Bill Nelson: Trial By Intimacy

Navel-Gazers #81 is an interview with Bill Nelson who is going to talk to us about the Trial By Intimacy series, released in 1985. I often prepare for these discussions by perusing the artist’s previous interviews. What I uncovered on this occasion was a wealth of discussion on topics such as record deals, lineup changes, transatlantic tours and so on from the rock press, who are primarily concerned with Bill’s mid-70s band Be Bop Deluxe. But what we encounter on ’Trial By Intimacy’ - originally a series of four releases on Bill’s own label Cocteau Records - is the work of an artist who by that point was pursuing more personal, contemplative forms of expression within the realm of his home studio. The album art across the series, all paper collage and oil crayons, is a series in and of itself: conceived, signed and dated by Bill, it’s the mnemonic bridge whereby these abstract sounds have managed to secure a permanent foothold in my imagination. Proudly described as “unpolished” and as a “sketchbook”, ‘Trial By Intimacy’s 83 tracks are like miniature impressions of songs, each seeming to explore some momentary idea while subjecting electronic instrumentation - typical of his music at the time - to various forms of light-handed studio play. This record amounts to no less than a quadruple slice of Navel-Gazers catnip! Let’s chat about it with the great Bill Nelson.

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers!

Firstly just to situate things chronologically, this music appears to have been conceived somewhere around the tail end of your string of albums for Mercury (Love That Whirls, Chimera). Was this music being made concurrently to those, a bit after, or what?

Bill Nelson: Well, I’m not sure if my memory’s that specific! But I think it would be probably after the Mercury stuff. It was released on my own label, and recorded in my home studio.

AC: Do you think of it as quite different to that stuff?

Bill Nelson: In some ways. There are elements on it, if I remember rightly, which are more accessible and some that are a little more obscure. But it’s a long time since I’ve listened.

AC: I’ve seen you mention a few times that you don’t typically listen back to your own music.

Bill Nelson: Not even the latest things! Once they’re released, I tend to forget them and work on the next project. People think it’s very strange that I don’t have a lot of interest once they’re released.

AC: I had another artist say that. It made quite an impression on me - not everyone's like that. 

I’ve read a few interviews where you articulate your “furniture music” perspective on recording, as though you’re decorating an empty room: choosing the carpet, the tables and chairs, what goes on the wall… I’d like to imagine how this applies to ‘Trial By Intimacy’, which you’ve described as a series of unpolished sketches. 

Bill Nelson: Well the album grew out of all kinds of personal stuff that was going on at the time. It’s very similar in some ways to an album called Demonstrations Of Affection which was about a breakdown of my relationship with my then-wife. But this album ‘Trial By Intimacy’ came before that.

Starting to work on the pieces would be a process of literally just putting something down - it doesn’t matter what, doesn’t matter if it’s absolutely perfect or not. For instance, it could start with programming a drum machine and laying down five minutes worth of percussion, and then trying to put some kind of harmonic context in, some keyboard pads for example… and then adding in smaller details and then perhaps a vocal or maybe a top-line guitar or something.

Then, I’d take away certain elements that I’d put in. For instance maybe the keyboard parts worked at the first stage with the drum machine, but by the time some other things get added, I might think that’s not necessarily the right kind of sound, I’ll take that away and put something different in.

The whole thing’s a process of moving stuff around until suddenly you realise what you’re getting at. It’s almost like the song writes itself, and then tells you at a certain point what it is about, or how it should end up.

It’s like being a blind man with a white stick, tapping your way around a room and finding out where things are and getting used to it.

AC: So how do these rooms look to you? Across the collection I counted 83 pieces I think. Do you think of them as little rooms like that? Do you often have that image in your mind?

Bill Nelson: Yeah - I think if I’m not wrong, that album has fairly short pieces. Some of them are almost like miniatures. You could say that they’re kind of like little boxes or little rooms that ideas are poured into. It’s all very spontaneous, there’s often not a lot of premeditation. It starts to make sense late on in the process, once you start to see how things are fitting together, once you see what’s needed to finish that shape.

