Two faces has Bill Nelson. In the '70s he was the stereotypical guitarslinger in Be-Bop Deluxe, a forward-looking but essentially traditional rock group. As a solo performer he uses synthesizers and modified guitars to fashion individualistic, largely instrumental "modern music." His current reputation as a radical, artsy trendsetter is quite removed from Be-Bop Deluxe's misconstrued image as a sort of Deep Purple with science-fiction pretentions.. If Nelson has never regained the level of commercial success he achieved as a guitar hero, he seems far more content pleasing his wandering muse with nouveau pop, audio experiments and theatrical scores. (Film soundtracks are a professed ambition.)
Besides being signed to a major label (Portrait/CBS, previously Mercury), Nelson has the "luxury" of his own record company: Cocteau releases the remainder of his efforts and singles he produces for other groups. No studio dilettante, he's overseen recordings by A Flock of Seagulls, Gary Numan (recollections of whom are too unhappy to print), the Skids, Units, Fiat Lux (another bad memory),Nash the Slash and others. As session musician, Nelson has played with Monsoon and Yellow Magic Orchestra's Yukihiro Takahashi, with whom he also toured.
After a quiet spell, Nelson career is on an upswing: A mini-album of instrumentals (Savage Gestures for Charms Sake) came out on Cocteau almost simultaneously with Vistamix, a Portrait compilation drawn from his solo career. For all his ambitious plans, Nelson - charming, witty and articulate - didn't mind returning to the dawn of his career.
Be-Bop Deluxe's story has been well documented. This autodiscography therefore focuses on Nelson's solo work - before and after his stint as a bandleader.
Early Days
In the late '60s there was a tiny recording studio in my home town of Wakefield (England): a two-track machine in a guy's bedroom. He was a student teacher; at the college where he taught there were several people who played music and wrote song.
One day I happened to be walking past the studio and heard some West Coast underground music. That was unheard of in Wakefield in those days, so I knocked on the door and found out it was this studio called Holyground. I talked to the guy, and he found out that I and a friend, Ian Parkin (who wound up in the first Be-Bop Deluxe), also played, so he asked if we would come down one night and sit in. We got roped into helping out, playing acoustic guitar and such.
Two albums, A to Austr and Astral Navigations (both released on Holyground) were done with that setup. They weren't my songs. It was simply a collection of guys who got together in different combinations. They didn't perform live; it wasn't a fixed group.
I had a band around the time of A to Austr (circa 1969) called Global Village - a three-piece blues/psychadelic band. There is a record, which is incredibly rare, by that group: We had three lacquers pressed up of an EP, one for each member of the group. My singing sounds like a four-year-old, so high and tiny.
Northern Dream (1971)
(Nelson recorded this solo album at Holyground. It was released on his Smile label in conjunction with the proprietors of the Record Bar, a local shop. Although essentially a one-man show, Richard Brown added drums and a little keyboards.)
A couple year previous, I'd been involved in a gospel band. I met Richard through that; he was the church organist. His father was pastor of the church, but Richard was a real raver. I formed Be-Bop Deluxe with Richard - it was going to be our project - but his wife forced him to stop playing. It was a shame, cause he's one of the most talented keyboard players I've ever heard. he did some gigs with Be-Bop Deluxe before we made any records.
Northern Dream was the first bunch of songs I'd written as songs. Also, apart from the very limited edition Global Village record, it was the first time I'd sung. I'd sung onstage with club bands, but not lead.
At that time I was a local government officer in Wakefield, working for the county hall. I wrote songs on my lunch break, whenever I could get away from my desk. It was a pretty boring job; that LP was the result of it.
I used to sneak off in the afternoon on the pretext of going to one of the other departments. The I'd hang out at the Record Bar and check out the imports. The original 250 copies of Northern Dream were sold locally. Betty Brombie, one of the shop's owners, has repressed Northern Dream so many times and has sold at least 20,000 over the years. I've not seen any money from it. I think the record is great for what it was: a diary entry. I'm quite happy with it, but I don't listen to it.
To this day I don't know how, but a copy got to (BBC DJ) John Peel. We got a letter from him saying his copy had got destroyed in the sun or something, and could we send another. So we sent it, and he began playing it on the air a lot. EMI heard it and contacted me, literally two weeks after I'd formed Be-Bop Deluxe (with Brown, guitarist Parkin, bassist Rob Bryan and drummer Nicholas Chatterton-Dew.) EMI wanted me to re-record Northern Dream in a 24-track studio. I was totally against the idea because now I had a band and wanted to move on.
