Be-Bop Deluxe
Mainman Bill Nelson revisits his band’s early years with debut album Axe Attack.
Axe Victim, Be-Bop Deluxe’s 1974 debut, is an album populated by ‘rock’n’roll supermen’ and ‘tongue teasers, young deceivers, night creatures on your heels so high’. The band ‘hoped you’d lend an ear’ but found that ‘you hoped we’d dress like tarts.’ Nonetheless, our heroes refused to be discouraged: ‘like voices on the winds, we hit the road to Hull’.
It was just a minute too late to cash in on glam, which had moved on, but thrives now in a fascinating time warp somewhere between flash and trash, with its then young, confident and ambitious chief creator’s gifts raising even its misfires into a dimension touched by magic. Its lyrics catch the temperature of the era in the UK as colourfully as any loftier
Bowie/Roxy album, while the guitar player is on all kinds of fire.
“Even after all these years,” says Bill Nelson modestly, “I don’t rate myself very much as a guitarist. I never can get to where I’d like to be with it. But that’s part of the journey – it’s better than arriving. You have to accept that you’ll always have goals beyond what you can achieve.”
Nelson’s opinion of his guitar skills will come as something of a shock to any readers who have enjoyed his fluid, inventive playing over half a century of diverse music which has taken in art rock, prog, new wave, ambient electronica and most points between and outside such margins. His albums with
“THE FIRST THREE BE-BOP ALBUMS WERE ALL MEANT TO HAVE NAMES RELATED
TO THE GUITAR.”
Be-Bop Deluxe, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, Orchestra Arcana and countless solo records, plus his production work for everyone from the Skids to Roger Eno – not to mention collaborations with David Sylvian, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Cabaret Voltaire, John Cooper Clarke and Harold Budd – have confirmed him as one of the most versatile, astute and often counter-intuitive musicians of his generation.
Today, however, Prog is taking the friendly 71-year-old Yorkshireman back to where it all began (bar a self-released solo album), on Axe Victim. It introduced the very first incarnation of Be-Bop Deluxe with a glorious flourish of glam tropes, proggy pirouettes and great hangar fulls of wailing guitar soloing. Now reissued as a lush box set,
Axe Victim boasts all the axe heroics that moment in the 70s called for, and does so slathered in make-up and satin-and-tat finery at which the Spiders Of Mars might’ve cast an envious eye. Bill’s not sure about its rather “metal” title...
“I don’t know that I’d choose that now! The first three Be-Bop albums were all meant to have names related to the guitar – ‘axe’ of course being how musicians referred to the instrument. Then came [1975’s] Futurama, which was the cheap European substitute in the early 60s for the Fender Stratocaster. And
Sunburst Finish [in ’76] was the actual colour on a guitar. So the three albums were tied together. But that skull on the debut’s sleeve was way too literal for me. It is what it is.”
He’s humble about the record’s curious charms. “I don’t want to say I’m embarrassed by it, but it’s a beginner’s album, y’know?
It has that naïve charm and potential. It’s a stretch towards better things to come. Fans love it: I shouldn’t disparage it! I’m grateful because it got me a record deal and set things rolling, laid the foundations for what I consider slightly more sophisticated albums later on. At the time, once we had made the decision to go pro, I was determined to make a go of it, with 100 per cent commitment. There was nothing throwaway about it. It’s a statement of where we were at that time.”
It’s a more stellar and seductive statement than Bill’s allowing. And where Be-Bop
Deluxe were at that time had been reached after a lengthy period of EMI indecision.
They knew they wanted him from Day One. They just weren’t sure they wanted Be-Bop Deluxe. But Nelson stood as firm as a column.
“When we first got the band together, we didn’t have a grand plan,” he recalls. He’d been to art college. “We had day jobs and would play locally around the Wakefield and Leeds area, just for the fun of it. We started right at the beginning of the glam era, and enjoyed dressing up to freak people out in these working men’s pubs and clubs.”
He made his 1971 solo debut Northern Dream, which John Peel took a shine to. EMI heard him playing it, and wanted to sign the young man. He explained he would prefer to be signed with his new band, but the A&R men hesitated while demos were cut. Even after coming up to Leeds to witness fan fever, they pondered whether the group were merely a “local phenomenon”.
“People couldn’t get into our sold-out gigs. They were standing outside, straining to listen,” he recalls. EMI still didn’t commit, until Be-Bop Deluxe came down to London to open for String Driven Thing at the Marquee. “They’d said it wouldn’t translate outside Yorkshire, but it went down well. And that was it. We were signed to Harvest.”
You showed some stones to hold out until they did things your way. Is it true they tried to tempt you to join a supergroup?
