BILL NELSON'S RED NOISE - ART/EMPIRE/INDUSTRY (THE COMPLETE RED NOISE)

 

I finally got the opportunity to explore the recently released box set, Art/Empire/Industry (The Complete Red Noise). This set takes the “one and done” Bill Nelson’s Red Noise album from 1979, Sound On Sound, and gives it the deluxe reissue treatment, which has previously been done with all the Be Bop Deluxe albums. Though I can’t afford a physical copy and therefore cannot comment on the packaging of this set, I can at lease enjoy the music and all the bonus material that’s been made available. In exploring this set, it has highlighted the singular creative spark which Nelson harnessed for this project and which still strikes up a flame over four decades after its release.

When this album was originally issued in February of 1979, it became my gateway into the world of Bill Nelson. I’d seen BBD performing Panic In the World from their final LP, Drastic Plastic, in 1978 when they appeared on The Midnight Special. That performance caught my attention with the band appearing in very conservative business suits, though with Bill having dark eye-shadow under his eyes to give him a slightly deadened appearance. It was the subtle subversion of that appearance which piqued my curiosity. However, it took a somewhat middling review of the Red Noise LP in CREEM magazine to inspire me to want to buy that record. Even though the reviewer was dismissive of the album, something about the way it was described made me feel like this album needed to be in my collection.

When I managed to snag a copy, it instantly became the dominant presence within my meager, yet burgeoning record collection. There was certainly a strong influence from DEVO in the music, but there was a poetry and humor apparent in the album that was decidedly all down to Nelson’s hand. What struck me about the album was the laser precision focus of the songs and the style of the music. Its single-mindedness and coherence all felt seamless and impenetrable. The songs were precision crafted and presented in a manner which was relentless and supercharged with electricity. This is perfectly encapsulated by the album’s opener, Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric). One felt like you might catch a spark from the turntable if you attempted to touch it while the album was playing. And then there was Furniture Music, a song which became my anthem of teenage angst, perfectly reflecting that feeling of being an object in my own life. Every song had something to connect with and put me in a state of mind where I was saying internally, “Okay, 1984 is on the way, so bring it on!” I was ready to end the ‘70s and start the future, no matter how bleak it might be.

Thematically, the album bounced furiously from one vision of dystopian alienation to another. Each song touched on themes of political fascism, machine conformity, intellectual dysfunction, emotional dysphoria and more. Bill’s evocative lyrics were layered atop a relentless onslaught of rapid fire tempos and song arrangements which felt like they’d been bolted together by assembly line robots rather than composed by human hands. This was all perfectly encapsulated by the LP’s cover photo, a brilliant work of found object assemblage by Japanese photographer, Bishin Jumonji, which depicted a bed ridden robot about to phone in sick. It’s an absolutely iconic symbolic representation of futurist failure.

The road to this album began before Be Bop Deluxe were formally disbanded, when Bill was beginning the process of creating what would be their final LP, Drastic Plastic. In fact, Bill was ready to pull the plug on the band at that time, but was persuaded to give it another go by the band’s management. As such, you can hear Nelson striving for Red Noise throughout the songs on DP, which were intended to be for RN’s first album, but it’s all a bit muted in the context of that band and the razor sharp angularity of Sound On Sound is only hinted at by Drastic Plastic. After DP’s completion, Bill was determined that the only way to realize his vision was to do so in an entirely rebuilt form with clear authority for the composer from top to bottom. So Red Noise would be a band, but only to facilitate Nelson’s vision as exactly as he demanded. He’d retain BBD keyboardist, Andy Clark, and brought in brother Ian on sax & additional keyboards and bassist Rick Ford. Drums would be handled by Bill himself, in the studio for most tracks, and Dave Mattacks on stage and for whatever Bill didn’t do in the studio. While Bill was the creative head, he’d relegate his guitar to a more supporting role, rather than making it the lead instrument. It would work in concert with the synthesizers to create what one critic described as “DEVO given Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound treatment”.

At the time of its release, while it performed well in the UK, reaching #33 on the album charts, it left zero impression on the US market. Critically, opinions were split with some marveling at its visionary departure from Nelson’s prior work, and others lamenting it as a contrived attempt to get in on the “new wave” trend. Music fans were equally baffled as Bill sped off into the future, leaving the “guitar hero” prog-rock of his past in the dust. The band embarked on a tour to support the album, presenting themselves in Neo-fascist grey uniforms as a tongue-in-cheek joke, positioning themselves, not as victims of this dystopia, but as harbingers and agents-provocateurs. The conflict of it all with Nelson's past work and mixed responses were enough to cause both Bill’s US and UK record labels to ditch him. This put the realization of a second Red Noise album into shambles. Bill had already begun work on the album, but the contract termination left those master tapes in the ownership of EMI, preventing him from doing anything for nearly two years until he could rework that material and release it as his first fully solo album, Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam. By that point, Bill had given up on trying to retain a position as “band leader” and, instead, he set on his path as a solo artist, a position he’s retained for the rest of his career.

Red Noise and its attendant idiosyncratic sound would ultimately end up constrained to the Sound On Sound album. Quit Dreaming…, while possessing echoes of SoS, would end up ever so slightly returning Bill to the more romantic disposition he’d established with BBD. Indeed, the stark, angry futurism of SoS remains isolated within Nelson’s musical canon to this day. While Nelson always maintained a sense of modernity coupled with vintage science fiction nostalgia, nothing he’d create before or since would strike so fiercely or with such manic intensity as Sound On Sound.

The new box set includes discs featuring non-album bonus tracks, live performances and home demo recordings of songs from the SoS album. Those serve to highlight how pure and imperturbable Nelson’s vision was throughout the project. Its sheer monomaniacal consistency is apparent throughout the process, from conception to realization to presentation on stage. The new mix of the album, as was the case with the BBD box sets, offers up a wonderful refresher for the songs, allowing the listener to see through some of the density of the original mix and into the details of the arrangements. As a set, these recordings all reinforce and highlight the purity of the creative execution which went into producing Sound on Sound. It certainly renewed my disposition in terms of considering it one of the most important LPs to ever come into my musical life.