AXE ATTACK
In 1974, a group of straggly haired art rockers called Be-Bop Deluxe prepared to record their debut record, Axe Victim. Now, five decades on, it’s been expanded and remastered. Prog catches up with Bill Nelson to chat about what he considers to be the band’s “beginner’s album”.
Axe Victim: Chris Roberts Images: Bill Nelson
Be-Bop Deluxe, L-R: Nicholas Chatterton Dew, Ian Parkin, Bill Nelson, Rob Bryan.
Axe Victim, Be-Bop Deluxe’s 1974 debut, is an album populated by ‘rock’n’roll supermen’ and ‘tongue teasers, young deceivers, night creatures on your heels so high’. The band ‘hoped you’d lend an ear’ but found that ‘you hoped we’d dress like tarts.’ Nonetheless, our heroes refused to be discouraged: ‘like voices on the winds, we hit the road to Hull’.
It was just a minute too late to cash in on glam, which had moved on, but thrives now in a fascinating time warp somewhere between flash and trash, with its then young, confident and ambitious chief creator’s gifts raising even its misfires into a dimension touched by magic. Its lyrics catch the temperature of the era in the UK as colourfully as any loftier Bowie/Roxy album, while the guitar player is on all kinds of fire.
“THE FIRST THREE BE-BOP ALBUMS WERE ALL MEANT TO HAVE NAMES RELATED TO THE GUITAR.”
“Even after all these years,” says Bill Nelson modestly, “I don’t rate myself very much as a guitarist. I never can get to where I’d like to be with it. But that’s part of the journey - it’s better than arriving. You have to accept that you’ll always have goals beyond what you can achieve.”
Nelson’s opinion of his guitar skills will come as something of a shock to any readers who have enjoyed his fluid, inventive playing over half a century of diverse music which has taken in art rock, prog, new wave, ambient electronica and most points between and outside such margins. His albums with Be-Bop Deluxe, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, Orchestra Arcana and countless solo records, plus his production work for everyone from the Skids to Roger Eno - not to mention collaborations with David Sylvian, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Cabaret Voltaire, John Cooper Clarke and Harold Budd - have confirmed him as one of the most versatile, astute and often counter-intuitive musicians of his generation.