Born in Wakefield, Bill Nelson studied at the town’s art college before recording his first album, Northern Dream, in Mike Levon’s bedroom studio in 1971. Much to his astonishment, legendary DJ John Peel played it in its entirety, before Nelson formed Be-Bop Deluxe and forged a reputation as one of art rock’s most exemplary - if under-appreciated - guitarists.
Nelson’s kit has always leaned towards the experimental, using a Minimoog, an ARP Omni and an EBow on his stylish 1983 LP Chimera, collaborating alongside YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi, Kate Bush drummer Preston Heyman, and Japan bassist Mick Karn.
Others soon called, with Nelson adding guitar and EBow to records by Yukihiro Takahashi, Yellow Magic Orchestra, David Sylvian and Harold Budd. Meanwhile, he produced the Skids and famously took his name off the production credit for Gary Numan’s 1983 LP Warriors.
In recent years, Nelson has distilled an astonishing 218 recorded tracks into improvised, texture-rich electric guitar instrumentals. Titled Guitars of Tomorrow, the first volume has produced the LP Magical Thinking. We caught up with Nelson to discuss his fascinating and surprising career.
MusicRadar: Hi Bill, tell us a little about Duane Eddy. We believe he was quite an influence on you when you first started?
Bill Nelson: “I was about 10 years old when I first got a Duane Eddy record - I’d heard a single he’d done called Because They’re Young on the radio and liked it an awful lot. My younger brother received a little toy plastic guitar, which he didn’t bother with, but I managed to pick out the theme from The Third Man on it. Then when I heard the electric guitar on the Duane Eddy records, I fell in love with its twangy, echoey sound.
“As a result of me being such a fan, my dad bought me a second-hand Zenith Archtop Acoustic. I tried to transfer what I’d managed to do on the toy guitar, but found it really hard going because the action was pretty high and it didn’t have little toy plastic strings.
“I almost gave up and then I met a pal at school called Ian Parkin who had an electric guitar. We were both trying to translate what was going on in our record collections, and I guess that gave me the encouragement to keep going.”
MR: When did the penny drop?
BN: “Before long, we’d managed to get some rudimentary chords, but the first time I ever played something properly was when we figured out the chord progression to The Ventures’ Walk, Don’t Run, but neither of us was playing the melody and then the penny dropped.
“I thought, ‘Hang on, let me try and figure out how this melody goes,’ and that’s when I became a lead guitarist and he became a rhythm guitarist. This was all during the late ’50s/early ’60s with instrumental bands like The Shadows, The Ventures and The Fireballs.”
MR: Jumping forward to when you first started making your own music, we understand that DJ John Peel opened a door after you released your debut LP, Northern Dream?
BN: “It was amazing because I had very little ambition to be a professional musician. Not that I wouldn’t have loved it, but it just seemed impossible for a young man from Wakefield to break into a music industry that seemed centred in London. I made Northern Dream in Mike Levon’s back bedroom studio. We recorded onto a two-track tape recorder and pressed up around 250 copies, one of which got into John Peel’s hands.
“He actually contacted me and said, ‘Listen to my programme tonight - I’m going to play the record.’ I thought, ‘Great, he’s going to play a track’, but he played the entire album in one go. I was thrilled to bits and about a week later I got a message from EMI saying they were interested in signing me as a solo artist and would I have a chat with them at Manchester Square in London.”
MR: Was this prior to the formation of your first band, Be-Bop Deluxe?
BN: “I’d just put the first line-up of Be-Bop Deluxe together and told EMI that I’d got a band and was now doing something different to Northern Dream, so they asked if they could get a cassette of it. We recorded the first two songs I’d ever written for the band, took it down to EMI’s A&R and they said they’d come up and see us in three months’ time to watch us play live.
“We did a gig at the Staging Post in Leeds and had already built up a good local following. It was packed out, but EMI still wanted to sign me as a solo artist. I said ‘It’s the band or nothing’.
