Milestones

Be-Bop Deluxe

Name: Be-Bop Deluxe – Sunburst Finish
Item: Sunburst Finish
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Sunburst Finish

1976 (Harvest)

art-rock, glam-rock

by Federico Romagnoli

Tomoyasu Hotei is probably the most celebrated Japanese guitarist. First as a member of Boøwy, the band that upended the local scene during the Eighties, then at the helm of Complex, who tried to carry on that legacy, and finally as a solo artist, always riding high.

Asked about who his favourite colleagues are, he has repeatedly pointed to Bill Nelson as his guiding star. Curious, considering that Nelson, in the West, is nowadays never mentioned among the greatest guitarists in the pop-rock universe. Yet one of the leading minds of Japanese music has cited his style as the single biggest influence on his own work.

Hotei isn't alone in this view. Other giants of Japanese music, from Yellow Magic Orchestra to soundtrack composer Joe Hisaishi, have called on him to enrich their own albums.

Also outside the Anglophone cultural empire, Vyacheslav Butusov of the legendary Nautilus Pompilius brought in Nelson in 1997 to produce the album “Yablokitay”. Nelson thus found himself in the producer's chair for one of the best-selling Russian records of the era, while back in his native Britain, no one outside a small circle of David Sylvian remembered his name any longer.

Nemo propheta in patria, one might say — except that for a while, starting in 1976, he almost seemed to have made it. In February of that year, “Sunburst Finish”, the third album by his band Be-Bop Deluxe, reached number 17 on the British chart. The following year, the band's live album, “Live In The Air Age”, made the top 10, as would his first solo album, “Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam”, in 1981. Unfortunately, from 1984 onward, any trace of him would vanish from the charts, a casualty of an increasingly uncompromising attitude and an unstoppable flood of releases. Practically impossible to keep pace with, given periods in which he averaged five albums a year.

For Nelson, “Sunburst Finish” marks the moment the ice broke. For some time, several industry insiders, John Peel foremost among them, had been pointing to him as one of the future guiding lights of the British scene. The record's modest success, helped along by the catchy single “Ships In The Night”, seemed to herald a rise to the upper echelons of English art rock, alongside Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel and those few other chosen ones capable of injecting, into the theatrics and orchestrations of glam rockthe convoluted structures of progressive rock.

Rounding out the lineup were drummer Simon Fox, New Zealand bassist Charlie Tumahai and newcomer Andy Clark, a virtuoso keyboardist who fleshes out the guitar textures in formidable fashion.

To assist him with production, Nelson brought in John Leckie, a young sound engineer who had never helmed a session on his own. Before long he would become one of the greatest producers in British rock (among his many clients Xtc, Magazine, Simple Minds, Felt, Fall, Verve, Ride, Radiohead e Kula Shaker).

Despite continuing to write all the material by himself, Nelson was probably affected by the new setup that had formed around him, and decided to release his poppiest record yet. The guitars keep zigzagging through bizarre tracks full of tempo changes, but these digressions go beyond mere virtuosity, often taking care to slip in refrain catchy hooks that never betray the song form. A compromise perhaps, but then again the absence of limits is one of the worst constraints, especially in art.

The opening track, "Fair Exchange", is a hard rock number with a verse shaped like a ballad and an accelerated chorus, punctuated by piano and exotic percussion, expanded with martial interludes, boogie and reggae breakdowns, filtered guitar solos and even a small synthesizer fanfare. All in under five minutes. Nelson's voice recalls that of Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, both in its polished timbre and its theatrical expressiveness.

As mentioned, the best-known song in the tracklist is "Ships In The Night", an irresistible piece of art rock, with pulsing keyboards that seem to anticipate the Buggles and a garnish of towering guitars. The limping groove draws as much from reggae as from tango, while the solos are entrusted to Clark's electric piano and the saxophone of guest Ian Nelson, younger brother of frontman.

The album continues with mirror games and a steady stream of surprises, well exemplified by the contrast between the ballad "Crying To The Sky", awash with liquid keyboards and passionate guitar solos, and the surge of "Sleep That Burns", a space rock number with a marching rhythm, sci-fi keyboards, complex drum syncopations, tango interludes, and cabaret touches worthy of Jaques Brel (via Scott Walker e David Bowie?).

The shifts don't only affect the atmosphere, but also the structures: consider "Beauty Secrets" - classically styled rock, exquisite yet resting solely on piano, acoustic rhythm guitar and electric flourishes - and the following "Life In The Air-Age", which has a roughly similar arrangement but comes across as decidedly less linear, given the long instrumental intro, the constant interjections of the lead guitar, the choral finale with phasereffect, and the funk drum coda.

The lyrics are something of an exception to the formula Nelson developed. They're not remotely aristocratic like Harley's, Bowie o Ferry, but instead seem to descend from the boogie wing of glam rock, the one that answers to Marc Bolan, but trim it down even further by cutting out any slang. While all hell breaks loose around him, Nelson's voice sings sentimental lyrics that are certainly pleasant (in “Like An Old Blues” he compares the end of a relationship to old blues songs fallen into obscurity), but sometimes so simple they brush against the zero degree of pop culture (“Ships In The Night” is yet another variation on how meaningless the world would be without love). The result is curious and disorienting.

The closing track, “Blazing Apostles”, is the most ambitious from this point of view, poking fun at organized religion and especially televangelists, a figure particularly widespread in English-speaking countries (“Blazing apostles, guardians of light, the phone number's on the wall, if you need a devil to fight, why don't you call us?”).

Be-Bop Deluxe didn't spawn a following among their peers, since glam was dying out (by 1976 even those who had once championed it were moving away from it), but their echo would reach more than one band of the next musical generation, that of new wave in particular (their traces are evident in the aforementioned Buggles, but also in the more polished tracks of Magazine and in the early Japan). An echo that would later spread east of the English-speaking world, as mentioned at the outset.

Bill Nelson is still active today, releasing albums for the benefit of his small but devoted fanbase, without ever disowning his past. In 2011, for instance, he put out a DVD credited jointly to the band Gentlemen Rocketeers, on which he revisited the historic Be-Bop Deluxe catalogue live, with performance impeccable, showing him still in fine form.

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14/10/2018

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition