The prolific Bill Nelson has taken a brief pause from his solo work to turn his attention towards a project of a different kind. Orchestra Futura was a live improv trio that also included Theo Travis and Dave Sturt. Although they never released any studio recordings, a selection of material has just been collated and issued as Live At Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall.
Mark Twain’s advice about finding a job you enjoy doing and not having to work a day in your life may be an old chestnut, but it certainly applies to Bill Nelson. In the years since the respective successes of Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise during the 1970s, the Yorkshire-born-and-based guitarist may have been outside the mainstream spotlight, but his home studio has been a hive of constant activity.
It’s where he works on music, writing, painting, drawing, multimedia installations, soundtracks, and wherever else his artistic interests might lead him. When Prog caught up with the polymath, he readily admitted he prefers the studio to the stage as a working environment. “A more apt way to express it would be to say that I’m more of a painter than an actor, more at home in the atelier than the auditorium.”
Having amassed a discography that runs to more than 120 releases since the 1980s, that already impressive list just got longer following the release of Live At Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall by Bill Nelson’s Orchestra Futura, featuring Nelson alongside Gong bassist Dave Sturt and Soft Machine’s Theo Travis on flutes and saxes. Although the trio have worked together on numerous occasions, this album marks their recording debut.
Nelson met Travis in 2005 when they were both part of an impressive cast of performers that included Steve Jansen, ex-Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie, Jah Wobble and others at Harold Budd’s final concert in Brighton. “I got to know Theo a little bit more, and he told me about Cipher, the duo he had with Dave Sturt,” Nelson says.
“He invited me to see them at what’s now called the National Science And Media Museum in Bradford, where they were performing live music to classic silent movies such as The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. I saw them again at Leeds’ Hyde Park Picture House and I thought, ‘Let’s try and see if we could do something together at one of my events.’”
The events he refers to began life as a fan-organised celebration in Nelson’s honour in 2001. He admits he was initially dubious about attending. “But I went and then actually enjoyed it,” he says. With strong demand for additional celebrations, he took an active role in planning the Nelsonica events. “We ended up having exhibitions of stuff, displays of all my guitars, and I made videos especially for some of the music I played there.”
Those events became must-attend diary highlights for Nelson’s fervent fanbase. “It was quite an involved thing and took a lot of setting up each time,” he remembers. This, then, was the context for the live appearances of what became known as Orchestra Futura, whose brief was to play wholly improvised music with only the barest framework, such as some pre-prepared rhythmic ideas or a soundscape backdrop.
For Sturt, it was something of a ‘pinch-me’ moment being onstage with Nelson. “I’d always been a fan right back to my first band, who used to play Be-Bop Deluxe material,” he says. “The first gig I ever played was doing a Bill Nelson track! So he’s always been a major part of my musical life.”
Travis also expresses his admiration for Nelson. “Hats off to Bill for wanting to do something that was pretty leftfield,” he says. “The nature of improvisation is that you don’t know what’s going to happen, so he clearly trusted us, and he enjoyed the freedom of these sets. You wouldn’t always think that hardcore Bill Nelson audiences would necessarily want some free improvising trio with a load of saxophones going on – but it actually went down very well.”
Nelson’s affinity with the saxophone runs deep. His late brother Ian played sax on Be-Bop Deluxe’s Ships In The Night and was also a close collaborator in Red Noise, as well as later ventures such as the Lost Satellites.
“My dad played saxophone and clarinet and tried to teach me when I was eight,” Nelson says. “I don’t know if it was the wrong time to try, but I just couldn’t get my head around it. So I was always impressed by saxophone players, and particularly jazz players.
Standing up in front of an audience and not really knowing how it’s going to go is scary
Theo Travis
“So I guess there’s an element of that in Theo’s playing that draws me in. But it’s also the things that he does with the flute, such as live looping and delays, that are more in my sort of area in the thing I do with guitar. That aspect made a lot of sense as well. Theo’s a brilliant player, no doubt about it.”