(The original Be-Bop Deluxe had recorded two songs at Holyground: "Teenage Archangel" and "Jets at Dawn.") I took a tape of the songs down to EMI in London. A man called David Croker - who was the one who wanted me to sign - liked it, but felt we should work at it a while and then come back. We put out the single on my label, Smile, in the meantime.
After a few months, EMI decided to come up and see us live, at Leeds. They liked us, but thought we were just a local phenomenon. We finally got a concert lined up at the Marquee in London, supporting String Driven Thing. The audience went bananas. The head guy from EMI was there. He came straight back to the dressing room and said, come to my office tomorrow and we'll do a deal.
Red Noise: Sound On Sound (1979)
I'd already started writing songs for Red Noise when I broke up Be-Bop. Likewise, the songs I'd prepared for the next Be-Bop album (had there been one) were some of the songs that wound up on the Red Noise album.
I never felt the album was that difficult to listen to, but the reaction was awful. People, especially DJs, didn't know how to take it. We lost our US record deal; EMI in England was taken over by Thorn, and their policy changed.
I don't think Sound on Sound was a mistake. It was necessary. The good thing was that when I toured England with Red Noise we didn't play any Be-Bop numbers. The things I've been doing the last few years would have been impossible without my making that solid break.
Red Noise had to stop simply because we lost the record deal. Suddenly everything stopped dead, as far as getting money from record companies. We tried a few places, but it was the start of the depression in the record industry, and everybody was very wary. Nobody would stick their necks out, because we were too far ahead of our time.
Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam; Sounding the Ritual Echo (1981)
I recorded Quit Dreaming just after Sound on Sound. It was going to be the next Red Noise album, even though the same people weren't involved. EMI wouldn't release it, and it sat on the shelf.
It was a great trauma for me. For so many years I'd been recording in studios, and had more success than I'd ever dreamed of - and here I was without anybody giving me money to go in a 24-track studio. I kept asking myself, "What have I done wrong? All I've done is follow what I believe; is that wrong?"
I ended up sitting in front of my little four-track at home doodling, making little instrumentals, which I really liked doing. When Quit Dreaming finally came out, it included a bonus album, Sounding the Ritual Echo, with some of those things.
The demos I'd done for Sound on Sound actually sounded better than the album - not in recording technique, but the arrangements. I'd always played everything on the demos myself, even through the Be-Bop stuff. The band would be given their parts on tape and add a few elaborations. So I thought, why not take that approach and do it all in the studio?
EMI was going to release Quit Dreaming until they heard it and didn't understand it. I wanted to keep Red Noise always in flux and moving forward so the only thing people could expect was change.
Mark Rye, Nelson's manager) and I bought three tracks - "Do You Dream in Color," "Mister Magnetism Himself," and "Atom Man Loves Radium Girl" - from EMI and started Cocteau. That was all we could afford. That was the first release on Cocteau, during the interim period (between Sound on Sound and Quit Dreaming), and that got more airplay than anything since "Ships in the Night." It was instrumental in getting Phonogram's attention.
Certain tracks on Quit Dreaming I can't listen to that much. I was trying vocal approaches that were kitsch, fun and a little off the wall. I've become a little more honest about my voice.
"Living in My Limousine" was about a Rolls-Royce I had just bought, but that went a long time ago. My money situation's been terrible over the last few years; I'm up to my neck in debt. When I split with my management company - Arnakata, who managed Be-Bop - I found out they'd done a terrible amount of bad business handling with my money affairs. They liquidated and I can't get anything' they had my publishing as well. I've yet to see a piece of paper that tells me how much money I've earned in America, either from record sales or publishing. My business affairs have been so badly handled. I owe the taxman a fortune at the moment. It's made me very bitter about the business end of things.
Das Kabinet (1981), Beauty and the Beast (1982)
I worked very closely with the Yorkshire Actors Company on the music to their production of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. They developed the play simultaneously with my developing the music. They'd improvise a particular scene over and over until things started to click. I'd time it and make notes, then go away and spend a couple of days doing that 10 minutes of music. Then I'd take it back for a run-through and make adjustments. It was very laborious, and took ages.
I hadn't planned to release an album; it was just going to be a tape which they would use on their tour. When it was finished, and I saw the play for the first time with the music, I had to put it out; it was worth more people hearing it than would only see the play.
Beauty and the Beast was done slightly differently because they were sticking very rigidly to Jean Cocteau's screenplay. I had a video copy of the Cocteau movie which I watched a lot at home so I could do things a lot quicker. I worked out huge chunks of the music at home, working from the script they gave me, and the film. I wanted to make certain referenced to the original soundtrack as a gesture of respect, so I transposed some techniques into a more modern idiom.
