BE BOP DELUXE - DRASTIC PLASTIC @ 45

 

Released in February of 1978, Be Bop Deluxe’s fifth and final studio LP, Drastic Plastic, turns 45 years old this month. It’s an album which would mark a pronounced shift in the group’s style, radically aligning them with the minimalist zeitgeist of the era, which had become the driving thrust for alternative music by the end of the ‘70s.

Recording for the album began in 1977, though not until Bill Nelson’s management had convinced him to stick with Be Bop Deluxe for one more go-round. He was ready to pack the band in at that point and head into a vastly different direction from the lush progressive rock the band had made their stock-in-trade over the course of their previous four albums. The stripped down, lean and angular sounds of the “new wave” and “punk” scenes were seducing Nelson towards a tougher, tighter approach, just as Bowie had been pursuing on his “Berlin” albums with Brian Eno. Nelson had a dystopian futurist vision in his head and was determined to realize it.

The band decamped to the south of France for recording, mostly inspired by Nelson’s love of French surrealist film maker Jean Cocteau. They booked into Chateau Saint Georges studio, which offered a picturesque, romantic backdrop for recording. It’s a setting which seems at odds with Nelson’s brittle visions of tomorrow, yet it suited the work in the end. The band were intending to record a double LP for this release, but the label ended up curtailing that ambition and insisted on keeping it down to a single album’s worth of material. That meant that a number of songs recorded for the album ended up shelved until after the band had broken up, eventually appearing on the posthumous, “Best of and the Rest Of Be Bop Deluxe” double album a couple of years later.

The material that did make the album showed off the band’s new sound with a collection of romanticized modern visions of life truly in the “air age”, with robots cleaning the home while doubling as personal attendants/jailers (Superenigmatix), collapsing civilizations (Panic In the World), fascist governments (New Precision) and science fiction telepathy (Electrical Language). Repetitive tape-looped drums and sharp, economical guitar and keyboard arrangements kept the album feeling steely and precise. The softer side of the band wasn’t completely eradicated, however. Visions of Endless Hopes is a languid instrumental built around fluttering mandolins, while the album’s closer, Islands of the Dead, is a loving memorial to Nelson’s recently deceased father, with the vocal recording performed on an exterior balcony of the chateau at sunset.

The cover graphics for the album were created by legendary ‘70s design house, Hipgnosis, who were responsible for some of the most striking LP imagery of the decade. While it’s not their most notable work on the front, showing a room of primary colored surfaces with an enigmatic plastic “apparatus” superimposed, the rear band photo is far more intriguing. The band are shown in a bare room with TV sets for heads, each showing the performer’s real head on the screen. Nelson’s screen, however, is glitching while another set on the floor shows his head in focus. It’s one of my all-time favorite band photos and perfectly captures the mood of the LP within.

At the time of its release, it received middling reviews and modest record sales. After a bit of live touring to support the LP, Nelson had his fill and was ready to move on to realizing his vision more fully with his next project, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, and their only album, Sound on Sound. Nelson has commented that he was ready to move on to Red Noise for Drastic Plastic and he felt that the end results for that album were a compromise of what he’d really wanted to do because he was convinced to stick with BBD. You can hear the difference with Red Noise as it is singularly uncompromising in its vision and never lets up its assault on the senses. While it may not have been the record he wanted, Drastic Plastic has always been one of my favorite BBD LPs, right from the first time I heard it. There’s a lot about it that has retained its relevance to the world at large, with its themes of alienation, automation and exploitation all serving as prophetic of the times to come. The recent deluxe edition’s 2021 remix offers a fresh interpretation of the music, allowing listeners to hear details which were previously obscured, bringing fresh life to an album which has never had the recognition it truly deserves.