AXE ATTACK
Axe Victim, Be-Bop Deluxe’s 1974 debut, is an album populated by ‘rock’n’roll supermen’ and ‘tongue teasers, young deceivers, night creatures on your heels so high’. The band ‘hoped you’d lend an ear’ but found that ‘you hoped we’d dress like tarts.’ Nonetheless, our heroes refused to be discouraged: ‘like voices on the winds, we hit the road to Hull’.
It was just a minute too late to cash in on glam, which had moved on, but thrives now in a fascinating time warp somewhere between flash and trash, with its then young, confident and ambitious chief creator’s gifts raising even its misfires into a dimension touched by magic. Its lyrics catch the temperature of the era in the UK as colourfully as any loftier Bowie/Roxy album, while the guitar player is on all kinds of fire.
“THE FIRST THREE BE-BOP ALBUMS WERE ALL MEANT TO HAVE NAMES RELATED TO THE GUITAR.”
“Even after all these years,” says Bill Nelson modestly, “I don’t rate myself very much as a guitarist. I never can
