(ambient music)
- Eno's someone who has crossed many worlds
and has lived and worked kind of at the interstices
between the worlds.
- He seemed to know or have this knack
for being involved in the right group at the right time.
Knowing where to go and he had such a good ear
of knowing what sounded good, of what would work
in a pop, in a rock context.
- Brian Eno is an anomaly because he just happened
to be born in a certain time, in a certain place,
in a certain number of events and creative nodal points
coincided with where he was and who he knew.
Perhaps people don't, younger people, don't realize
quite what an anomaly in the 70s,
he was an alien not only because he made these weird sounds
but because he seemed to act in a way
that nobody else could prescribe.
It's a one-off.
(upbeat music)
♪ I tried but I could not a find a way ♪
- [Narrator] In 1972, a band appeared from out of nowhere
to take the British music scene storm.
Roxy Music had existed for just over a year
and had not toured the live circuit.
Yet their defiantly different music had won the support
of key allies in the music press
and their ascension to stardom rewrote the rule book
in how to make it as a rock band.
Unique conceptually, visually, and musically,
this was a new kind of act for a new decade.
♪ She's as sweet as a queen I ever seen ♪
- We were into the 70s, if you talked about 1970 to '71,
obviously the 60s has ended but most people
were still waiting for the 70s to begin
and looking around for something that might indicate
that the 70s had begun.
And Roxy Music, possibly along with Bowie,
were the first indicator that something new
was maybe happening in the UK anyway.
There was a schism within popular music
as far as the UK was concerned at the time.
The first thing that probably emerged in the 70s
which was distinctive was so-called glam rock.
If you look at the major stars in the firmament at the time,
it was Gary Glitter, it was Sweet, it was Slade,
it was T-Rex,
all making singles, all aimed specifically
at a predominantly young teenage market.
♪ Get it on, bang a gong, get it on ♪
The music press at the time, which incidentally
was incredibly powerful and that should not be
underestimated, we're talking about sales figures
of 200,000 plus for Melody and the NME too.
Their remit was predominantly to report on so-called
progressive music and the major exponents
would be the big acts like Jethro Tull, Yes,
Pink Floyd, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
♪ Caesar's palace, morning glory, silly human race ♪
♪ On a sailing ship to nowhere
♪ Leaving any place
♪ In the summer change to winter ♪
♪ Yours is no disgrace
- Progressive rock was basically
musicians were really good at playing their instruments.
Who were up to classical standards or beyond.
The bulk of the bands who were playing,
they all had long hair, beards and denims.
Obviously its appeal was male.
The incredible thing about Roxy Music
is that from the very beginning,
from the very word go, they appealed to women as well.
- [Narrator] The brain child of singer
and songwriter, Bryan Ferry,
the group were unlike anything on the musical
landscape at the time.
The majority of its members were art school graduates.
And together they re-imagined the very concept
of the rock band and the music it could create.
And key to this synth player, Brian Eno.
Then known only as Eno,
whose striking image and experiments
with new technology would further distance
the band from their contemporaries.
In June 1972, their debut album was released.
Introducing an act who seemed a response
to rock and roll's past, as well as a beacon
for its possible future.
- Roxy Music's first album is
one of the great debut albums in the history of music.
Just the cover, the cover of the album alone
sets it completely apart from anything else.
It was erotic, but it wasn't porn,
but it was something else, it was more lifestyle.
This is a world of glasses of champagne,
flowers, gold records, incredible looking women,
pink and blue were those kind of colors
that you'd never see that were,
sort of thing in women's magazines.
It was very striking, but then you open
the album up and you see these weird
characters inside, you think,
God, what do these guys look like?
They look so weird-looking.
♪ You got me girl on the run, run around ♪
♪ Got me all around town
♪ You've got me girl on the run around ♪
♪ And it's getting me down, getting me down ♪
♪ Lady if you wanna find a lover ♪
♪ Then you look no further
♪ For I'm gonna be you're only
♪ Searching at the start of the season ♪
- The Roxy Music concept was almost
post-modern in a sense.
It was difficult to classify them for a start.
They presented themselves as
in some ways as the ultimate glam rock group.
But they seemed to borrow things
from different eras, both musically
and in terms of the visual image.
You had Bryan Ferry with a 50's quiff,
and also with a Lurex jacket,
so he wasn't quite the 50's Elvis,
he was Elvis with a sort of 70's look about him.
Then you had Eno.
Eno was unique, visually, he was
beyond flamboyance.
Eno was more flamboyant than probably
anybody else in rock, even Bowie,
I think he was more flamboyant than Bowie.
There was Eno with feathers,
apricot lipstick, this mauve kind of
over the top eyeshadow.
He was androgynous, he could have just
walked out of a hospital he was so thin.
So he embodied a new glam rock of the 70's.
The others you could see elements of the 50's.
They didn't quite seem to fit together,
and yet they did.
And part of the reason that they did was
that the music reflected the image, in a strange sense.
♪ Throw me a line
♪ I'm sinking fast, clutching at straws ♪
♪ Can't make it
♪ Havana sound we're trying
♪ A hard edge, a hipster jiving through ♪
♪ Last picture show's down the drive-in ♪
♪ You're so sheer, you're so chic ♪
♪ Teenage rebel of the week
♪ Pictures of the mountain streamline ♪
♪ Midnight blues casino floors. ♪
There was definitely a 40's and 50's
element to the music.
