Be Bop Deluxe - Electrical Language

Bill Nelson is one of my favorite guitar players, and he falls somewhat into the "unsung hero" category, despite the fact that he is both fantastically talented and extremely prolific both as leader of the bands Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise and as a solo artist. His guitar lines are very distinctive...they weave in and around melodies in an almost serpentine fashion. And those melodies...so great.

Here's more info from the FAQ section of his website:

Foreward section by Steven E. McDonald, reprinted with kind permission.

Bill Nelson is both an enigma and a highly public person whose motivations sometimes seem shrouded in complex mysteries, yet whose sometimes prodigious output amounts to public development of song ideas and musical experiments. He has been both a guitar hero and the background figure in any number of art installations, exhibitions and theatrical presentations. While difficult for record company executives to grasp and often obscure to the general public, Nelson has nonetheless built up a strong and loyal fan base around the world.

Nelson was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the semi-industrial town of Wakefield, showing a talent for art and design and a passion for science fiction. His father, saxophonist Walter Nelson, was the leader of a dance band, and his mother, Jean, had once performed as part of a dance troupe, so music permeated the household -- Nelson's brother, Ian, is also a saxophonist, while several close relatives were expert musicians. Even so, Nelson never learned to read music, and was relatively late coming to guitar -- he was well into his teens before his father bought him the Gibson ES345 that eventually became his trademark. His early influences included Duane Eddy, as well as the icon of every budding English guitarist of the early 1960s, Hank B. Marvin of the Shadows ("The Passion," included on The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything, is a veritable chronicle of Marvin's influence). Later influences included Jimi Hendrix, for whom Nelson wrote "Crying to the Sky," a Be Bop Deluxe song.

He went through a relatively normal process of education at Wakefield schools, eventually attending the Wakefield College of Art, where he was able to pursue his painting and graphics interests, as well as his fascination with Jean Cocteau. On the musical side of his life, he was involved with several unrecorded bands. The first known Nelson recordings are of a three-piece band called Global Village, who cut three covers for an EP and dissolved in 1968. Nelson also played on sessions at the Holyground recording studio, various of which have surfaced again in recent years, though Nelson is dismissive of his participation. Around this time he married for the first time, becoming a Pentecostal Christian and joining a church group called the Messengers, who later changed their name to Gentle Revolution. The marriage resulted in the 1970 birth of Julia Nelson.

Nelson's career began in earnest with the recording and release of a solo album, Northern Dream, which was financed by the owner of the Record Bar, a local Wakefield record store. The initial pressing was limited to 250 copies (it has since been reissued several times, much to Nelson's frustration; he has never received royalties from the record), one of which found its way to BBC disc jockey John Peel, whose late-night Radio One shows were a constant influence on British rock music. Peel took an immediate liking to the record, playing cuts from it on a regular basis, with the result that executives from EMI's Harvest label contacted Nelson with the intention of having him record for the label, possibly with a remake of Northern Dream.

Nelson had different ideas by this point, however, and had assembled the first version of Be Bop Deluxe, featuring fellow Gentle Revolution member Richard Brown (keyboards), Ian Parkin (guitar), Rob Bryan (bass) and Nicholas Chatterton-Dew (drums). Brown left before the band went into the studio. A single, "Teenage Archangel"/"Jets at Dawn," was recorded and sold at concerts just before the EMI deal was finalized. Nelson broke the band up after the recording of 1974's Axe Victim, after EMI expressed dissatisfaction with the abilities of the other members. Nelson briefly worked with Paul Jeffreys and Milton Reame-James, formerly of Cockney Rebel, and bringing drummer Simon Fox into the band. Bassist Charles Tumahai was the next addition, with the trio going on to record Futurama. Keyboardist Andy Clark was the final addition to the band, which remained together until the recording of Drastic Plastic in 1978, by which time the mantle of guitar hero was beginning to weight heavy on Nelson, who was intent on expanding his horizons. The band had quickly developed a reputation for quirky songs and musical pyrotechnics, facets demonstrated both in the studio and in a live context -- Live! In the Air Age remains a brilliant document of a great live band. During this period Nelson divorced his first wife, Shirley, and married his second, Jan, for whom he wrote a great deal of music; he also used her as a model for much of his art.

Red Noise was the next phase of Nelson's plan for life, originally intended to begin with Drastic Plastic -- never the same thing twice, in either musicians or styles. Sound on Sound was a fluid, expert document that demonstrated Nelson's ability to experiment, though at the cost of jarring both the audience and the record company -- EMI, looking for moneymakers and easy understanding, dropped Nelson. A second Red Noise album had been finished, but was never released in its original form.

Abandoning the Red Noise experiment, Nelson reworked the album and released Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam via Mercury Records. In its original format, the album came with a bonus disc -- a full-length album of ambient sketches recorded in his home studio, released as Sounding the Ritual Echo (the album has subsequently been issued by itself). Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam went into the Top Ten in the U.K. This was repeated with The Love That Whirls (Diary of a Thinking Heart), which also included a bonus album (this time La Belle Et La Bete, a theatre soundtrack recording) and the single "Flaming Desire." This period proved to be the commercial peak of Nelson's career, unfortunately -- Chimera, an EP, failed to generate much interest (it was released with additional cuts in the U.S., under the title of Vistamix) and a subsequent deal with CBS/Epic led only to strained relations and a confused release; the U.K. Getting the Holy Ghost Across was altered, resequenced and released in the U.S. as On a Blue Wing. For Nelson, the main advantage of the deal was that he was able to completely rebuild his home studio, providing him with the facility to experiment more and more, resulting in the release of the first Orchestra Arcana album, which combined synthesized soundscapes with sound bites and tape loops. The name originated as a result of a clause in Nelson's CBS contract that forbade him to release his experimental material under his own name.

Today's selection provides a great example of the guitar playing I described. The lyric is a simple, four-line phrase that he repeats for several bars over a hypnotic electronic rhythm track. And the guitar? Just fantastic.