Artist on artist: Simon Armitage on the ‘exceptional’ yet ‘overlooked’ Bill Nelson
The Poet Laureate (finally) shares his appreciation and admiration for the multi-talented musician Bill Nelson
It can be something of a cliche to describe someone as needing no introduction, but it’s undoubtedly apt when said in relation to Simon Armitage.
The poet, writer and playwright has published 25 collections of poetry – from his 1989 debut Zoom! to his latest work New Cemetery published in September – and authored 14 books, and five stage plays. The current Poet Laureate, Armitage has become familiar to millions through appearances on television and radio – including his BBC Radio 4 series, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed – and has been recognised with more honours and awards than we could possibly fit in this introduction.
As well as being a notable lover of words, Armitage – who joined us in October 2025 as part of our London Literature Festival – is also a huge fan of music and in 2008 formed the band The Scaremongers with friend Craig Smith. Since 2019 Armitage has been the lead ‘talker’ of ambient three-piece LYR (Land Yacht Regatta), which he established alongside singer-songwriter Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson. The only Poet Laureate to also DJ (presumably), Armitage’s own musical favourites include The Smiths, The Fall, Microdisney and Bill Nelson.
A fellow son of West Yorkshire, Bill Nelson is a singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer who first came to prominence with his 1973 solo album Northern Dream. Off the back of this debut record’s acclaim, Nelson formed the progressive rock band Be Bop Deluxe, who produced five studio albums and enjoyed much critical recognition in the mid 1970s. Eager to embrace the changing musical landscape, Nelson dissolved Be Bop Deluxe in 1978 to form the new wave band Red Noise.
With Red Noise’s second album tied up in industry red tape, Nelson went solo again, and beginning with 1981’s Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam, which reached number seven in the UK album charts, has recorded and produced a frankly bewildering number of studio albums – 122 at last count. Among his early solo albums was Sounding the Ritual Echo (Atmospheres for Dreaming) and a quartet of similarly ambient guitar-led electronic records that would later make up the boxset Trial by Intimacy (The Book of Splendours). It was these albums in particular that struck a chord with the then student Armitage, and, as he recounts in this conversation about the often ‘overlooked’ musician, continue to have an impact for him today.
I would have first heard Bill Nelson on the radio. Most likely on John Peel’s show, in the early 1970s, when his Northern Dream album was around. It was one of those albums that was coming through the walls; older people were playing it, brothers and cousins. He was one of those artists that spanned the period from the old rock and roll world, which was still happening as I was growing up, into the punk movement, and then into post-punk and new wave.
Though I was aware of Bill when I was growing up, I don’t think he was especially meaningful to me then. That changed when I went to study at Portsmouth Polytechnic. We had these extraordinary things called grants, where you went along to a little office in the polytechnic, and they gave you a cheque for more money than you’d ever seen in your life. And instead of thinking ‘oh here’s the rent’, ‘here’s food’, I just divided it by how many albums I could go and buy. It was 1981, so it was Joy Division, it was Talking Heads, and it was all that post-punk, new wave stuff that I’ve always loved and will carry on loving. And then there was Bill Nelson.
I found Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam in a record shop, a sort of knock-off emporium in Portsmouth. I’m not sure what it implied about its origins, but somebody had put a hole punch through the record’s sleeve. But I really liked his single ‘Do You Dream In Colour’, it got quite a lot of airplay at the time, and it had a sort of crackly, poppy electronic noise about it that was fairly new and that I found really exciting. So I bought the album, and I really love it, but inside there was, unbeknown to me, a bonus album called Sounding the Ritual Echo (Atmospheres for Dreaming).
I don’t think I’d come across the idea of ambient music before I listened to Sounding the Ritual Echo. There’s no singing on it, most of it is synthesizer and guitar and then there are kind of field recordings, archive, bits of radio and stuff like that. And I think the first time I listened to it I probably thought it was a bit weird and a bit strange. But then after a time I realised that I was playing it much more than Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam.
‘Sounding the Ritual Echo became something of a soundtrack for my last year of college… part of the ambiance of my room, along with the net curtains and the posters and probably a lot of joss sticks.’
Sounding the Ritual Echo became something of a soundtrack for my last year of college. It was one of five ambient guitar and electronic albums Bill released that happened to coincide with my time at Portsmouth in the early 1980s. And they became part of the ambiance of my room, along with the net curtains and the posters and probably a lot of joss sticks. I remember quite often my mates would come into my room as I was playing these albums and say things like ‘can we have something with some words in now?’.