The notion of Roxy Music, it was originally
gonna be called Roxy.
They wanted to be named after a cinema,
it could have been the Realto,
but it became Roxy, it had a ring to it.
And it was again, instantly predomniant
of almost post-war Britain,
immediate post-war Britain.
So you had that whole 50's thing.
But at the same time you had
synthesizers in there courtesy of Eno.
The musical approach was incredibly modern,
it was electronic, it was all about the 70's.
You also had via the saxophone and the car,
you always had to add 60's rhythms in there as well.
So both the music and the image suggested
50's, 60's, 70's,
three different decades, possibly
even the 40's if you wanna throw that in as well.
I think only Bowie and Roxy were doing
this kind of mixing and matching
of different styles.
And a lot of it did come from their art school
backgrounds as well.
If you throw all that into the mix,
you've got a unique concept, and
that's what made Roxy very special at that time.
- [Narrator] And Brian Eno's art school
background in particular was key to
making him such an unconventional figure
within popular music.
A graduate of both Ipswich and Winchester,
where had studied to become a painter,
he main areas of interest musically
prior to joining Roxy had been in the avant-garde,
and in the technical aspects of sound recording
and audio manipulation.
Although he had been interested in rock and roll
and doo wop from an early age,
and had been involved in a band during
his grammar school days,
he had never seriously considered
entering the rock world until he
was introduced into Roxy Music
by one of its founding members,
saxophonist and oboe-player, Andy MacKay,
whom he had met while at art school.
Eno's original role was as the
group's technical advisor.
Brought into record demos due to this knowledge
of tape recorders and his stash of amps
and equipment, his use of techniques
drawn from the avant-garde allowed him
to process and alter the band's conventional instruments.
And his job title was upgraded to sound manipulator.
Over time, these techniques would be key
in making Roxy Music such a unique outfit.
- I think from today's perspective,
it's actually quite difficult to understand
the sheer weirdness that was processing
other instruments, even the idea of treatments
which later became called process,
these were alien terms.
And in the initial Roxy Music shows,
Brian wasn't even on stage, he was at
the back of the hall at the mixing desk,
with his tape recorders, and delay units, et cetera.
Feeding the guitar, the saxophone,
sometimes Bryan Ferry's keyboard,
sometimes even the vocal.
Through these tape recorders to create
two signals, so you've got the signal
of the actual instrument but then
you also had the effected signal,
and he would then mix at mixing desks
between these two so that you could turn
an ordinary-ish guitar chord into something
very, very strange, something that reverberates
and repeated.
And had a completely different character.
So much so that some of the,
like Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay
were rather ruefully noted that sometimes
they'd hit a chord or a note and
they wouldn't hear it back the first
10 seconds or something because it had
been taking so long to go through
Brian's various systems.
It's taking what is essentially
an orthodox rock band, however,
artfully clothed and shaped.
Roxy Music, and giving this patena
of other-worldliness.
And I think he probably hasn't even today
received enough credit for that.
- [Narrator] Eno also became proficient
on Andy Mackay's rare VCS3 synthesizer.
And not only would his experimental input
become a dominant element in their recorded work,
but by 1972, when the band were performing
their first major life concerts,
he had managed to become an essential
part of their stage show.
- He wasn't going to be the general keyboard player
which a bit like Bryan was, sitting
on the piano, playing, he wasn't going to be like that,
he was going to be in his own little box,
as part of what was going part of the group,
but doing something completely different.
And he developed this idea where he
was like a controller at an airport,
with all the controls around him,
and they would sit in at the,
well he sat himself at the mixer in front of the group,
so people would be looking at the group
and see this guy at the mixer
playing along with his synthesizer,
which was extraordinary, they'd never
seen anything like that.
Because usually people at mixers
were people you didn't really look at them.
They'd just be dressed in black and not,
they'd sort of out.
But this was now part of the scenery.
(psychedelic rock music)
- When Roxy Music first emerged,
I think what made them stand out
was the way that the music was treated.
It was really like the only person
who was doing anything, okay other people
were playing synthesizers, but they
were playing them just as the instrument itself.
He was molding and re-molding,
and texturing and layering.
He wasn't a musician.
He could play a little bit of guitar,
but his forte was
taking it all and molding it,
and making it into Roxy Music.
He was doing something new,
and it took people a little while to
understand, hey look, here's a guy,
he's not a virtuoso musician,
but he's got something, and he's able to do
something.
- [Narrator] For the record-buying public however,
this something was both alien and mysterious,
upon the release of Roxy Music's debut in June 1972,
the sonic experience of the album was so novel
that many could not discern exactly
what instruments they were listening to,
and how much of this was due to the contribution of Eno.
- From the opener of Remake/Remodel,
this is a sound that was obviously gonna
be very different.
Determining Eno's role in it has never been easy.
Consistently in Roxy Music,
and perhaps even at later stages,
Eno often gets credited for things
he didn't actually do, by his own admission.