“Island Records did. They wanted me to join Mitch Mitchell, Andy Fraser and the singer Frankie Miller. I mean it was tempting, because I was a big Jimi Hendrix fan and Mitch was a great drummer. And I liked
Free at the time. But I got a few other offers too. Sparks asked me to join them at one point. And I read in a gossip column back then that the Rolling Stones had me on their shortlist when they were looking to replace Mick Taylor…”
Somehow we can envisage you as a better fit on Kimono My House than on, say, Black And Blue…
“Yes. I just felt, with the Stones, that’s very flattering but I don’t want to be playing that kind of music. I was into other things.”
“I’M GRATEFUL BECAUSE
IT GOT ME A RECORD DEAL AND SET THINGS
ROLLING, LAID THE FOUNDATIONS FOR WHAT
I CONSIDER SLIGHTLY MORE SOPHISTICATED
ALBUMS LATER ON.”
So had you been a childhood prodigy on the “axe”?
“I began young… but not so young. At 10 or 11. I got sore fingers and found it hard at first – the high action – and almost relegated it to the cupboard. But a friend at school encouraged me, and we kept each other going with it.”
And so he found himself among EMI’s glam rock stable, in, to quote his lyric, ‘Max Factor and satin’. Was it obligatory for young bands to peacock it up then? And did he in any way sense he’d missed the boat, as Bowie and even Bolan were already shifting direction?
“Oh, it was kind of on the way out, I think, yes. And I’d already started writing some of the songs that ended up on Futurama, where we got away from the glam feel. But EMI wanted the songs our following knew, saying that would be a springboard.”
The most obvious Ziggy-zone track must be Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus. Prog asks if Nelson could clarify whether it’s piss-take, parody or homage?
“Ah… for a few years I was embarrassed to say, yes, it was very much a comment on the Bowie thing. I mean, I’d got an art school background, as had Bowie, and we were roughly the same age with the same influences and so on. So… it was, let’s say, an affectionate nod. Ironically I’ve worked in recent years with Reeves Gabrels, who played with Bowie for nine years. We did an album together. And Reeves told me that Bowie listened to my stuff! Among the albums which inspired his Earthling were my Practically Wired and After The Satellite Sings, which had drum’n’bass with rock guitar on.”
That art school background was evident on Axe Victim as Nelson dropped in a quote from Jean Cocteau on the sleeve - “no longer to consider art as an amusement, but as a priesthood” – and referenced André Gide in the closing track, the atypical Darkness (L’Immoraliste), “which paved the way for the orchestral side I built up for later songs”. He took some flak. “At that time the press were promoting pub-rock bands: gritty, downhome, denim-clad, long-hair stuff, y’know? So they took the mickey, went: ‘Whatever next?’ Saw me as too airy-fairy or arty-farty. It’s funny, things moved a different way later.”
Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape seems to be Bill’s favourite – “if there’s one song that’s lasted the years, it’s that one” – while there’s a touching tale behind Love Is Swift Arrows. The initials of the title spell out the name of a lady friend of the time. And there’s more, romance fans. “Also, the first letter of every line then spells out her surname as well. Before we did the record we’d play a North Ferriby pub once a month and I met this girl and fell head over heels. It eventually ended, because her parents found out and forbade us from seeing each other. She was hopefully going to university and they threatened to cut off her funding if she continued to see me, this ‘rock musician’! Young love – that’s an energy.”
Rather less energy was displayed by the album’s producer, Ian McLintock, who wasn’t always engaged with the project.
“I don’t want to be too unkind, but it was difficult working with him. I think he was a bit of an acid casualty. Luckily we were friends with a band called Babe Ruth, and a couple of them came to a session – Jenny Haan sang backing vocals for us – and they saw the problem and mentioned it to our
A&R guy. He had a word, and things bucked up after that. It was our first album and we’d just assumed that this was the kind of thing that went on…”
A little-known engineer called John Leckie helped with the mixing, and he and Nelson formed a healthy alliance for subsequent albums. And that year a tour supporting Cockney Rebel enlightened Bill that he would have to loosen his dogged loyalty and change the band’s personnel for the next phase. Be-Bop Deluxe went on to further memorable work, not least the perfect single Maid In Heaven. “It’s brief and to the point,” Bill replies to Prog’s gushing. “Doesn’t go off on tangents. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”
Bill Nelson’s been mightily prolific and musically adventurous ever since. Asked if he’s a workaholic, he says with a laugh, “Well, my wife would think so” – and he likens recording to being a painter. After a brief eulogy to the joys of Yorkshire (where he still lives) and the south of France (“the Cocteau connection’s there”), he adds, “The recording medium is the canvas and sound is the paint. It’s been a pleasure, a fabulous gift to not have to do anything but think about music all these years. I’m really lucky in that I’ve never had to go back to a day job. There have been times when it’s been a bit hair-raising, up and down with finances, but I’ve managed to survive and keep making the music I want to make. And it still reaches people. That’s really magic.”
The deluxe edition of Axe Victim is out now on Cherry Red. For more, visit www.billnelson.com.