Beauty and the Beast is very pastoral, very much in contrast to Das Kabinet. I saw (the latter) as a training ground for making film music - my big ambition at the moment. When you're huge in rock 'n' roll, people ask you to score movies because your name is good publicity. But often the music has nothing to do with the movie whatsoever. I need to get my work in a form that I can send around to a few people, like David Lynch (one of my heroes), and see how they react to it.
The Love That Whirls (1982)
This took Quit Dreaming a stage further. On that record I demo'd all the songs at home, then took them to the studio and recreated them. Here I had the opportunity to create in a 24-track studio. I would go in with no idea whatsoever, sit down with the drum machine and program it until something happened, get a sound together and bounce off that to add a keyboard part. Then I'd take a cassette of that back to my room and sing along to it; then go back to the studio and take it a little bit further. The songs were constructed a bit at a time.
"Empire of the Senses" was a demo that went back to Red Noise but was never used. The song was about trying to liberate yourself from your senses controlling everything you do; it also was inspired by the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses. "The October Man" is probably the best self-portrait I've done so far. A lot of strange things happen to me in autumn.
Flaming Desires and Other Passions (EP) (1982)
"Flaming Desire" was a single in Britain; the other tracks were left over from sessions for The Love That Whirls. This was a way of getting rid of them, really. (The English 12-inch of "Flaming Desire" includes some of these tracks.)
I had so much material left over from The Love That Whirls that I was trying to find ways to get it out of my system and let people hear it. We put out 12-inchers, 7-inchers with an extra track - I've lost track of how many. I know there was enough for nearly three albums when I finished The Love That Whirls.
Chimera (1983)
I started work on Chimera in 1982; the original idea was for it to be out in November of that year. Because of various commitments - I had to go to Japan for five weeks to work on the Yellow Magic Orchestra album, Naughty Boys, and I was producing other people - I didn't get a chance to finish it until early 1983.
Chimera was to be an intermediary release between The Love That Whirls and the next official album in 1983. But it came out late, and then my contract with Phonogram came to an end. They were going to renew it, but we wanted better circumstances.
The biggest influence I've had of late has been from working with YMO. Those guys wipe the floor with most of the musicians I've ever met. On "Acceleration," the bass line (which is Moog bass) is very much like some of YMO's things, not in notes or tempo but in style.
Chimera and The Love That Whirls are my two favorite albums of everything I've done. They show me finding myself, which takes a long time; there are so many things to try in my world. I feel I can stand by those two records because they have a lot of meaning for me in the lyrical content. With those two records I came to grips with the ideals I'd had for a while, trimming away the things that weren't necessary.
I'm not a synthesizer play; I wouldn't dare get up onstage and play keyboards. If one hand's down on the left end of the piano and the other's on the right, they get completely lost. But in a studio situation I can take my time and experiment. It's like playing with building blocks, trying something out a bit at a time. It's quite a painful process, and something I don't like people watching me do.
Guitar is the only thing I can play, really. I've been coming back to guitar; there's probably more on Love That Whirls and Chimera than anything I've done since Be-Bop. But it's E-bow guitar, which I've also used an awful lot on my performance pieces. My next album should come back to more guitar - acoustic guitar. Being in a synthesizer band now is like being in a heavy metal band.
Savage Gestures for Charms Sake
(Nelson's latest offering is a mini-album of instrumentals released in the UK on his Cocteau label)
Vistamix
The tracks were basically chosen by committee; my own favorites probably wouldn't make a very commercial record. I'm putting some faith in "them." I suppose it gives an overview of some of the more commercial things. It's not coming out in England.
Other Plans
I've got four albums coming out in a boxed set. It's all instrumental music recorded at home: 95 pieces of music, three years' work involved in the lot. It's coming out on Cocteau in a limited edition of 3000 copies, all hand-signed and numbered.
One of the albums is a re-release of Sounding the Ritual Echo. One side of Chamber of Dreams is a selection of backing tracks I improvised during the Invisibility Exhibition (a multi-media show in London); the B-side is incidental music played between acts. An album called Pavilions of the Heart and Soul is about eros and sensuality. It's meant to be music to make love to, very sensual and delicate. A Catalogue of Obsessions is a ragbag of everything that didn't fit into other concepts. It's very tongue in cheek, full of nice, absurd song titles.
I originally wanted to include Beauty and the Beast and Das Kabinet, which are now unavailable, in the box as well, but it made the price a little too extreme. We may re-release them as a double-pack in the future.
I'm going to put together a band and tour. I did a tour with Yuki (Takahashi) earlier this year and got a taste for it again. But I don't want to do it forever. I'm guarding against it going back to being-a-band-and-making-records. There's so much more to be done.
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