Anything that was sonically odd or different,
any particular effect on any of those albums,
the man you look at instantly was Eno.
The beauty of it was that you never quite knew.
There was a certain mysterious quality about Eno
as precisely what he did.
And where he did it.
- Eno's presence on the first Roxy album is
perhaps not as palpable as it would have been
on stage at that time.
I think it's there, it did,
it's sort of background and it's kind of subtle,
and like on Ladytron, there's perhaps more of it
where I think Ferry famously asked him to
create some lunar quality music,
and Brian said, oh I have just the thing.
He'd already made something.
And that's quite high in the mix,
and there are a few treatments of oboes
and guitars throughout the album,
which is where his presence is palpable
obviously and it's wobbly and weird,
and you know when it's wobbly and weird,
Brian Eno is nearby.
- [Narrator] Yet the fact that Eno represented
a new kind of musician, posed a problem
in some quarters of the rock fraternity.
As the band's profile grew,
in interview Eno was more than happy
to admit that he wasn't a classically trained virtuoso.
And instead began to label himself a non-musician.
This term was incredibly sell-effacing,
but the notion that a blooming figure
in popular music was advocating invention over ability
was both baffling and threatening to some.
- Probably the most heretical idea that Eno
had in the early 70's was this idea that
he wasn't a musician, didn't need to
toil away in a room learning all these
techniques and there was a kind of
joyous gleeful contempt for
craft, which was really a radical break
with the 60's, there was a lot of people
who went to art school, Eric Clapton
went to art school, but they all had
subscribed to this idea of learn your instrument
and practicing and virtuosity.
But what Eno introduced from the
sort of radical art school environment
was this idea that it wasn't,
you could be an artist but you didn't
necessarily have to have skill.
- Here was this guy who plays synthesizer
in Roxy Music, but he doesn't so much play it
as he plays with it.
He uses it as an effect.
He uses it as a stage prop.
It was all very visual,
what he was wearing on stage with Roxy Music
was outrageous even by the standards of the time,
and that was the whole point
to attract a lot of attention with this big
as he put, a shake you by the lapels
kind of musical statement.
But again, he wasn't a musician,
he didn't practice, he didn't hae a lot of chops.
As far as I know, he still doesn't today.
If you look at Keith Emerson,
or Rick Wakeman, these guys have chops up the whazoo,
they are classically trained musicians,
they can play anything.
(progressive synth music)
- If you compare him to the Rick Wakeman's
of this world, or the Keith Emerson's of this world,
who were the predominant keyboardists in
progressive rock at the time,
these were music school guys essentially.
They could play with their eyes closed.
Eno needed to have dots on the keyboard
to actually even make anything.
So you had the non-musician versus the musician,
and it was understandable there were
certain suspicion and prejudice against it
because he wasn't a player, and they were.
He wasn't interested in virtuosity,
or playing, or technical ability.
The musicians use music to make music.
For Eno, music was a function of art,
it was the function of something else.
It wasn't just music for music's sake.
And inevitably that's gonna create
jealousy from somebody who's been
playing an instrument 15 hours a day
since they were 10 years old.
To see somebody come along from an art school
and just tinker with the thing
as if it was nothing more than a play thing,
and also to be given great critical
kudos as a result, it must be very frustrating.
- [Narrator] And although Eno's status
as a non-musician may have antagonized
some of the old guard, as he persisted
with the VCS3 synth, he grew accomplished
in using what was a complex machine.
The music press became intrigued by his
technical activities, which he would discuss
enthusiastically in interviews,
and a picture began forming of Eno
as the mad professor of rock.
A new kind of musician mastering emerging technology.
- At the time, the only other people
that used a VS3 were Pink Floyd
who had one in the studio, 'cause
they were recording Dark Side of the Moon at the time.
And they were starting to experiment with this thing.
And the other people who had this
were say Germans like Klaus Schulze.
Eno was the most interested in using
it all the time, the others only
wanted to use it for say a track,
or this, and maybe then put it away,
but Eno wanted to use it out front.
So he was the one who became
associated with the VCS3, it was his baby.
- With a synthesizer you build up a pattern
of maybe three or four sections which
virtually make one sound,
and it's not very easy, you had to
on a special course, or have someone to teach you
how to actually do this because it's
quite advanced sort of work.
And he had got past the initial stages,
and he was in an advanced stage of it.
So he was getting very good at combining
different sounds from these synthesizers together
and together, and together,
and even putting things like
cow bells through at the same time,
or he had built this rather interesting instrument
which was a piece of wood,
with a paperclips stuck into it,
so there was all these paperclips,
all at various heights, and if you
prong them, put them through the synthesizer,
it made this weird sound.
I don't think he actually recorded that
for Roxy Music, but he was interested in
making new types of instruments.
- [Narrator] By the end of 1972,
having conquered the UK, Roxy took
their inimitable show to America.
Advanced word had traveled across the Atlantic,
and the US press were eagerly awaiting
not only the band's iconic front man,
Bryan Ferry, but the unique visual and
musical presence of Eno.
- Roxy Music was hot as a firecracker
from the get go.
