Be-Bop Deluxe
Rising from playing Working Men’s Clubs in Yorkshire to US tours with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Be-Bop Deluxe were an arty enigma in mid-70s rock’n’roll. Mastermind Bill Nelson reflects on a life of musical adventures, flaming guitars and taking glam to shocked “ha
Mastermind Bill Nelson reflects on musical adventures, flaming guitars and taking glam to shocked “hard, butch miners”.
How do you solve a problem like Be-Bop Deluxe? That was the issue facing industry types and critics during the 1970s. The band were too savvy for rock’n’roll, too sleek for traditional prog, too complex for punk. They had hit singles they didn’t want, toured America with wholly incompatible acts and created pyrotechnical stage shows devised by the most reluctant of guitartoting frontmen. In short, they were the decade’s biggest enigma.
“We had some problems with the old guard in that things had to be clearly defined back then,” explains the band’s founder, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, Bill Nelson. “We’d be pulling in all kinds of directions, not just from album to album or song to song, but within one piece of music. It made it very difficult for some people to grasp what we were about. We were a postmodern rock band.”
Across five studio albums, Be-Bop Deluxe blurred the battle lines between glam, art-rock and prog, offering a scintillating fusion that pointed to an unscripted future. Visionary works like Sunburst Finish and Drastic Plastic pre-empted the new wave of post-punk and beyond. Just as crucially, in Nelson they had the embodiment of the modern guitar hero; a riff lord of sophistication, guile and consummate ability.
A former art-school student from Wakefield, his conceptual lyrics recycled pop culture in much the same way as those of David Bowie or Roxy Music, soaking up references from sci-fi, Pop Art and Expressionist cinema. “The Pop Art thing was emerging when I was at college in the mid sixties,” he says. “And that was part of the idea I had for Be-Bop Deluxe, to take the commercial pop and rock aspects and set them in a different context, to make people think and question it. Duane Eddy was the first guitarist I ever took notice of, then jazz players like Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery. The avant garde came into play when I discovered John Cage and the Fluxus movement. So they were all swimming around in my head and somehow came to bear on the music.”
Nelson was working as a local government officer when he recorded his first solo album, Northern Dream, in 1971. A year later he and fellow employee Richard Brown started casting around for musicians to start a band. Be-Bop Deluxe quickly became known on the local club scene, although more for their visuals than for the music.
“It was never intended to be anything more than fun,” Nelson says, laughing. “We were playing in Working Men’s Clubs and pubs around Yorkshire, so putting on the glam-rock thing was kind of subversive. These hard, butch miners would be quite shocked by us. And we enjoyed that idea of getting up people’s noses. Instead of getting changed back into our street clothes at the end of a gig, we’d get in the van in our glam gear, with all the make-up still on, and stop off at a fish and chip shop. The looks we’d get were priceless.”
In the meantime, John Peel had become smitten with Northern Dream and played the whole record on his radio show in one go. EMI got wind of the album, too, and told Nelson they’d like him to re-record it with some choice session players. “At that point, I’d just started Be-Bop Deluxe and we were only about two weeks old as a group,” Nelson says. “I told them: ‘Actually, I’ve got a band now, so it’s not like that any more.’”
EMI were initially uncertain about Nelson’s new venture, but a storming gig at London’s Marquee in March 1974 persuaded the label to sign them up. Be-Bop Deluxe were promptly put on Harvest, the label’s progressive arm, and put in the studio to record their debut, Axe Victim. Largely comprised of songs road-tested for more than a year, the album veered from proggish reveries like Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape to the hardnosed title track and winking sci-fi fantasias like Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus.
The band were packed off on tour for two months, supporting Cockney
Rebel. “We went down really well with those audiences,”
Nelson remembers. But sales of Axe Victim were modest.
For the follow-up, Nelson unveiled a slimmed-down new line-up, with bassist Charlie Tumahai and drummer Simon Fox. EMI duly teamed up
Be-Bop with producer Roy Thomas Baker, who was then shaping the sound of another of
EMI’s bands, Queen. But it wasn’t quite the harmonious union they’d hoped for.
“We recorded most of Futurama down at Rockfield Studios in Wales,” Nelson explains. “I was incredibly impressed by Roy Thomas Baker’s engineer,
Pat Moran. I learned an awful lot just by watching him and seeing what he could do with the studio. But I wasn’t completely overwhelmed by Roy. He would sit in an armchair by the mixing desk and go: