Having disbanded Red Noise and left EMI Records, former Be Bop Deluxe frontman Bill Nelson released the UK#52 hit "Do You Dream in Colour?" on his own Cocteau label in June of 1980. Clearly a song from its time, you can play pick the influences from the Bowie/Eno Low-era production, to the M styled keyboards and herky-jerky rhythms of XTC or Devo. Still, it's a delightful surprise to hear this again after so many years!
Nelson says on his website that the song's lyrics troubled the BBC:
"There was also a problem with the lyric 'video junkie looking for a fix' which the BBC interpreted, (quite wrongly), as being indicative of heroin addiction. It was merely about people who can't pull themselves away from their tv set, people whose lives exist only via an obsessive involvement with tv soap operas and suchlike. Anyway, the BBC refused to play the record with those lyrics and I seem to recall eventually having to make a mix with the offending line replaced by something else, purely for radio."
Nelson also made the video on a shoe-string budget.
Filmed it on my super-8 home cine-camera in Haddlesey house which was then my home. My brother Ian is in the Monroe mask, me in the Superman and old man mask. My ex-wife Jan is the Pierrot on the rocking horse at the end. Lighting was done by borrowing a couple of old coal miner's pit lamps from a friend who worked as a mining engineer. I had no means of auto-synching the film to the soundtrack so the final edits were synched by hand, which took AGES. Nevertheless, it's a quirky, humorous and surreal piece of filmic art, is it not?
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