I suppose, given what I went on to do, it was an odd choice for me, this music that didn’t have any words in it. But it served as my introduction to ambient and occasional and non-intrusive music; music which is still very, very powerful and poignant and moving. There are four more Bill Nelson albums from that period, alongside Sounding the Ritual Echo. There’s The Summer of God’s Piano, which has become something of a meme among my mates from college who’ll use it as a reference point for something that only I like and they don’t – ‘Is it a bit The Summer of God’s Piano?’. And there’s Chamber of Dreams (Music from the Invisibility Exhibition), A Catalogue of Obsessions and Pavilions of the Heart and Soul. They were later released as a box set, which I keep thinking I’ll buy even though it would be a massive indulgence because I’ve got all the albums anyway. But I know at some point I’m going to submit to my temptation.
I’ve been influenced by his use of language. Lavish and extravagant language that I was a little bit shy of using, or backed off from using, particularly at school, where it would have marked you out.
He has that unexpected and unapologetic exuberance and extravagance that I recognise in other Yorkshire musicians of the time. He’s from Wakefield, which I got to know quite early on. I was quite homesick in my first year at Portsmouth and so I think I subconsciously associated listening to his music as being back at home. And much like the music coming out of these other pretty gritty places such as Sheffield, with bands like The Human League and ABC, and my own town of Huddersfield, there was this feeling of contextually low expectations, but exorbitant ambitions. These were pretty difficult places to live in the late 1970s and 1980s with an idea that you would conform to the working class stereotypical norms. But in the titles of his albums and his tracks, here was someone really bucking that trend.
Through the punk era you got used to song titles that told you everything about a record. The sloganeering and the shoutiness of punk was there in the titles. But then you look at Bill’s ambient albums from his time on the Cocteau label and there are titles like ‘The Chinese Nightingale’, ‘The Difficulty of Being’ and ‘The Celestial Bridegroom’, ‘The Blazing Memory of Innuendo’ and ‘Into the Luminous Future’. I was hooked.
He seems to wear his learning very lightly. He’s someone who you feel is well read, but he’s not lording that over you. Yet through his music there are intimations of a classical understanding and an arts background, because as well as being a musician he’s a painter and a photographer; he’s an all round artist really.
I think he’s a good lyricist. He combines an air of learning with catchy phrases and the rhymes are pretty solid. If you listen to his album The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything or the mini album Chimera, you’ll hear really sound and provocative lyrics, and there’s a lot of eroticism in those tracks as well. And I do really like these works of his, but I’ve gravitated towards, or fallen into the gravity of, his more ambient albums because they seem to put me in a more poetic place and conjure a more poetic mood.
‘If there is any music that can put me under the spell or, or talk me round towards that mood [of writing poetry] it’s those ambient, abstract, experimental albums of Bill Nelson’.
Somebody once asked the poet Michael Longley where his poems came from. And in reply he said ‘I don’t know. If I knew where poems come from, I would go there’. I completely understand that; there’s no way that you’re fit to write poems every day. You’re just not in the mood. But if there is any music that can put me under that spell or, or talk me round towards that mood it’s those ambient, abstract, experimental albums of Bill’s.
I use the phrase experimental nervously, because in music it often means, unlistenable. I don’t want to hear people’s experiments. I don’t want to hear people’s experiments in poetry either, I want to see and hear the finished product. And there’s something very, very finished and stylized and stylish about Bill’s albums.
I still play those ambient albums as much as anything. I had thought that my interest in music from that period would eventually dwindle, but it never has. I think part of that is to do with my working practice. If I’m at home and I’m trying to write poems it’s no good putting something on with a catchy tune or words that I’ll start singing or will get into my head because that’s just going to disrupt the process. So at some level, that lasting connection with Bill is, for me, functional; it’s worked in a functional way.
I’ve never tried to convert anybody into being a Bill Nelson fan. In the same way that I’ve never tried to convert anybody into being a fan of The Fall, because I’ve played Fall albums in rooms with people and it’s sent them running. I think it’s different with Bill. I wouldn’t describe it as an acquired taste, just perhaps that people don’t always have the patience, or that they expect something different from music.
Am I a fan of Bill Nelson? I think it’s something different from that. It’s more personal. I’ve never seen him play, and I’ve never got off my arse to try and find a gig anywhere. Instead there’s something very internal about my appreciation of him. Internal in terms of personal and private, and also internal in terms of it being something that happens in my house. So, I’m probably not much use to him as an admirer. But I am definitely an admirer, and an advocate, and an acolyte, from a distance.
