Whatever happened to Bill Nelson?

One of my favourite songs of the 1970s was Be Bop Deluxe's Ships In The Night from their interesting album Drastic Plastic. I was sure the Be Bop main man Bill Nelson would go on to be a major star. What happened? It wasn't the usual story, that the brief first flourish was the sum total of the artist's inspiration. In practice what he did was explore increasingly avant garde forms of music over a long but low profile career. Never mind, we've got a good album and a classic pop single, with its wonderfully wacky sax break - on a par with Jeff Beck's idiosyncratic guitar break in Hi Ho Silver Lining - to keep us warm. You can find the song on youtube, of course.

Be Bop Deluxe is far from the only band to fail to live up to its potential. I was sure Marillion would go on to world domination and be rather like Genesis, instead of just, as Wikipedia has it, "the most successful neo-progressive rock band of the 1980s." And, while the band continued without its erstwhile front man Fish, who realised they were taking loans from their record company in order to undertake ever bigger tours to enrich their manager (who got 20% of the gross) so said "me or the manager" (his bandmates chose the manager in a kind of all impoverishing band Brexit) surely they would still be earning big money if they'd had the stamina that some of the real old timers, like the Stones, have had despite palpable "differences" over musical and other matters (such as the size of Mick's "todger", according to Keith).

Talking of front men, one of my favourites is Kirk Brandon, who first came to attention with Theatre of Hate (though when I saw them supporting the Clash I thought I heard Kirk say "we're Theatre of Eight" with a dropped "h" and severe glottal stop the like of which my then very northern ears hadn't heard up to that point). Their first song was "Westworld" which I still love. I couldn't believe it wasn't a monster hit, though Kirk did get one, with his next band Spear of Destiny: the top 10 hit Never Take Me Alive, still occasionally played on the radio. The radio where a dj or producer picks the playlist, of course, rather than the modern streamed version where only your own choices come up, or maybe those of the dreaded algorithm which will inevitably lead eventually to Ed Sheeran, Adele or Taylor Swift even if your preference was for death metal. SoD (sorry, Spear of Destiny, keep up) is still gigging. Kirk always seemed very macho, but my barber where I lived till a couple of years ago delighted in telling me that Kirk had been in a relationship with Boy George, which my man assumed would have horrified most of Kirk's equally macho audience.

All of which goes to show you never can tell for sure.