BE BOP DELUXE - AXE VICTIM @ 50

Celebrating its golden anniversary at 50 years old this month is the debut LP from Yorkshire progressive rock underdogs, Be Bop Deluxe, with Axe Victim being released in June of 1974. While the band did not actually play any "be bop" music, they did come out of the gate as glam-rock wannabes until leader Bill Nelson retooled his vision and managed to conceive of something rather more original on their subsequent albums.

As it was, Be Bop Deluxe came out at the height of the UK glam movement, fashioning themselves while under the looming shadow of David Bowie. Though Bill Nelson denies any overt influence, it's hard to take that stance too seriously when a song title like "Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus" is clearly a first cousin of "Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars". That overt similarity would undercut the band's ability to distinguish themselves at first, a situation further aggravated by their use of makeup and extravagant attire as shown on the group photo adorning the back of the album.

However, on closer inspection and with the benefit of hindsight, there is a blush of the sophistication and sincerity that would bloom on subsequent albums, as Nelson found his own voice and cast aside obvious influences. The album's title track offers up a convincing perspective on the rigours of rock stardom, Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape glints with the essence of the band that would come, and Night Creatures offers up a sublimely beautiful ballad about denizens of the darkness. The only real fly in the ointment of this album is Rocket Cathedrals, the only song to ever appear on a BBD album that was not penned by Bill Nelson. It appears here as a concession track for bassist Robert Bryan, and sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the other songs.

The version of Be Bop Deluxe that recorded their debut would be short lived. After a brief tour of the UK to promote the LP, Nelson realized that his band, mostly mates from the Yorkshire music scene, really weren't up to snuff as far as being players capable of realizing Nelson's ambitious musical vision. As a result, the entire band would get amicably sacked and replaced for the next album by two thirds of the players who would constitute their stable lineup until their ultimate dissolution by the end of the decade.

While Axe Victim doesn't quite fulfill the promise that Nelson held in his potential, it does set the stage for what would come and still contains a few excellent tracks that make the album worth its place in the band's canon. Plus it's got an absolutely ace cover, so you can't really fault it too severely for being a tentative step towards eventual greatness.

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.

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.

BE BOP DELUXE - SUNBURST FINISH @ 45

 

Also celebrating 45 years on the shelves this month is Be Bop Deluxe's 3rd LP, Sunburst Finish, release in February of 1976.

This was the album where all the pieces of the BBD puzzle came together in their fully optimized forms. The band lineup had settled into a four piece with Andy Clark coming in on keyboards to work with Charles Tumahai on bass and Simon Fox on drums. With the band sorted out, front man and guitarist, Bill Nelson was free to focus on his songwriting and, for this album, managed to both find his own voice, leaving the pseudo-Bowie allusions behind, while also reigning in some of his more bombastic guitar indulgences, which had been a hallmark of their previous LP. There was still a lot of drama, detail and complexity to the music, but it all seemed to be better balanced and didn't obscure the focus of the tight hooks and evocative lyrics. For a progressive rock band, on Sunburst Finish, BBD managed to weave their virtuosity around infectious and memorable music that never went too far into self-indulgence. This LP also marked the arrival of John Leckie as producer, who would go on to work on all the subsequent group albums as well as the post BBD Red Noise project.

While Bill has often been somewhat ambivalent about the album cover, it does present a very memorable image and the perspex tube seen in the photos did translate into their stage show for the tour to promote the LP. Three such tubes were used on tour with Bill, Andy and Charles beginning each show from inside a tube filled with dry ice. As the show began, the tubes would rise into the ceiling, revealing the band. There was one memorable instance, however, when this staging provided a real life "Spinal Tap" experience as the tubes failed to rise and the band remained trapped in them as the show began!

For me, this album has continuously grown in my esteem over the years. When I first got it, I had backed into Be Bop Deluxe after discovering Red Noise at the peak of the "new wave" era of the late 1970s. As such, the progressive rock styles of earlier BBD were a bit outside my preferences, but it didn't take long for these albums to reveal their charms and seduce my senses. Throughout the ensuing years, Sunburst Finish has continuously illuminated more depths to itself as I rediscover it again every few years. The subtlety of the arrangements, the attention to detail, the irresistible hooks and the heartfelt romanticism of the lyrics continue to flower with new layers of meaning. Like a fine wine, this is one of those albums that keeps getting better with age.