If I'm not mistaken, the first time I ever saw them,
it certainly is something I remember,
they initially opened for another Warner Bros. Band,
Jethro Tull at Madison Square Garden,
and it was this whole phalanx of rock critics,
and there weren't so many of this at this time,
so say a dozen people at least that I knew.
We'd get to Madison Square Garden at
eight o'clock sharp, they put on their
32 minute opening act, we cheer,
we look at all the time because he
is the visual center of the show,
as much as Bryan Ferry.
They go off, we all get up and leave.
(laughs)
Whole row, gone.
We just wanted to see this band.
- [Narrator] Not only were the US press
primed for the spectacle of Eno,
but also for his growing fame.
Articulate and relaxed, he had become
a much sought after interviewee.
While his notorious sexual antics on the road
were making him an unlikely icon,
and his profile was beginning to eclipse that
of front man Ferry.
Roxy toured with support from blues guitarist,
Lloyd Watson, who was a witness to Eno's
embracing of the rock and roll lifestyle.
- Me and Eno, we sort of
got a bit of a reputation as the looners
in the party, as it were.
Well it was the age of the
Polaroid camera at that time.
So of course there'd be girls in the dressing room,
and Eno would be snapping,
and then in the morning, showing us his collection.
Yeah, I'm sure he won't mind me saying this now.
And also like the song, The Fat Lady of Limbourg
is an actual experience of a
night in a hotel room when
I had at that time I would say it
was the misfortune to be in the
next bed on my own, and not able to sleep.
Because of what was going on but
it's rock and roll innit? (laughs)
- There was a lot of photographs of Brian Eno
surrounded by lots of women. (laughs)
He was getting a lot of attention though,
and he relished that attention,
he thought it was fantastic.
Once he was asked, what are his interested in life?
"My interests in Roxy are sex and music",
so he was saying what people felt.
I think, it may sound a bit strange,
I think Bryan Ferry has always come across
as quite a shy person,
and someone who actually doesn't like
socializing and talking outside the fantasy
which he made in Roxy Music.
I think personally he seems quite shy.
And very self-conscious, where Eno wasn't self-conscious.
- Went Eno went to America,
they all loved him.
He gave good copy.
And he was a natural entertainer.
He was incredible garrulous,
and he'd talk to any journalist.
Ferry was more elitist.
Even his choice of women seemed elitist.
When he did get involved it was with fashion models.
You got the impression Eno would sleep with anybody,
was always the impression he gave,
and on that level, there was a distinction between them.
- [Narrator] The band returned to the studio
in February 1973.
And the resultant LP, For Your Pleasure,
was greeted even more enthusiastically
than their debut.
During the recording, Eno began to take
a more active role in the studio,
and was able to imbue the album
with inspiration he was taking from
the new sounds emerging from the flourishing
but little known German experimental scene of the time.
- On For Your Pleasure, Brian does become
more involved in the production process,
definitely more so than the first album,
which was recorded really fast.
They had much more time on the second one.
Apart from anything else, he started to
make notes about different ways
of approaching the recording studio,
some of which would have significance
for him later on.
I remember him saying something about
if you listen to the studio playback from outside
the control room, you picked out only
so many frequencies, and you could hear it
in a completely different way,
and sometimes gave him great ideas
for mixing.
He also on the track, The Bogus Man,
he had a lot of impact on that one,
and was influenced by Can, particularly.
And he bought that kind of German,
what later became known as Krautrock, sensibility
to that track in particular.
It does have this metoric
quality kind of, but shrouded in weird textures.
♪ The Bogus Man is on his way
♪ He's fast as he can run
♪ He's tired but he got you
♪ And show you lots of fun
So he was actually now rather
than just bringing weird sounds,
he was slightly more targeted,
and I think the problem that he had
on that album with the relationship with Bryan Ferry
was that Ferry was kind of drifting
towards the orthodox, to the classic,
and Eno was definitely wanting to
put more of the avant-garde into Roxy Music,
and that album, For Your Pleasure,
is perhaps a very finely balanced
version of these two things,
kind of keeping each other in equilibrium.
But that's perhaps why it's for many people
the finest Roxy album.
- [Narrator] Yet despite the success of For Your Pleasure,
the equilibrium found on the album
between the clashing personalities of Eno and Ferry
could not be sustained elsewhere.
Not only were they disagreeing about
the direction of the band,
but a power struggle had developed.
As they hit the road, Eno had become
such a draw in his own right,
that a baying crowd would chant his name
throughout the set, while a neglected Ferry
was continually having to remind the press
that he was in fact the brains behind the outfit.
And the sole songwriter, and not his
flamboyant colleague.
Yet any confusion came to an end
while promoting the new album,
as Ferry chose to step out from behind his piano
and on stage became the focal point.
- Bryan Ferry had founded the group,
and it's the same with anybody like
with Brian Jones, he formed the Stones,
and then finds himself getting marginalized.
I mean it didn't happen to extent with Bryan Ferry,
because he was the vocalist, so
he was always in the forefront,
but the attention wasn't always going
that way, it was sometimes going there,
and let's see what Eno's doing
and oh, he's singing, we better
get back and look at him now.