He’s is also quick to praise Sturt’s contributions to Orchestra Futura’s sound. “He’s got great technical ability and he’s very good at setting up loops. His bass-playing is very appropriate; spare when he needs to be, and he can bring it forward into a melodic area as well. It was fantastic – a joy to work with them.”
He notes that playing with Travis and Sturt required a shift in approach: “I try to play less and not force things; not kick it along too much in one direction or another. You have to accommodate others, listen carefully and respond as needed. It’s different from working alone. I mean, I do everything on the solo albums myself. That’s a very deep, personal way of working, because you’re shaping every single aspect of it.
“In some ways, one of the nice things about doing the Orchestra Futura was that I didn’t feel any pressure to do anything. It was just nice to sit back and let things develop naturally. It’s difficult to explain completely, because it’s almost like something mystical’s going on. It’s that telepathic thing between people. The thing to do is not to really get hung up on it; not to worry about it. You don’t steer too much.”
Still, nobody is more surprised about the appearance of Live At Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall than Nelson himself. “The first I heard about it was when Dave told me, ‘I’ve got some mixes of those Orchestra Futura tracks.’” He readily admits he’d never listened to any of them himself. “I always thought of it as being something that happened and then was gone, because it’s purely improvised music.
There will be some die-hard people who don’t get the other stuff, and I can understand that. But for me, it’s a journey of exploration
Bill Nelson
“Part of me felt that’s how it should stay – that you witness it when you’re in the audience, it’s a one-off thing, it disappears and you’re left with just a vague memory of it. So putting it on to a permanent recording that people can access again and again was a bit weird for me.”
However, Travis and Sturt were passionate advocates of the music they’d created together, and Sturt took it upon himself to sift through performance recordings in between his commitments with Gong. He finalising a series of mixes for consideration, which were then honed down to the five tracks that appear on the album. Listening to them brought back the intensity of the original performances, he says.
“I love that situation where you really don’t know how it’s going to work out. Normally, you have every bar worked out pretty much with the band; but standing up in front of an audience and not really knowing how it’s going to go is scary. That sort of thing can improve when you’re doing it regularly within a trio or a band. But to do it with so little preparation and to be doing it with Bill Nelson, I’m feeling like, ‘I really don’t want to fuck up here!’ It’s real seat-of-the-pants stuff.”
Sturt recalls a moment during the performance of Pixels By Moonlight: “Suddenly I hear a harmonica, and I look round, and there’s Bill playing one. That was a bit of a shock as I had no idea that he even had one with him, never mind that he was going to be playing it!”
Nelson adds: “We got together in Fairview Studios near Hull to listen back to the tracks Dave had prepared on the big speakers. When that track came on, I was as surprised and startled as anybody else! I said, ‘Who’s playing the harmonica?’ Dave said, ‘You are!’ I said, ‘I don’t remember playing that!’”
Having recently celebrated his 77th birthday, and with the ink barely dry on the cover of the Orchestra Futura album, Nelson is already well into his next project. “It’s almost embarrassing how much stuff I’ve done, but I’ve got four albums still from between 2016 and 2020 to release. The first one’s going to be called Magical Thinking with the subtitle Guitars Of Tomorrow, Volume One.
“I’ve got almost 200 tracks done. They’re all instrumental tracks exploring guitar textures and tonalities. Some are abstract, others are melodic, rockier and jazzier as I go through all the different things I’ve picked up over the years.”
While some fans want their musical heroes to stand still and keep making what amounts to the same record, Nelson acknowledges he’s been lucky to have such an accepting and supportive following. “I guess it all started from the Be-Bop Deluxe days. I picked up a lot of people who have stayed with me. But there have also been people who have come in at different points in the trajectory, such as with the solo stuff after that, and they seem to stay.
“There will, of course, be some die-hard 70s-era people who just don’t get the other stuff, and I can understand that. But for me, it’s a journey of exploration, and if I can get people to come on board and enjoy that journey with me, that’s great.”
Live at Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall is on sale now.