“Eventually, we got a gig at the Marquee Club supporting String Driven Thing, and EMI turned up again to see how we’d go down with a London audience. As it happened, we went down very well, so they agreed to sign the band if they couldn’t get me on my own. That was how we got our first record deal, so we did the Axe Victim album and went on tour with Cockney Rebel.”
MR: At this point, were you practising guitar day and night?
BN: “I did when I first got into guitar, but I never learned to read music or study theory. Before Be-Bop was born, I’d played in lots of different vocal bands doing rhythm and blues and working men’s club kind of material, playing everything from Jim Reeves and Elvis Presley to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.
“That was useful because although my heart might not be in all those kinds of music, that sort of cross-cultural education helped me to understand a wide range of music. I’m not just a rock guy - I like to listen to jazz, classical and folk.”
MR: In 1979, you produced the Skids’ album Days in Europa. Why did you take a diversion into production?
BN: “I never intentionally wanted to produce other people. John Leckie and I co-produced the Be-Bop albums from Sunburst Finish and the Red Noise album. As it happened, Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson from the Skids were big fans of both and approached me with a view to us producing an EP for them.
“For their next album, they asked if I’d do it on my own, so I produced it. It was the same with all the bands I produced, which was nice but it wasn’t something I went out looking for. It’s a very different skill set, but it’s quite frustrating watching other people have all the fun so I’d always try to get a little bit in there on guitar or keyboards.”
MR: You started Cocteau Records about a year later for your own music and other bands. Did you regret getting into such a cut-throat industry?
BN: “I wanted to open the label up to other artists because I had this altruistic idea that an independent label could be artist-centred rather than business-centred. I got a deluge of cassette tapes and 90 per cent of them were just horrible, but some good things came out of it.
“We released this band called Man Jumping, which was a bit like a cross between a prog band and Philip Glass, but my manager did a runner and it all fell apart. After that, I was picked up by Mercury, who liked my second album Quit Dreaming (And Get on the Beam). They bought it from EMI and it went top 10 in the very early ’80s.”
MR: You also signed the ’80s synthpop band A Flock of Seagulls, which seemed like quite a strange choice?
BN: “One of their managers had been part of the road crew for Be-Bop, so they rang me up and said ‘We’re managing this band from Liverpool but can’t get a deal’. We recorded the single (It’s Not Me) Talking at a tiny studio in Leeds and put that out, but they suddenly got a deal from a major label.
“In terms of electronics, I’d been dabbling since the early-to-mid-’60s. At college, I produced an electronic score for a play of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and used various techniques that John Cage had pioneered with tape cut-ups and putting objects through the strings of the guitar to slow it down and reverse it.”
MR: That takes us nicely to Chimera, your 1983 solo LP that leaned on a lot of synthesisers and sequencers. How did you acquire those instruments?
BN: “The first synth I ever got was the Minimoog, which I bought from a band called Hudson Ford. They couldn’t get on with it, so I got quite a reasonable price and used it a lot to write some of the Red Noise stuff. In fact, when we did the final Be-Bop album, Drastic Plastic, I used a Hagstrom Patch 2000 guitar synth on various tracks.
“I also used a big Yamaha CS80 and a Roland synth guitar that had a strange reinforced part that went over the neck to the headstock. It had really delayed tracking, so it wasn’t great for anything other than steady chord playing.”
MR: On Chimera, you worked with Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japan’s Mick Karn. What do you recollect from those sessions?
BN: “For the drum stuff, I’d been to Japan to play on a YMO album called Naughty Boys, and then I played on Yuki’s album What Me Worry. I basically asked if he could send me some drum tracks that might be useful to write to, so I got a tape of improvised parts and used them as a starting point for songs.
“I’d also done an album with another Japanese musician called Masami Tsuchiya and Mick Karn was at those recordings at Air Studios, so I asked if he’d like to play on Chimera. He came up to Yorkshire and we ran through the material, but he didn’t actually bring his bass. We used a proper studio for the recordings, but Mick was very talented.”
MR: Around that time you were invited to produce the Gary Numan album Warriors. Your relationship started well, but went downhill at some point. Why do you think it didn’t work out creatively?
