Be Bop Deluxe

Bill Nelson is a Yorkshireman through and through. Born in Wakefield, the son of semi-pro sax player and band leader Walter, by his late ‘teens he’d become an accomplished guitarist – Duane Eddy and Hank Marvin were early influences – and 1965 saw him playing in covers band with much older musicians, impressing all with his precocious takes on songs by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and The Who. A graduate of Wakefield Art College, where his fascination with Jean Cocteau emerged, Nelson, by now plugged into both the USA’s West Coast psyche/blues scene and the UK’s equivalent, organised local happenings, which featured sets by his band Global Village and included covers of songs by John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac and Traffic. The owners of local record shop, Records Bar, funded nascent mono recordings and limited pressings and their homespun label Smile released 250 copies of Nelson’s Neil Young-esque debut solo album Northern Dream in 1971.

“A lazy sort of album,” according to Nelson, most of the songs were about his struggles with theological issues – “There was a lot of woolly mysticism in the air,” he reported – as he’d married a Pentecostal Christian. The cover illustration featured works on Buddhism, The Story Of Krishna and a Flying Saucer Manual. The naïvely bucolic acoustic songs won over DJ John Peel, who featured it on his Top Gear radio show and remained a lifelong Nelson supporter, leading to A&R interest from EMI Records. While the label suggested Nelson to re-record these songs to a higher-fi standard, Nelson assembled a band, which, after some dates as Flagship, was christened Be Bop Deluxe, taken from Nelson’s note book of “daft names.” Regular gigs at North Ferriby’s Duke Of Cumberland pub, near Hull, saw the band glam up on stage. “The New York Dolls had nothing on us,” Nelson joked. “At first it was just a laugh, but it caught on and gradually became more sophisticated.”

While EMI Records dawdled, Be Bop Deluxe recorded two tracks, Teenage Archangel and Jets At Dawn, at Heckmondwike’s Box Studios, which were pressed up by Smile on 7-inch and sold at gigs. Finally signed after a triumphant show at the Marquee Club, Be Bop Deluxe’s debut album Axe Victim, recorded with (then) young engineer John Leckie, was released on the progressive Harvest imprint in the summer of 1974 to no small acclaim.

Revealing Nelson’s primary influences as his native Yorkshire, retro Fifties pulp sci-fi and Americana, renaissance man Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde films and Bolan/Bowie/Roxy glam rock stylings, the ten songs were unashamedly decorated with his “gonzoid virtuoso” (according to Julian Cope, who warmly reviewed it on his excellent Head Heritage site) guitar playing, pitched somewhere between Mick Ronson-as-Spider From Mars and fellow Hendrix acolyte (and astronomy buff) Brian May. By no means a great vocalist and an often surreal, occasionally bathetic, lyricist, Nelson more than compensated with his incendiary fretwork, having served a similar guitar apprenticeship to elder masters Beck, Page and Green, albeit a number of years later. The title track was the first of many songs exploring the displaced status of living in the limelight, the rock star as Messianic victim, with the proto glam goth Darkness (L’Immoraliste) compounding the melodrama, and on the aching Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape Nelson’s guitar soared and swooped, one of many outstanding solos which placed Nelson alongside John McLaughlin, Adrian Belew and Patto’s Ollie Halsall in the Premiership of guitarists’ guitarists.

After pressure from EMI, line-up changes ensued, eventually solidifying with session drummer Simon Fox and New Zealand ex-pat of Tahitian and Moari descent Charlie Tumahai on bass, with keyboard player Andy Clark joining after the trio had completed second album, 1975’s Futurama, on which the band worked with producer Roy Thomas Baker. The title referenced typical Nelson themes – it was a type of 1960s Fender Stratocaster copy and so a continuation of his real/replica obsession, as well as the previous album’s title and cover, which featured on the back Nelson holding a Hoyer Les Paul copy. It evoked a pre-Sixties space-age vibe and could it also have been a sly nod to/dig at Roxy Music’s Pyjamarama? Futurama’s songs and arrangements were more developed, the sense of celebration in the Hendrix-saluting Sister Seagull and singles Maid In Heaven and Between The Worlds in particular reflecting Nelson’s improved state of mind, having emerged from a failed first marriage to enjoy a new relationship.

Nelson, with assistance from engineer Leckie, produced third album Sunburst Finish, which featured on its cover a Spinal Tap-esque image of a flaming Gibson guitar held aloft by a naked woman inside a perspex cylinder! Released in January 1976, it’s a creative highpoint, considered by many Be Bop Deluxe’s best meshing of Nelson’s hyper-playing with melodic, commercial material and it gave the band its first UK Top 20 album. A month later, Ships In The Night went to #23 in the UK singles chart, the band’s highest placing, rewarding them with an appearance on Top Of The Pops. Check out the solo-frosted, sinewy Zappa-meets-Thomas Dolby funk of Shine. Sunburst Finish was also, at last, Be Bop’s first official release in America. With a cult following across the Atlantic, when Be Bop began touring there in March (which they would continue to on-and-off do for two years), the album broke into the US Top 50, just weeks after the Thin White Duke himself had cracked the Top 5 with Station To Station.

Written while touring America, fourth album Modern Music appeared in September the same year, capturing Nelson’s fascination and disillusionment with the country he had dreamed of visiting since boyhood, its shift from optimistic Fifties retro-futuristic vision to cold (war) clinical corporate cynicism illustrated by the collectively grey suited band’s blank expressions on the sleeve. The arrangements were more considered, the performances more exhibitionist, but, even if the title track and single Kiss Of Light showed the deftness of Be Bop’s pop touch (like 10cc’s less arch, sci-fi fixated cousins), for all the creative heat, there were less showers of sparks.

In 1977 the band released Live In The Air Age, which was more than simply Be Bop Deluxe’s best songs performed in front of an ecstatic audience; it is, along with The Who’s Live At Leeds, Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus and Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous, one of the great Seventies live albums and, for numerous Nelson disciples, Be Bop’s most representative release. A year later, the band’s fifth studio album Drastic Plastic saw a significant change in direction with Nelson eschewing solos to focus on rhythm and texture, incorporating new technology such as the synth guitar. Recorded at Chateau Saint Georges in the south of France with Rolling Stones' mobile studio, the stripped down songs reflected the influence of UK punk/NYC new wave.

Initially Nelson wanted to release the album as the debut of a new project, Red Noise, but, despite being persuaded to credit it to Be Bop Deluxe, it became the band’s final opus. Convinced of the need to evolve and re-define, and taking only Andy Clark with him, 1979 saw the release of Sound On Sound by Bill Nelson’s Red Noise. His last album of that decade and for EMI – Nelson would go on to be an indie pioneer, launching his own imprint Cocteau – it was the start of a new set of chapters for the talent Yorkshireman, who would later be named as influencing a new generation of guitarists such as John McGeogh, Charlie Burchill and the Edge, as well as numerous post punk, new romantic and avant-garde bands.

In his solo guise, Nelson went on to build a canon of experimental music and ambient instrumentals, working with, among others, Gary Numan and Harold Budd, which was virtually a blueprint for labels like 4AD. Despite limiting his chances of mass appeal by his determination to evolve constantly as a writer and player, Be Bop Deluxe’s six albums in four years still stand as some the most inventive, beguiling and underrated rock music of the Seventies.