BE-BOP DELUXE

Sunburst Finish ESOTERIC

Canonical Stephen W Tayler remix reissued on vinyl with restored artwork.

Generally referenced as the “best” Be-Bop Deluxe album, 1976’s Sunburst Finish is in fact their most solid, their most accessible. In truth, like the minor hit single it yielded, Ships In The Night, it feels a little restrained, with Bill Nelson phlegmatically curbing his more experimental urges to ensure a commercial foothold for the band. He’s less lyrically effusive than on the two previous releases, and the songs tend to lean on legible structures, his guitar solos where guitar solos usually go, rather than blazing in like volatile comets.

None of this is to say the record doesn’t frequently dazzle: indeed the attack of Sleep That Burns or the Roxy-ish sigh of Beauty Secrets present consummate art-rock. Yet overall the weird fusions of glam and prog, which characterised their 1974 debut Axe Victim, are held in check, akin to when a politician hides their maverick tendencies to woo the mainstream. There’s a calculated short-term trade-off; a trick that Bowie, an influence, wasn’t averse to deploying.

It has a sidebar claim to history as the first album officially produced (at Abbey Road) by John Leckie (whose starry CV would go on to include Radiohead, Stone

Roses, XTC, Muse et al), although Nelson co-produced. And Nelson’s musical wit peeps through the shiny surfaces of Fair Exchange or Heavenly Homes. Ships In The Night itself, for all its targeted catchiness, dances to a fairly leaden cod-reggae rhythm, but Life In The Air Age thrives on the writer’s fascination with sci-fi, otherness and with twisting plot lines. The closing track, Blazing Apostles, bubbles with a hint of the energy Nelson repressed to keep the album’s edges smooth. With its tonguein-cheek tales of ‘saints on the highway, martyrs on the road to Hell’ it reveals the all-rounder’s wish to stretch his limbs further, something he was to do on the subsequent album with its giveaway title, Modern Music. Sunburst Finish is a grand gateway, but Bill, and Be-Bop, did better things.