So I think that's just about
how it was, yeah. (laughs)
♪ There's a new sensation
♪ A fabulous creation
♪ A danceable solution
♪ To teenage revolution
♪ Do the strand
- Once Ferry took center stage,
Eno's flamboyance and his role as
the clown of the group, but also the
genius of the group is thrust somewhat
into the background, and so what's he left with?
Once Ferry took center stage then they
become a much more traditional group,
it didn't look so odd on stage,
it was the right thing to do,
the management wanted Ferry to be center stage.
But then it becomes increasingly
to look like Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music
as opposed to just Roxy Music.
And that's the direction it started going in.
♪ They're playing our tune
♪ By the pale moon
♪ We're incognito
♪ Down the Lido
♪ And we like the strand
- That was really, I think the catalyst,
it was never really the same after that.
And I think Eno felt he was being ousted,
and he beat them to it in the end
by saying, okay look, I'm resigning,
he left Roxy Music.
And he left it in jubilation.
Once he made that decision, he ran out
singing and dancing down King's Road.
And I think that gives you an indication
on the degree of tension that there must have been
and the sense of release he felt,
that he could finally go off and do
what he wanted to do, and was free
from the constraints of Roxy Music.
- Roxy Music really was Bryan's band,
it was his vision, and it was one that
I'm sure I contributed quite a lot to,
but without a doubt, it was
the whole construction was his in conception.
He had this idea for this band and
as I said, I was very happy to be part of it,
but I think it wouldn't have been
such an interesting band if
I had been able to sort of co-opt it
to go in my direction.
- They lost that edge when Eno left,
the experimentation seemed to die out.
And the records became
more refined.
Still very good, still very good,
but I say that sense of danger or excitement,
or experimentation, when Eno left,
a lot of that went with him.
- There's no doubt about it that the minute
that Eno left Roxy Music, it became
a conventional rock band.
But with Eno in it, the actual songs
are not allowed to fall into that
kind of easy thing.
They're going places that you just,
you don't know what's going to happen next,
and that's what makes it so tense.
And makes, particularly the first record very powerful,
it's an amazing record.
It's the classic Roxy Music album.
- I think it's a mistake to say,
oh, he's the great genius, and Ferry, baloney.
Baloney, Ferry was a brilliant creation,
and it was really Ferry's creation.
Sure, we were aware of Eno, as he was called then.
But finally Ferry's concept did not need Eno.
And Eno had plenty clearly that he could do
without Ferry's concept.
- [Narrator] Without Roxy Music however,
Eno's future was uncertain.
Despite his profile in the music press
as a strange, brilliant anomaly.
Whether this non-musician could produce
significant work of this own remained to be seen.
And his finances were hardly conducive
to a fresh start.
- When Brian quit Roxy Music,
he was famously felt incredibly liberated by this,
and went off dancing down King's Road.
But he was in debt to the management company.
To the tune of £15,000.
Which was a not-insignificant sum in 1973 obviously.
So he was in a very uncertain position.
Of course he'd now left Roxy Music,
and he didn't write the songs in Roxy Music,
he contributed to them, so
what he presented to Island Records
was the most improbable career project.
What did he actually have to do?
It wasn't a great situation to be in,
but I think creatively it was a huge spur
because he had to do something.
He had to focus in, he couldn't just be
this kind of dilettante figure
hanging around the speakeasy and other
London rock venues where he was always be
guaranteed lots of attention.
And a kind of rock star status.
But he now had to actually prove it,
'cause he didn't have the lifeboat of Roxy Music,
so I think whilst it was obviously
there was pressure, he was still a
relatively young and had the institutions
of a young man, oh right okay I'll do something.
Although his initial efforts weren't that great,
and didn't actually come to anything,
it did galvanize him into work.
- [Narrator] Without the group around him,
Eno was far from stranded.
He had been active ever since his graduation
within a community of artists,
and while in Roxy Music had produced work
and been involved in performances
unreleated to the musical mainstream.
Eno was first and foremost an artist,
and this loose collective of like-minded individuals
included the painters Tom Philips and Peter Schmidt.
Prog rockers Robert Fripp, and Robert Wyatt,
and avant-garde musicians and composers,
Gavin Bryars and Corneulius Cardew.
Without his commitment to Roxy Music,
it was to this community that Eno returned.
- One of the frustrations that Bryan Ferry
had with Eno was that he had
all these other things going on.
And he would things which he'd bring to
interviews in the NME and the Melody Maker,
he'd been talking about John Cage,
he'd be talking about the scratch orchestra
that he played with briefly,
or the Portsmouth Symphonia,
this kind of joke amateur art orchestra
which was overseen by Gavin Bryars.
And various other, he had all these concepts
with his former tutors like Tom Philips
and Peter Schmidt who were quite well known
and established art world figures actually.
And of course soon but Brian would
take up school lecturing himself
in very much in their model.
So all this was
in the background of the Roxy Music rock star world
that he also inhabited with some panache
and with a great deal of zeal.
But to his credit I think he always
kept his hand in the art world, generally.
Not through any kind of dilettante
opportunism, because just because that's
what he was genuinely interested in.
And that's genuinely what he wanted to
bring to Roxy Music.
So I think when that became
hit the buffers essentially then
he inevitably returned to the rest of
the stuff he did which was
more avant-garde.