I could make a kind of art equivalent, in that it’s like a sculpture with a big piece of stone, and it just chips away. Eventually, the form within the stone will start to reveal itself, and then you have that purpose: you know what it is and what you have to do to complete it. To start with, you’re just knocking away at the stone and seeing what emerges.

AC: Something presents itself to you.

Bill Nelson: Yes. And I think the trick is really to recognise when it is emerging, that thing, whatever it might be. Knowing: that needs to stay now, at that stage, and then I do this or that to it because that’s what going to perfect it, or bring it to fruition. …rather than keep knocking away until you’ve got nothing left but a big pile of dust!

AC: These records are described as ‘instrumental’ but along the way, we encounter so much language. Besides the vocal samples - which maybe we’ll touch on later - there are 83 track titles to contend with here, and a lot of your track titles are named after other works of art, which makes them fun to research. I picked out a few examples…

Les Amoureux is a painting by Marc Chagall.

Meshes Of The Afternoon is a film by Maya Deren.

Zanoni is an occult fiction by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

And several others: The Golden Bough, The Celestial Bridegroom, and so on.

Could you describe your selection process for these kinds of titles?

Bill Nelson: Yes. Well in some way, the titles appeal to me in that there’s some resonance with something in my own life. At that point in time it was prior to my marriage breakup, and I’d actually fallen in love with a Japanese girl. ‘Les Amoreaux’ for instance was sparked by that relationship.

I was an art student in the 60s, so I’ve always been aware of different artists’ work, especially Jean Cocteau. There are things you come across, and I jot them down in a notebook thinking that might work with something later on. When that feeling is right when music emerges, that title will pop into mind and that’s the title I’ll give to the piece.

AC: The main title itself as well, “Book Of Splendours”… is a reference to Kabbalah I guess?

Bill Nelson: Yes. At that time I was I was pretty into esoteric philosophies. I was a member of a Rosicrucian group, later a member of a French Martinist group, so I was building up a huge library of esoteric books and manuscripts and things. …western magical tradition as well. I had a kind of temple in the attic of the house I was living in. That was a big thing for me at that point in time, not so much now but something I was pretty heavily involved with.

Inevitably, it bled into the approach that I took to the music.

AC: 'Zanoni' jumped out at me musically as well, as it’s one of the few pieces which is in a minor key.

It jumps out because the way that the series is framed in terms of the titles and visuals seems somewhat dark compared to your other work. I’ve even come across listeners who describe these as “the dark albums”. But then the music itself is actually quite peaceful, uplifting even.

Bill Nelson: It certainly wasn’t meant to be a dark album! The drawing I did for the cover probably gives that impression. The pieces are meant to be joyous in a sense. Generally my music does lean more towards the positive side, rather than a down-in-the-dumps negative thing.

AC: Absolutely. I think pretty consistently.

But those visuals really stand out in your catalogue. Do you remember working on the collages and the other artwork for the inserts?

Bill Nelson: I do. I was searching through old magazines, cutting things out that might go together. And they were actually physically cut out and glued down onto a sheet of black paper. For instance the woman holding a cross with a clock head and wings, those were all separate elements cut out from say, four different magazines and combined in that way.

I remember doing those on the floor of my study, with all the pieces gathered together, and then putting them in different combinations, seeing what worked and gluing them down.

The front cover, that was an oil crayon, again done on black paper with white lines. I’ve done that kind of work a lot in the past, not always finding its way to album sleeves but just for the fun of doing it.

AC: Yeah the music probably caught my eye, before it caught my ears! I guess, as I’m a collage artist too…

Bill Nelson: Oh, I see! Yes.

AC: Yes and that led me to the music.

Regarding the vocal samples, one I really like is on a piece called Sleeplessness from Chamber Of Dreams. There’s a guy saying: “I believe that all my imaginative work is composed during deep sleep”. Any memory of what that is?

