Mystery synth-pop with heavy Bill Nelson involvement
Label: Cocteau
Year of Release: 1981
What a peculiar release. Bill Nelson is something of a cult figure in Britain, producing major progressive/ art-rock work with Be Bop Deluxe and later Bill Nelson's Red Noise. Hailed by artists as diverse as David Sylvian, Andy Partridge and Gary Numan, Nelson arguably hasn't really had the full credit he's been due for influencing the direction of modern pop and rock. Seldom ever on the radio, and generally ignored by the kinds of major magazines who run retrospectives on classic rock artists, he's one of those seventies artists whose run of success was too modest to place him in the mainstream, and too big to cause anyone to trumpet his virtues as a "lost artist".
By 1980, he had run into a dispute with Harvest Records about his Red Noise project, and subsequently made arrangements with them to begin a new career on his own Cocteau Records label. Far from using it as a vanity press for his own output, Nelson also released a number of records by other artists. While some of these will be familiar to most readers, and Nelson was astute enough to release early records by A Flock Of Seagulls and Fiat Lux, it was also home to some very strange records like this one.