- [Narrator] And this immersion in the avant-garde
would be vital for Eno's career outside of Roxy.
Allowing him to focus on concepts
that he had been developing since
his radical art school education in the late 1960s.
Having grown up in quiet and conservative rural Suffolk,
the inspirational lessons learned at Winchester
and particularly at Ipswich had been
fundamental in introducing him to progressive
approaches to art, that would now become
the foundation of his future work.
- They had introduced him to a whole new set of ideas
that he otherwise would not have been exposed to.
Ideas that he described as well,
avant-garde, using value systems that
he didn't understand and none of the other
students understood, really making them
think about not just here I am creating
a piece of art, or a piece of music,
but what am I doing in the process of doing that?
More of an emphasis on process versus product,
if you will.
- Well when Brian went to art school,
he initially went to be a painter.
And very quickly he was disabused of that idea
by the regime at Ipswich Art School,
the regime was administered by a man
called Roy Ascott, and one of Ascott's
abiding principles was to
remove preconceptions about what art education was
for the young students.
And these were foundation level students,
very young, come from a very formal school
education which Brian had done.
And were plonked into this environment
that involved all sorts of disorienting games.
I think designed to just remove all
these preconceptions about being a painter
with a tin of water colors.
A number of the teachers there had come from London.
And they were bringing this, including Tom Philips,
who was a painter, and composer.
And he introduced ideas to Eno
very early on about how music could be art.
Particularly with regard to John Cage,
and the book that he'd written called Silence.
Which was sort of a bible for the
avant-garde at that time.
And this was something that immediately struck
Brian as something he could get into
'cause he had already had an affair
as it were, with sound, since was a kid.
- [Narrator] Cage was a revolutionary composer
and theorist whose development of aleatoric
or chance-controlled music
would have significant impact on Eno.
Another painter turned musician
who had studied under one of the towering
figures of 20th Century classical composition
Arnold Schoenberg, by the 1950s,
Cage had turned his back on conventional
notions of musical creation, and instead
looked to reappraise the role of composer
and to reexamine the very definition
of what constituted music itself.
Yet he would not only be a theoretical influence
on Eno, his music too would become an inspiration.
- He was about drawing attention to the experience
of listening to music, as opposed to
having the attention being focused on
the sacrosanct score that the composer
had written out note for note.
Traditional musicology had music studies in general
focus on that score, on the intention
and the will of the composer.
Cage turns that whole thing on its head
and says, it's great that Beethoven was Beethoven,
but at the same time, I wanna have a Beethoven
like experience if I'm listening
to the sound of water on the beach,
or the wind in the trees.
It's about the experience.
Yes, Beethoven can bring up feelings like in me,
but I wanna have those experiences
when I'm not listening to beautiful classical music
as well. (laughs)
So that aesthetic, that whole complex,
Eno heard that, and he was like, I'm there.
- I think John Cage for Brian Eno
was an important exemplar of how you
bring art and music together and
how music can be art, and not necessarily
just entertainment, with Cage a lot of
these experiments obviously were quite dissonant
and difficult to listen to or
silent, in one famous case.
But often, they were also quite beautiful to listen to,
and I think that definitely resonated with Brian.
(ambient piano music)
I think the thing with Cage's works
like Landscape is that although
it was a system piece, it was created
using the formal devices, its sound
does have a kind of romantic quality
and a lyrical quality.
I think with Brian being brought up
with rock and roll records and
do woop and Elvis Presley,
I think melody has always been something
that's been important to him,
and it's something that's kind of
seeped into his work, even at it's most
austere and ambient.
He's a melodist.
- [Narrator] With Cage, Eno became intrigued
by the potential of music as a creative
artistic medium.
Yet his lack of any training
presented a seemingly impenetrable barrier
to this realm.
His discovery, again through tutor Tom Philips
of the American Experimental Composer Steve Reich
was therefore life-changing.
A pioneer, along with fellow Americans
Terry Riley and Philip Glass
of a musical style that would late
be termed minimalism, Reich was a formally
trained composer, who in the mid 1960s
began to use tape recorders as his
instrument of choice.
- I never stopped saying that without Steve Reich
I probably wouldn't have had an interesting
composing career, it was very much
to do with ideas from his early work.
- He was a kind of, a well educated composer
in the traditional sense, but he had this
vision of a kind of creating a modern
compositional node that was inspired
as much by jazz and Motown, the sort
of steady beat of Motown.
As it was more avant-garde influences like
Terry Riley, for example, who made the
tape recorder music out in California,
experiments with multiple tape recorders
in sequence, and so forth.
And Reich used tape recorders to make
two significant pieces in the mid 60s
called Come Out, and It's Gonna Rain,
both using recordings of speeches.
Editing them down into small cells
of repetition and then running the tapes together
to gradually slowly separate the two
recordings, and so you get this synchronized
stereophonic quality that gradually
goes out of phase, and this was the first
of the many phase experiments.
♪ Come out to show them
The influence on Brian was obvious,
it was you could use a tape recorder
to make significant pieces of art music.
