right, finally enjoying chart success with 'Ships In The Night' from the 'Sunburst Finish' album in 1976.
The US-tailored 'Modern Music followed, and 'Drastic Plastic' in 1977 found the group out of synch with the times, and signalled their demise.
That, more or less, is the music business career of Bill Nelson in terms of mass market appeal, but what singles him out is really what's followed since.
Far from being content to rest on his laurels, he embarked on a path of rugged independence, releasing albums which, while seldom finding a huge market, were more personally satisfying. Many are semi-ambient in tone, produced in quiet isolation at his home studio and released through his fan club, on his own Cocteau label, or through other small presses in limited runs.

It's really difficult to know where to start. The accessible vocal albums of the early 80s – 'Love That Whirls', 'Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam' and 'Chimera' were made at a time when electronics and drum machines really began to come into their own, and Nelson was one of the first to thrill to their potential. Similarly, his mystical band Orchestra Arkana introduced sampled and treated Gregorian chants a good decade before they became an advertiser's staple. A collaboration with the classical composer Darryl Runswick produced some striking combinations of orchestra and electronics, notably on the soundtrack to the TV series 'Brond', which made excellent use of layered operatic voices. This appeared on the 12" single 'Scala', along with other fruits of the duo's alliance.

The 1980s saw the release of 25 albums, in addition to the soundtrack to the film 'Dream Demon', the 'Altar Pieces' series conceived for performance in cathedrals (that sens of creating space again), a collaboration with the pianist Harold Budd and other work for David Sylvian and Japan, Cabaret Voltaire, Yellow Magic Orchestra, The Associates and The Skids.

The 1990s found Nelson briefly back on a major label, with the release of 'Blue Moons and Laughing Guitars' on Virgin in 1991, and there has been much praise for the occasional collaboration Channel Light Vessel, in which he's teamed up with oboeist Kate St John, Laraaji and Roger Eno to release two fine albums, 1994's Automatic' and 1996's 'Excellent Spirits'.

'After the Satellite Sings' in 1995 was dedicated to the spirit of Jack Kerouac and fused rock with jungle, pre-empting the later work of Bowie on 'Earthing' and gaining considerable critical acclaim. Current projects include a trilogy of albums based loosely around the theme of childhood, of which 'After the Satellite Sings' was the first. The nine albums released in the last three years include two boxed sets 'My Secret Studio' and 'Confessions of a Hyper Dreamer'. All of this stuff is pretty collectable. He is also featured on the recent tribute to the late Mick Ronson and has recently signed to Robert Fripp's DGM label.

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