BN: “I got the impression that Gary didn’t want to move from a safe place. His record company had contacted me and said that, whilst he was one of the early synthpop artists, the newer ones were moving ahead and doing something different. They felt he needed to push the envelope a little.
“I tried to get him to do certain things, but found it really hard going because he wanted to do stuff the way he’d always done it, which I can understand after you’ve been working in a certain mode. Anyway, engineer Nick Smith and I mixed the album, but I got a call from him about a week later saying he’d quit because Gary had gone in and remixed it.
“I managed to get hold of a copy of the remixes and it just wasn’t what I wanted to have my name put to, so I took it off the album before it came out. It was all a bit silly and sad really, but he’s actually been good enough to say he was young and naive and should have given me more space. I did some EBow guitar on the album, which hopefully stands up, but I haven’t heard it for years.”
MR: A happier collaboration unfolded in 1986 when you worked on David Sylvian’s Gone to Earth LP. We’re guessing Sylvian gave you a lot more latitude to interpret his material?
BN: “From what I remember during the sessions, the songs weren’t finished. In fact, there was no vocal at all and the tracks had ghost-shaped chords so it was literally let’s do six takes and improvise - then David would sort through all the takes, edit bits together and build a song around them. It was quite open and free - playing whatever came into my mind.
“At that time, I was into a lot of esoteric philosophical stuff, and he was very hungry to learn about that. I gave him a list of obscure books, which he sent his girlfriend out to buy from Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street. I also introduced him to the music of Jon Hassell and they ended up working together.”
MR: You returned to work with Sylvian when the band Japan reformed as Rain Tree Crow. Was that one of your more gratifying projects?
BN: “It was an interesting project but slightly fraught because they didn’t stay a band and David and Steve Jansen fell out after that. It had a sad side to it because of the tensions within the band, but I remember doing sessions at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Studios and gave him a box set of ambient pieces I’d done.
“Pete got in touch later asking if I’d be interested in working with him on music for a stage production of The Iron Man, but I don’t know what happened.”
MR: When you do sessions for other people, do you make sure to reference whatever you’ve worked on?
BN: “I always found playing with other musicians nerve-wracking because it’s hard to know exactly what they want. Most times they probably wanted my guitar to sound like whatever it did on my records, but sometimes they wanted a certain style that I wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards.
“I can’t say that I always enjoyed playing on other people’s records because it’s always slightly stressful, but as long as they’re happy with it - and they usually seem to be - I won’t bother referencing it again. I tend to be like that with my own albums once I’ve released them too.”
MR: You made some albums with ambient master Harold Budd. Did you specifically seek him out for collaboration?
BN: “When I was working on the Red Noise album in the late ’70s, we were recording at one of Richard Branson’s studios in Shepherd’s Bush and I decided to go into the West End and browse some of the more avant-garde racks at the record store. It was there that I pulled out a Harold Budd album called The Pavilion of Dreams. I bought it on spec because the track titles were speaking to me in some way and it was just stunningly beautiful.
“Later, I did a track called the Shadow Garden on a cassette release for a Belgian label called Les Disques du Crépuscule and Harold had a track on that album. That’s how Harold heard my music and he later asked my friend for an introduction while he was working with Brian Eno.
“He came up to Yorkshire and we hit it off straight away and became great friends. Even though he lived in LA, Harold came over to watch me play live in 2020 at the Clothworkers Hall in Leeds and we did three numbers on stage.”
MR: What do you remember about working with Harold as a session player?
BN: “We recorded By the Dawn’s Early Light in Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio and that was a fabulous experience. Harold had written out parts for everybody to play. BJ Cole was on pedal steel and there was a viola player, a harpist, Harold and myself, but I was a bit worried about this.
“I said, ‘You do remember, Harold? I can’t really play scored parts’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll play the piece, I’ll give you the nod when I want you to come in and you just play whatever you want for as long as you want.’ It was so easy to do and all the musicians were looking at me thinking, you lucky so and so, we’ve got to follow this score’.”