To have someone like Steve Reich, Terry Riley,
these mysterious avant-garde figures
from across the Atlantic making
legitimate music, they were composers,
they weren't just dabblers, they were composers,
but they'd chosen to use things like
tape recorders to make
avant-garde music, and together with
the im-primitor of John Cage,
this kind of I think just sort of
emulsified in Eno as something he could do,
and I think he went with some gusto after that.
- [Narrator] The influences he discovered
during his time at art school
weren't simply musical however.
Just had Tom Philips had introduced Eno
to essential composers, the school head
Roy Ascott exposed him to a new theoretical
discipline called cybernetics.
And this too would be key to Eno's artistic approach.
- I think that Eno derived a lot of
very powerful ideas, especially out of this
one book by Stafford Beer called the Brain of the Firm.
Cybernetics is away of kind of whole systems thinking,
a way of conceptualizing the whole organism,
and it can be applied to so many different fields
so engineering, science, business,
which is something that Stafford Beer did,
he sort of applied it to management.
Anything that you can conceptualize
as a system, key to cybernetics is the
idea of control and a feedback loop.
These are ideas that can be pretty
readily applied to music.
Especially to electronic music and the kind
of stuff that Brian Eno is really interested in.
- What Eno recognized in cybernetics was
a means whereby a system could be put in place
that despite the random elements
was autonomous, and looked after itself.
In Brain of the Firm,
Stafford Beer writes about organizing
management processes for places of work.
And to Brian's credit, I think it's quite
a conceptual leap to say how do I apply
that to art and music.
- This whole idea of cybernetics would then
dominate Eno's life until now.
It's where everything comes from,
where the oracle cards, where the maxims honor
the hours, the hidden intentions.
Where the whole idea, and you set the process up,
allowed one cell, and the music,
the whole idea of working with Bowie,
of working in his studios, and letting
things just happen, this kind of
still an anarchic thing.
I think it was because Eno
had really got into machines.
He wasn't really a musician,
but he could work a tape recorder,
he could fiddle with the electronics,
because he could actually interface with machines,
that any kind of machine kind of
philosophy would appeal to him.
- [Narrator] All these significant influences
gathered during art school were then
brought to the fore upon Eno's development
of his own career in mid-1973.
Yet before attempting a traditional solo record,
he returned to work he had begun the previous year
whilst still a member of Roxy.
Recordings that drew heavily upon
the tape compositions of Steve Reich.
Through his social and musical escapades,
Eno had met Robert Fripp,
the guitarist and founding member of
prog rock giants, King Crimson.
Together, the pair began working on
experimental recordings in September 1972,
yet these were shelved to their other commitments.
After his departure from Roxy Music,
Eno returned to these experiments.
And found that Fripp had become similarly
disillusioned by his day job,
and was more than happy to participate.
- Fripp had had great difficulty with King Crimson.
The first King Crimson had imploded
after an American tour.
The whole energy of the band that
had made it in the core,
just dissipated into rancor, arguments,
and people walking out.
The most important being Greg Lake,
the bass player who then joined,
Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
And so Fripp was really at a loose end.
He wanted to make another record,
but he didn't have a band really.
- Eno and Fripp were this really incredible
working team.
They had a real intuition for each other,
and in a certain way, they were like
completely different people.
Fripp was very much more technical,
much more a real guitar virtuoso,
meanwhile Eno was calling himself a non-musician.
So they really bounced off each other
in a very special way.
They were like a perfect pair because
in a lot of ways they were so opposite to each other.
In other ways, Eno and Fripp were very similar
to each other, Fripp had sort of
fled King Crimson, Eno had left Roxy Music,
they had both left these very successful bands
to break off and do something new.
And they both were very interested in
sort of pushing the limits of the music of the time.
- [Narrator] The work completed in August 1973
relied heavily on the tape system
that Eno had developed, which through delay
created a multi-layered wash of repeated
and receding moments.
Although Steve Reich had been pivotal
in Eno's recognition of the potential
of the tape recorder, another towering figure
of the American avant-garde
was perhaps even more inspirational
on this experiment.
- While I think the more close
technological borrowing is Terry Riley.
Poppy No-Good and the Phantom Band
on side two of Rainbow and Curved Air,
was the first time I know of the
open tape loop improvising technique
which became the No-Pussyfooting kind of approach.
It was in the air, and everybody
was experimenting with these approaches of
pure tone, these approaches of
elongating the time based of music.
(ambient music)
I think Fripp and Eno were expressing
their fascination with what was happening
in the avant-garde.
I don't see it as a side project,
I think artists in general are curious people.
And they love exploring new avenues.
The fact that it was an avenue that was
referencing Terry Riley
is like we all do, a form of respect
and a form of influence and playfulness.
We like to explore other people's territories
from time to time, to enlarge our vocabulary.
- [Narrator] Released in November 1973,
No Pussyfooting unsurprisingly failed
to chart on either side of the Atlantic.
Yet sold respectably for such an idiosyncratic creation.
And although Island Records were opposed to the work
and only grudgingly issued it,
over time it would be acknowledged as a milestone
in the development of experimental music.
- I think that No Pussyfooting was a landmark,
certainly in Eno's career, and in the career
of Robert Fripp.
