With two new albums released in recent months and plenty in progress, it’s safe to say Bill Nelson remains, at 75, as inspired and prolific as ever. One reason for this may be that he came from a devotedly musical family.
“The day I was born, December 18, 1948, my mum was starting to go into labour, but knew my dad had a gig at the town hall in Wakefield for the Lord Mayor’s Christmas Ball,” he chuckles. “So she didn’t tell my dad she’d started – it was an important gig for him and she knew he’d not go. She packed him off to the gig, and only then called the midwife!”
His dad was a saxophonist who had a Big Band in the 50s “when I was a kid. So music was always around for me. My mother was in a tap-dancing troupe, that’s how they met. I had a cousin who was a jazz trumpeter, another who was a