MR: You called your latest project, Guitars of Tomorrow, “heavily layered futuristic guitar instrumentals with a historical twist”. In what way is it futuristic, and what historical period are you nodding to?
BN: “The idea behind Guitars of Tomorrow started when I was thinking about what sort of guitar playing would be acceptable in, say, 20 or 30 years’ time. I almost called it Guitars of Tomorrow - Echoes of the Past because it sort of harks back to The Shadows, The Ventures, Duane Eddy, and even Wes Montgomery’s jazz stuff. It’s about trying to pull together all those different elements from the guitar’s past and possible future.”
MR: Over a period of around three years, you recorded something like 200 tracks and apportioned them to different albums. Is Magical Thinking the first of those?
BN: “The idea is that there’s going to be a series of albums, all subtitled Guitars of Tomorrow, but each one will have an individual title. Magical Thinking has just been released, and the second, Art of Light, is more contemplative and abstract.
“The third will be called Elsewhere, but it’s been hard going through all the tracks and deciding how to put them in the right running order. The process is very old school, but I do like to think of an album as a journey with variations in tempo and key. The tracks have to relate or flow somehow, but it takes time to come up with the right combinations.”
MR: Are you still working with hardware to process guitars, synths and other instruments?
BN: “When digital recording started, I got a Mackie D8B digital mixing desk and 24-track hard drive recorder, which worked fine because it was a fader-based system that I was used to with individual channels that could be manipulated by hands rather than a mouse. It eventually broke down, so I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and go down the software route.
“I eventually got a Mac mini with Cubase and a Mackie control surface with eight faders so that I could still have that sense of being able to ride a fader, which is totally different from messing about on-screen.”
MR: In terms of guitar improvisation, how do you decide when the playing ends and the editing begins?
BN: “There are two ways that I start a piece. One is using a drum or percussion sequence of some kind and playing guitar or keyboard chords against it; another will be starting with a keyboard pad sound and building on top of that. There’s not an awful lot of editing. I tend to play keyboards and guitar live and if there’s a mistake I’ll play it again rather than copying and pasting.
“I’ve got a Yamaha Motif 88 and a DX7 somewhere in my storeroom. I keep getting tempted to get myself another keyboard because I’ve exhausted all the sounds on the Yamahas, but I work in a very small space full of guitar amps with shelves full of science fiction toys, antiques and stuff. The house is more like a museum now. It’s terrible. My wife keeps asking me to throw stuff out, but I won’t! [laughs]”
MR: Do you lean towards using a chosen few guitars that you feel truly comfortable with?
BN: “I’ve got about 100 guitars and I’m actually going through a process at the moment of documenting them. I’ll typically try to get about eight out at a time and use them in the studio, but I’m nearly 78 now so lugging all these things around is getting to be a chore. I don’t use amps anymore and haven’t for a long time - when I play, I’ve got an Axe-Fx modeller and the POD Go effects processor going direct into the recording system.
“At the moment, I’ve got a 1962 reissue Gretsch White Falcon double-cutaway, a Fender Stratocaster, Les Paul Custom three-pickup and a couple of obscure things like a Musicvox. The Fenders, Gretsches and Gibsons are all great guitars, but I sometimes like to use something a bit quirky and obscure because it inspires different things. If something’s not so easy to play, that puts a different shape on what you actually do.”
MR: Does acquiring techniques make you a more creative player or do you have to unlearn certain habits in order to move forward?
BN: “I have arthritis in my hands, so I even find it hard to do an open D-shape chord. You work around your limitations, but when it comes to playing I’ve always said to people ‘If you’re thinking, you’re not really playing’.
“You should almost approach it like a child with building blocks and just let it happen. Once you’ve put the time in to understand how a guitar works and are reasonably competent, play and lean back on your instincts because they’ll usually serve you well.”
Bill Nelson’s Magical Thinking: Guitars of Tomorrow Volume One is out now on Sonoluxe. For more information, click here.