Bill Nelson: If I remember rightly, it was an old television advert from either the late 50s or early 60s. And it was an advert for something like Horlicks or Ovaltine, one of those malted milk drinks that you drunk at bedtime.

The guy speaking - I forget his name, he was an author - he was advertising this product and he was saying that sleep is essential to creativity and you need to get a good night’s sleep, so drink this and you’ll be fine!

AC: Ha!

Bill Nelson: Haha. So, I just took the bits that seemed relevant to the piece, and left the advertising side of it out.

AC: It also reminded me of something else I wanted to ask you. I read a previous interview where you described how we all exist in the waking world and the sleeping world.

Bill Nelson: Well, when you consider that virtually half our life is spent sleeping or dreaming… dreams have always been something that fascinated me - the unconscious mind and the way that it expresses itself through dreams, and the psychic connections if you like, which it can have with the waking world.

It’s all part of one ribbon of life, not really a separate part. It’s just a facet of being alive and being a human being, that we exist in different states at different times.

Whether we’re dealing with everyday domestic duties, or whether we’re pondering the meaning of life, or whether we’re sleeping and dreaming about some bizarre surreal situation which seems totally believable and real when it’s happening to you, when you’re in that dream, no matter how absurd, it seems to have a validity and a solidness.

It’s only when you wake up - if you can remember what you’ve dreamt about - that you think: well that was absurd, what was that about?

It’s something that’s really impossible to pin down and put into words. In a sense it’s a spiritual thing, it’s nebulous. And yet it’s sort of influential and tangible in terms of the person that you appear to be to other people.

AC: I wonder how that relates to the arts… I guess as an artist you’re straddling both states because you’re there in the real world, constructing something with your hands or whatever, while also exercising your imagination.

Bill Nelson: Yes. Imagination is a powerful tool.

I’ve been watching this series - this is slightly off course - it’s a kind of comic book series. In the 60s there was a DC comic called The Doom Patrol, and this new version, it’s absolutely absurd, funny, strange… and they’ve thrown tons of money at it. It’s really well-made, well-photographed, but so ridiculous. It pleases me that someone bankrolled the wild imagination of whoever came up with that!

I like that idea, of the imagination being given a chance, to flourish in the real world.

AC: I’ve never heard of that series but I’ll be looking that up probably as soon as we get off the phone!

There’s something you mention in passing when describing this collection on your website. Apparently there was a period when you were sending cassettes of this music to your now-wife Emiko in Tokyo, prior to its release. That’s an interesting anecdote, could you possibly elaborate on that?

Bill Nelson: In 1984, that’s when I first fell in love with Emiko. She was married originally to Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra. They’d split up, and my marriage wasn’t great. She briefly came to England and I spent a lot of time with her. Then she went back to Tokyo and I was stuck in England.

A lot of the music that’s on that album was made for her. I sent a cassette where some of the tracks were related to the relationship we had.

We never saw each other for 9 years after that, Then, I went back to Japan to play some concerts with Harold Budd, who was a dear friend of mine. Emi came to the concert in Tokyo which I did with Harold, and of course the whole thing opened up again. I thought I’d managed to put it all behind me - I had two young children at the time, and I thought I couldn’t abandon them.

Harold said to me one day: this is now a rehearsal, you’ve got to decide if this is where you’re going to be happiest. I thought about it, and that was it: that signalled the end of the marriage and the start of the relationship with Emiko. We’ve been together now, married 31 years and we were together 3 or 4 years before that.

AC: Was there ever a period when you thought the music would just be for her, or did you always know you would put it out into the world as well?

Bill Nelson: I wanted to release it. I did think it was something that should be heard more widely.

AC: Right. Well she got to hear it first so she was lucky.

Bill Nelson: Yes she did.

AC: On Pavilions Of The Heart And Soul, towards the middle there’s a series of short pieces with an almost-baroque sound to them which is quite different to the other music. What’s the story behind these?