I’m very interested in beauty, and beauty that comes through harmony and melody, and there’s an awful lot of that in Bill Nelson’s ambient albums. None of the music is sharp or difficult or challenging, instead it’s all very enticing and compelling, and I think I’ve definitely taken some of those sensibilities into the music I make as part of LYR.
He is the most astonishing guitarist and producer. And I say that as a listener, I’m not one of these people who salivate over guitar licks and solos, I’m not a connoisseur of these things, I’m in no position to judge. But I’ve heard it said by other people, other musicians, that in his time he was recognised as a really brilliant and innovative guitarist.
‘It occurs to me that he often makes music for films that have never been filmed… he makes these exquisite and powerful music pieces, And if you think of his music in those terms then to me he’s right up there with Ennio Morricone and John Williams.’
To be a musician or in a band that makes sounds similar to Bill Nelson, you have to be an exceptional musician, and you have to have exceptional studio technique. And none of those things were ever going to come my way, because I didn’t play any instruments – all the bands I’ve been involved in have been quite conceptual and idealistic, and I was always the person making the words – so I’ve always admired Bill Nelson’s music as something that I could not do.
It occurs to me that he often makes music for films that have never been filmed. He’s such a great producer, and he makes these exquisite and powerful music pieces. And if you think of his music in those terms, as a film score, then to me he’s right up there with people like Ennio Morricone and John Williams.
There’s a track on his Sounding the Ritual Echoes album that I revisit often. It’s the last track on side two, it’s probably a minute and a half long. It’s a fragile, synthesized track called ‘Opium’ and I think for 99 people out of a hundred it would pass them by as something happening in the background. And though I don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe what’s going on there, it’s very dreamlike, very touching, very transformational. It feels like an invitation into a trance or into sleep, and I guess from its title it’s a reference to slipping into the equivalent of a narcotic trance. It’s a lovely little piece.
I’ve never really talked about Bill Nelson to anyone before. I don’t know why. I’m proud of liking him. A lot of my mates who I share a lot of the same musical tastes, co-ordinates and reference points with are aware of him, but I don’t really know anybody else who listens to these albums. I’m sure there’s a forum I could be on. But then part of my musical upbringing was that you always wanted to be the only person in the world who knew about that band. You wanted it to be secret, fugitive, alternative to the point of almost invisibility, and if they ever went on Top of the Pops, well that was that. So I guess I’m ok with this being something of a private passion.
I’ve toyed with the idea of getting in touch with him over the years. And I toyed with the idea of maybe trying to write spoken word pieces to go with these ambient, instrumentals. I suspect, or maybe I hope, that he’s quite tricky. If you read about him it’s a history of label fallouts and dismissals of bandmates and always wanting to do things his own way. He comes across as a solo artist, in every sense, and he’s able to do everything needed in the production of an album himself, from writing it to producing it and putting it out there.
I think he’s a maverick, he’s somebody who exists on the margins. I don’t know whether he enjoys that position or not, but he’s someone who’s been around for the whole period I’ve been listening to music, and is still making a lot of music now.
I may have met him once already, accidentally. I was at an event at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Parks’ former director Peter Murray had also invited Bill, so we may have been in the same room, but Peter didn’t tell me until afterwards. So I missed him, or I averted a ‘meeting your heroes’ moment. Although I don’t necessarily think of him as heroic, more as a pioneer. Maybe meeting him would have shattered the idea that he just spends every minute of every day in a recording studio in his basement making another three albums.
‘Part of my musical upbringing was that you always wanted to be the only person in the world who knew about that band. You wanted it to be secret, fugitive, alternative to the point of almost invisibility… so I guess I’m ok with this being something of a private passion.’
If I were to meet him now I’d like to know what he thinks is his best work. And whether he shares that idea with me. Or what he thinks of that series of ambient albums I’m so fond of. I think I’d also want to ask him something about fulfillment, and whether he feels he’s perhaps been neglected or overlooked. I certainly feel he’s been overlooked in terms of his talent, and particularly in his contribution to my musical landscape. But I wonder how he feels, looking back, about the work he’s made.
Have a listen to The Summer of God’s Piano. Then a lot of what I’m talking about might make a bit more sense.
Simon Armitage was speaking to Glen Wilson
Simon Armitage’s new collection New Cemetery is published by Faber
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