Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe on being proud but not too nostalgic about past glories

By Joe Matera

English-born guitarist, singer-songwriter and composer Bill Nelson first came to prominence via 1970s glam-prog-rock combo Be-Bop Deluxe, then later embarked on a solo career which saw Nelson maintain a consistent and prodigious output of solo albums over the ensuing decades. One of the most prolific and innovative musicians around, and an unsung guitar hero, too, 

Nelson sat down with Goldmine recently to discuss Be-Bop Deluxe, his solo career, his approach to creativity and more.

GOLDMINE: The Be-Bop Deluxe debut album Axe Victim, which came out in 1974, has over the years caused much confusion for record buyers who think, due to the album’s title and cover art, that it is a metal album.

BILL NELSON: I was always concerned about that back in the day, as that cover wasn't the one I would've chosen for the album really. But it was the band's first album for EMI and EMI Records had the upper hand at the time and decided that was going to be the cover. So yeah, I can see why people would think it's a heavy metal album or something.

Be-Bop Deluxe’s second album, 1975’s Futurama was issued as a Record Store Day release this year. Why was the album chosen to be reissued specifically for Record Store Day this year?

BN: I don't know. I don't control the Be-Bop Deluxe catalog. That's a company called Cherry Red and Esoteric Recordings that have all of that now. That was something that they decided to do, but I have no idea why that particular album was chosen.

Roy Thomas Baker produced the Futurama album, right around the time he was also working with Queen on their Night at the Opera album. What was it like working with him?

BN: I'm not sure of the timing, whether he was doing Queen’s album before or after. It was tricky working with Roy because we didn't quite have the right chemistry, and again, it was EMI’s idea to put Roy into it. After that album, Futurama, I decided that I wanted to produce all the future Be-Bop Deluxe albums myself and put the idea forward to EMI. But they were a little wary because they said I had no production experience but were willing to let me work in tandem with a guy called John Leckie, who was a house engineer at that time at EMI. And John and I had a meeting, got on well together and we decided we could work together as a team during the production. So that was my first production and also John's first production.

Be-Bop Deluxe embarked on a tour with Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel and two of Cockney Rebel members later joined your band. What was it like to be on tour with Steve?

BN: At the time, the Cockney Rebel had quite a hit with “Mr. Soft” so they were drawing a decent sized audience. Again, they too were on EMI and it was thought a good idea to push us onto the same tour because as a so-called brand-new band, we would be exposed to a fairly good audience and receptive audience. So that worked out well. But Steve at that time was a difficult character. He could be very sort of standoffish and so on, and there were problems within the ranks of his band. The band’s bass player, Paul Jeffreys and keyboard player, Milton Reame-James weren't happy. And at the end of that tour, I decided that I needed to get a better band around me. And so, the two guys from Cockney Rebel left Steve Harley and joined me in Be-Bop Deluxe, but after a few weeks as a tryout, that didn't really work musically either. There was nothing wrong with the personalities, they were nice guys, but it just didn't gel for me musically. So, I sort of scrapped that and had a rethink and eventually ended up with, what I think it was, the definitive people of the Be-Bop Deluxe lineup.

You achieved commercial success with the 1976 single, “Ships in The Night,” which reached No. 23 on the U.K. chart. Did that prove to be a turning point for you career wise, considering you weren’t one seeking fame and fortune with your music?

BN: The song’s position varied on different charts depending on what you looked at the time. On some charts it was higher than that. It actually did the job of introducing the band to a wider range of audience, but it wasn't really representative of the band. I never thought of the band as a singles band. I always aimed at an album audience with the whole album being a thing rather than any single track. But EMI again, at that time said, ‘we need a single’. And I wrote that with the idea of it being a single but didn't think it would do anything. Ironically, it actually did achieve some commercial success but it's not been one of my favorite tracks ever since.

You’re a very forward-thinking artist, never one to look back, so how do now you look back on your legacy with Be-Bop Deluxe?

BN: Well, it's there and I'm kind of proud of it, but it's a long time ago. It's over 40 years. I can look back on it as if it is somebody else's band almost. I don't always recognize myself in it, but it's a product of its time and it's a moment captured in time, and in that sense, it has its validity, but I've always been loathed to past glories and keeping on selling the same old thing. So, I felt after that, it was time to move on and try new things.

You're very prolific, releasing a constant stream of solo albums, what inspires you to be so prolific?