Bill Nelson: I’d have to try and remember!

At the time I had a Yamaha CS70 synthesiser. It had no presets on it, you had to build the sounds using the oscillators and so on. Everything on that album is done using the Yamaha and a couple of cheap Casio synths. Perhaps I was messing around with the different settings and things.

AC: Let me run another one by you. Something dawned on me during a track called The Boy Pilots Of Bangkok. The synthesiser is running through the notes so fast that it sounds like it couldn’t possibly have been played live, by a person. I’m clueless about electronics: were you programming this music into whatever instrumentation you had at the time?

Bill Nelson: Well that sounds like it would be a thing called a Casio VL-Tone. It was one of the first small, almost pocket-synthesisers. I bought it in New York, in the 70s or the early 80s. It’s got keys which you can put notes in individually like a sequence. And then there are two keys on the top which run the sequence backwards or forwards.

Basically each tap of these switches on the top plays one of the notes you’ve put into the sequence. Then you press the second button for the second note, then press the first one and the third note is playing, and so on. So once you’ve put a string of notes into its memory, you can go through by literally just tapping very fast with the fingers of your right hand.

It’s quite a toy synth sound rather than a big synth sound. So that would be that, because I’ve used it quite a few times, where tapping along at that speed allows this really fast stream of notes.

AC: Yeah come to think of it, I’m hearing this in a lot of your music from that time.

Obviously in the 2020’s, very straightforward to do something like that but in the 80’s we have more of a story behind it.

Bill Nelson: Well with that album, generally the recording at that time would be on a 4- or maybe at most an 8-track reel-to-reel tape machine, so things like the voice samples were actually recorded on a separate piece of tape on a 2-track Revox, and then edited by cutting - literally with razorblades - and then running that tape at the right point into the multitrack machine.

So there was a lot of physical manipulation rather than digital.

AC: Yeah a lot of mechanics!

I’m told you have a few new albums in the pipeline which, when wouldn’t you?? Tell us what you’re currently working on and any new or recent work we should check out.

Bill Nelson: For the last two years I’ve been working on a really epic project, which will end up as a multi-volume set. The subtitle is “Guitars Of Tomorrow”, then each album has its own main title. I’ve just mastered the first three volumes and I’m working on artwork for them now. The first one’s called “Magical Thinking” (Guitars Of Tomorrow Volume 1), then Volume 2 “The Art Of Light” and Volume 3 “Elsewhere”.

I still have many, many tracks for this project. Eventually if I survive long enough, they’ll all come out! We’re hoping to get the first volume out in early autumn. That’s purely instrumental, electric guitars with treatments, exploring non-linear kind of tunes.

One other thing that I’m doing later this month - I did an album with a Japanese artist called Yumiko Morioka, with the name Culturemix. That was a good few years ago. She’s coming to England to do a concert at the Elgar Rooms in the Royal Albert Hall, and then she’s coming up here - she’s a friend of mine and of my wife - and we’re going to record a couple of tracks together in my home studio.

AC: Sounds wonderful.

…you’re just tireless aren’t you? It doesn’t seem like you’ve stopped for one second all the way since 1970.

Bill Nelson: Well, it’s what I do! I used to say: a daffodil doesn’t have to think hard to be yellow.

But it gets harder. I’m 78 this year, so I have various health issues including eyesight loss. Operating the recording equipment is now a bit of a heavy task because I can’t see properly. At times I make mistakes and I have to go back and do it all again. But I’m determined that I will keep going as long as humanly possible.

AC: That’s inspiring!

It’s been great not only to talk to you today, but I also did so much listening in preparation for this discussion. It was good to listen more carefully to some of your music over the past few days. It always gets me thinking and gives me ideas.

Bill Nelson: Oh thank you! That’s kind.

AC: Of course, thank you for talking to me.

Bill can be found at https://www.billnelson.com/.