Bill Nelson probably got me buying 7" singles. I rarely bothered with them during my teenage years because albums seemed better value and my pocket money didn't stretch that far, so I didn't get into the habit; plus my friends Pete and Graham, respectively sons of a retired colonel and a bank manager who had seemingly done better in the pocket money lottery than myself, were usually well stocked up on all the singles I would have bought, so I taped their copies. All the same, Bill Nelson's Do You Dream in Colour? seemed like the best thing I'd ever heard at the time, and still retains most of its magic, not least for featuring three killer b-side tracks. Naturally I bought the album.
Years later, I notice that I never bought the 7" of Do You Dream in Colour? which seems like a massive oversight. I have the other tracks on The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything compilation, but sometimes it's nice to have a stack of three or four singles to play when you're having a shave and getting ready to go out, and so I tracked a copy down on Discogs; then noticed that somehow I'd confused my having taped the Stranglers' Christmas EP from Graham with possessing a copy of my own, so I bought one and then took to buying up all the singles I should have picked up first time round, which is thanks to Bill Nelson. Do You Dream in Colour? really is a fucking cracking record.
I still don't fully understand why Bill Nelson wasn't massive, given some of those singles. My guess is that he didn't quite fit into new wave, having been in a band which had featured an airbrushed guitar turning into a skull on the cover - and he clearly wasn't a skinny tie guitar band from New York singing about girls and soda pop; and his music was presumably too weird for old school hairies. Of course, there was quite a head count in the Bowie-influenced cattle truck at the time, and it could be argued that Nelson ticked more boxes than most - Banal could almost have come from the Scary Monsters sessions, for example; but listen close and it sounds more like parallel evolution than influence. We have the post-glam chug and stomp of Banal or Disposable, but there's an angular, spiky edge suggesting European art cinema rather than Warhol's factory, and literary influences that are possibly more Ballard than Burroughs or whoever, perhaps with some early Roxy chucked in; somehow, despite which, I'm not sure it's possible to mistake Quit Dreaming for the work of anyone but Bill Nelson.
This is a genuinely huge album with a massive sound which artfully strikes a balance between filmic bleeps and squelches with rocking the fuck out - big, bold populist riffs and heroic vocals. Weirdly, it's not even like this was the high point prior to some overproduced tail off, it being the first of a whole string of solid albums which somehow seem to have been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't already a fan. How the hell did that happen?
Never mind. If you didn't already get the memo, Quit Dreaming really is a masterpiece in every sense.
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