Yorkshire TV was never really known for pop music, but in the mid-70s, they would sometimes fill space between programmes with a bit of Modern Popular Music. This meant that one afternoon, I heard Ships in the Night by Be Bop Deluxe, which as a ten or so year old, registered as a catchy tune but in retrospect fitted in with hearing Autobahn by Kraftwerk, The Sweet and (ulp) Gary Glitter as something other.
Forward a few years and I was listening to the Radio 1 evening show (probably Mike Read back then) while doing homework and heard ‘Do You Dream in Colour’ by someone called Bill Nelson, which again caught my ear as being smart, futuristic new wave. There were others following that, ‘Banal’ and ‘Living in My Limousine’. Powered by paper round money and as a new reader of the NME, I started buying records, and among them was another single ‘Youth of Nation on Fire’, a double pack which featured three other tracks which had the same post-punk electronic sound with Bowiesque vocals. A bit of inevitable promotion appeared in the NME which told a story of Be Bop Deluxe’s transformation into Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, subsequent record company rejection, a leased Rolls-Royce he couldn’t get rid of, that he had decided to record the LP himself, oh, and he lived in Wakefield, a bus ride away, which pop stars didn’t do (Sheffield was somehow different and you could find the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire’s studios if you knew where to look – even see Phil Oakey in the street).
The home studio part was the most interesting to me – that you could make a commercial record at home (albeit, as it turned out, on the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio) seemed genuinely hopeful to a skint teenager with ambitions that outstripped ability and resources.
The LP was called Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam. I found my copy mistakenly priced at 99p in a department store in my home town so I bought it without a second thought. It came with a second LP ‘Sounding the Ritual Echo (Atmospheres for Dreaming)’. ‘Quit Dreaming’ was 12 tracks of something that definitely wasn’t born out of punk and its antecedents but had liked what it heard. It had hooks and choruses and weirdness. There were four singles on it and there could have been two or three more, it was that kind of record. The second LP was genuinely home made on a Tascam four track, a collection of drifting instrumentals that would now be called ‘ambient’ but made before that had gained currency as a genre (and something I probably haven’t listened to for 40 years).
‘Quit Dreaming’ was a record out of time and place. It had been written as the second Red Noise LP, where Red Noise had been formed out of Bill’s wish to include more contemporary influences, but where ‘Sound-on-Sound’ feels deliberate, ‘Quit Dreaming’ seems like trying to make a commercial record but without compromising values (I didn’t hear ‘Sound-on-Sound’ until much later and it does seem to be trying to get away from Nelson’s past as much as possible). I explored Be-Bop Deluxe a bit on the back of it courtesy of the town library, and couldn’t find as much in it as I did in ‘Quit Dreaming’.
The next Bill Nelson LP, a year or so later, was The Love That Whirls (Diary of a Thinking Heart), which crashed in on wave of synths and crunching 808 before 808s generally crunched, and just pre-dated the high points of UK synth-pop of 1983 or so. It like a declaration of intent from the start, heading full-tilt into the future, finally abandoning Nelson’s trademark guitar solos for the eBow, and synths and Japanese influenced themes. As with ‘Quit Dreaming’ it lived in a world of its own, listening to what was going on but again reassembling on Nelson’s own terms. It also came with a home made second LP ‘La Belle et la Bête’, the soundtrack for a theatre production of Jean Cocteau’s film ‘Beauty and the Beast’ by the Yorkshire Actors Company in a mix of global and local.
The final part of what turned out to be a trilogy published by Mercury Records was [Chimera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(Bill_Nelson_album), a six track mini LP released another year or so later, a remote collaboration with Yukhiro Takehashi of Yellow Magic Orchestra, who created drum parts that Nelson wrote songs around. The drum tracks were remarkable in themselves, mixing machine and human drums and bridging jazz and electronica before such things were common. The songs themselves reflected Nelson’s common themes of modern art, futurist visions and romanticism that again sounded out of time and space while being effortlessly contemporary. ‘Acceleration’ from the LP was released as a single a year after the release of the LP, and got Radio 1 daytime airplay.
After these three releases, Nelson didn’t make another solo record for three years. He was enormously productive as he’s been since, but in that time I’d done my A-levels, gone to university and found other music and forgot about him for a while. I was still inspired by the idea of doing it for yourself and that has been a large part of my life in general. I’m listening to his next LP Getting the Holy Ghost Across for the first time now, and it’s definitely a Bill Nelson record but on first listen he’s kept on moving forwards through the 80s (specifically through the DX7 and fretless bass overloaded part of the charts) and it doesn’t hit as immediately. Then again, I’ve had 45 years with the previous three and if I play them I remember how I felt when I first heard them.