BN: I love the process of recording. I love the way that you can start with nothing and through the recording process, end up with a piece of music at the end of it. I've said this often before, but I studied as an artist. I was a fine arts student and one of the things that I liked about painting was the way that, you start with very little and you build things up a bit at a time. And I think I've always thought of recording like painting with sound, and also you can relate it to decorating a completely empty room. First of all, you lay the carpet and choose what goes on the walls, and you decide on what furniture goes in and where it would sit and whether something is close to you or far away from you and so on. And working with music is like working with blocks of sound, you're building up a picture from very basic beginnings into something quite complex. So, I just love that process of doing that. And I don't seem to be short of ideas. It's mainly because I don't have any definite idea when I start working on a piece, I allow it to take shape slowly in its own way, and I don't force anything. I'll let it just appear. And then at a later stage we'll start pushing it around a bit more and deciding to keep this part or lose that part or whatever until the final thing appears. And then I consider what the lyrics might be and the top line melody and so on. It's just a process I really enjoy more so than listening back to the finished thing. When I've finished the track and it's allocated to an album, I rarely listen to the album again. I'm more interested in getting the piece done.

You also have a love for the so-called Decadent Poets such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire which played a huge influence upon your music.

BN: A lot of that is from the past. I've read a hell of a lot of books, thousands and thousands of them, and at one point I had that kind of interest in everything from existential writing through to Jean Cocteau and so on. And I guess I've got a curious mind in that sense and wanted to absorb as much as possible. Now, unfortunately, I can't read at all because my eyesight has deteriorated due to diabetic macular degeneration. So, I've got a house like a library, with books I've read over the years, and a lot I still need to read because I have bought books and stacked them up ready to tackle them one at a time. And now it's just almost impossible for me to read due to my eyesight being so bad.

Due to your diabetic macular degeneration condition, do you listen to audio books instead?

BN: I haven't done, no, because I haven't really delved into that. It seems to me that a lot of the catalog of books that you can get in that form, maybe aren't the kind of books I would read. My tastes tend to be eclectic, but obscure. I need to look at that a little bit more and see what is available and what you can get, but it would be a solution.

Where do you think music is heading in the future as the new AI technology comes into being?

BN: The AI thing is concerning because it can mimic any artist really, and create something that sounds like them, but isn't them. And I know there are a lot of concerns within the circle of musicians about being kind of ripped off by that. I do think the technology is amazing, and it has obviously some profound uses, but I do worry about it in the context of being used in music. The technological advances are both good and can be bad as well. So, I mean, the internet's a prime example, and that's allowed me to do what I wanted to do years ago, which was just produce an album and release it whenever I felt like it, rather than working to a music industry stereotype. But at the same time, the internet has allowed people to rip off artists. I mean, there are albums of mine on eBay, which are fake albums. One of my assistant friends found the other week that there were a number of albums. Somebody had downloaded a digital version and then pressed up fake copies onto CDs and was selling them.

Looking back over your whole career and all the music you’ve produced; is there any specific album you would pick as your favorite, and why?

BN: Well, yeah, I guess there's an album called The Alchemical Adventures of Sailor Bill [2005] and that's one of my favorites. And it's because that actually started with an idea, rather than just going in and seeing what happened, I had this need to make an album that was in a lot of ways autobiographical about when I was a child or a teenager going on holidays to the Yorkshire coast and with my parents. And I have a lot of fond memories of those holidays on the coast of the Yorkshire and on the west coast as well, places like Blackpool. So that was the starting idea for the album. And I wrote the whole thing around that kind of loose feel and theme, and I wanted to have some of the tracks with a very grand orchestral mood to them. So, I came up with all kinds of string parts, and I actually subtitled it, Bill Nelson and his Lighthouse Signal Mechanism Orchestra. And that one, I do listen to that occasionally. I can listen to that because when I listen to it now, I can't imagine how I did it. It just seems so complex and so dense and rich and lush, and I must have put a lot of energy and time into doing that one. And yet, I can't remember, it's almost like it was done in a trance. I can't remember the process of doing it. So, that's one of my absolute favorites. 

Another one is an album called Rosewood: Volume One [2005] which is an acoustic guitar instrumental album, that along with the acoustic guitar, it also has electronic touches, with little glitches and distortions and things like that. I wanted it to sound like it had been buried under the ground for a hundred years and then dug up and played, and this was the music that came.

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