Back To The Future

Be Bop Deluxe always struck me as the sort of band your clever older brother would have been into in the 1970s. He liked Glam Rock but turned his dreadfully serious elder teen nose up at the fact that Bowie and Roxy had pop hits and went on Top of The Pops. Plus there were all those screaming girls at Bowie's concerts, he couldn't possibly take seriously someone teenage girls liked too. But "serious music" usually meant Prog Rock which was just too silly and long-haired – besides, he'd long since grown out of reading Tolkien and was into J.G. Ballard now. Be Bop Deluxe fitted the bill nicely for the clever boy with pretentions, they had the futuristic sheen of Glam but leader Bill Nelson's flamboyant guitar virtuosity and arty songs gave them the image of "real" musicians and put them out them out of the reach of the charts, teenage girls and Fab 208 magazine.

Nelson himself had something of the swotty schoolboy about him, his songs were full of science, robots, and rockets which makes me think he was probably the type who spent hours in the school library poring over picture books of aeroplanes. The gorgeous "Jets At Dawn" is like the "White Cliffs Of Dover" of Glam Rock, bringing the sort of swooning, romantic poetry to flying machines and war that Bryan Ferry brought to ennui and blow-up dolls.

Woke this morning the war was over
The radio was singing love songs
Saw the smiles upon the soldiers,
Coming home across the fields
The calendar said first of August
Romance and promises of summer days,
I strolled unclothed into the garden
To feel the warm sun on my face
The saving of the human race...

Jets at dawn, trail across the sky
Silver birds writing words for airmans wives
Who down below hang the washing out to dry
Frilly briefs and flying helmets in a line

I don't know about you but that makes me sigh a very wistful sigh. Though this evokes the past with visions of old fashioned English heroism and a dream-like pastoral idyll, it's not about anything that actually happened – sadly, no wars ever ended like this. As the saying goes, it's nostalgia for an age yet to come, a mix of Douglas Bader and Dan Dare. Julian Cope calls it Pastoral Glam.

This is the version that was on the b-side of their independently-released first single "Teenage Archangel" in 1973. They re-recorded it on a grander scale it for their debut album "Axe Victim" but I much prefer this simpler rendition.

Download: Jets At Dawn- Be Bop Deluxe (mp3)
Buy: "Postcards From The Future" (album)