Eno comes to the fore as
a really great collaborator to work with,
and one that's very easy to work with,
and one that can in effect get
maximum originality and creativity
from the people that he's working with.
(ambient music)
We see Eno early in his ambient career,
laying down the types of atmospheric sound beds
that would later become his real specialty.
And you have Robert Fripp,
sometimes playing a solo on top of that.
And that's a solo that's going somewhere.
Directionally, developmentally.
The solo, which is more like speech,
it's more like a sentence,
it's more like something that's articulated,
has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Robert Fripp's solo is sort of the more
conventional of those two elements, if you will.
The background tracks which are
eternally existing, in that sort of
minimalistic space, that's
the new direction that Eno is gonna take,
and develop into the ambient sound.
(ambient music)
- The way No Pussyfooting works is that
Eno's austerity is very good for Fripp.
Stops him from getting too fancy.
Eno's austerity reigns him in.
Fripp is certainly smart enough to
understand what Eno wants to do,
and he tries to do it,
and so Eno is essential to
Fripp's fancy pants tendencies.
But Fripp's content is even more essential
to Eno's austerity.
I think that that's a record that
someone who's not inclined to like
that sort of thing, can learn to like anyway,
and with without much difficulty too.
- [Narrator] Outside of his pioneering work with Fripp,
Eno appeared to be struggling for a new direction.
Ideas seemingly came thick and fast,
but led nowhere.
Recordings were made with Roxy Music's Andy Mackay,
only to be shelved.
Studio sessions were booked with a street busker
and the material went unreleased.
And a new band was announced,
Luala and the Lizard Girls, which never materialized.
Yet despite all these false starts,
the month before No Pussyfooting was released,
Eno finally entered majestic studios
to record his debut solo album,
and in contrast to his later reputation
as an artist whose work with formed in the studio,
he came armed with self-penned material
that he had been working on since
his departure from Roxy.
- He had songs.
He wasn't quite so experimental as all that,
his songs were quite sort of
poppy and commercial, almost sort like
Beach Boys type of thing.
Which, we were quite surprised,
we didn't quite know, what sort
of music's Brian coming up with?
Because nobody knew at that time,
nobody had been exposed it to us at all.
But we went along and sure enough
there were some songs and
we knew immediately what to play
as soon as we heard the songs, and
yeah, he had material.
- [Narrator] Eno assembled a collective of
familiar faces to record the album,
including Robert Fripp, ex-Roxy support musicians,
Chris Spedding and Lloyd Watson,
and every member of Roxy Music itself save Ferry.
He was conspicuous by his absence.
But he took on production duties himself,
and despite his famously modest assessment
of his own musical abilities,
the non-musician got the best out of
his more technically accomplished allies.
- He was musical enough for us to relate to him,
he knew music, definitely he wasn't a
sort of guy that we couldn't relate
to musically, and he could relate to musicians,
obviously, he'd been in a rock bad.
Lots of rock musicians have got no musical
background training.
They pick up an instrument and they're
able to get a tune out of it,
and they have talent and ability.
It's all you need.
- He had a strong work ethic, and
although he was, as I say,
a non-musician, he had a very professional approach.
And in the studio, there wasn't
loads of Jack Daniels and coke and all that,
he was in to work.
And that's what we did.
- He didn't really say, oh Chris,
can you play this part?
Or sing me something and you play.
And this part, and can you do this?
He would never do that.
I dont know whether he ever did that later,
but I've come across the kind of producer that
Brian is, elsewhere in my career
and they tend not to be very controlling.
They tend to sort of put you in a situation
and let you do what you do, which is
a very agreeable way to work.
You wouldn't have been there if you
couldn't play what you wanted.
- [Narrator] Released in January 1974,
no-one had really known what to expect
from Eno's first solo outing.
Here Come The Warm Jets was an album
that could either make or break his career.
- When he left Roxy Music, he was in terrible debt.
He was under tremendous pressure,
he was living in very sparse conditions.
And he had to make money,
and he had to make a record pretty quickly.
And that record was recorded with extraordinary
rapidity, I mean it was just a couple of weeks.
And I think what it did do
was reveal that mad professor side of Eno
where kind of everything went.
He was like the proverbial boy in a sweet shop.
It was so stylistically diverse as to be absurd,
even by Roxy's standards, I think it
was actually both more accessible,
and more stylistically diverse than Roxy.
♪ Those who know
♪ Don't let it show
♪ They just give you one long glance and you go ♪
♪ Goes to show
♪ How winds blow
♪ The weather's fine and I feel ♪
♪ So, so, so
Its stylistic diversity is staggering in once sense,
but it's also incredibly refreshing.
It does sound like a record made in the moment.
It captures Eno at that wonderful stage where
you can actually almost taste the freedom
that he feels from leaving Roxy Music.
But he also knows he's gotta make a statement,
he's gotta make it quickly,
he's gotta make some money if he can too.
- I liked it, I thought it was very
accessible and not at all sort of serious
and technical and avant-garde at all.
I like sort of pop music
sort of instant disposable pop,
I was kind of interested in that genre,
as I went on to do my own pop records.
And I was agreeably surprised that
he seemed to fall into that genre.
- I think what is interesting about the songs
is their sheer playfulness.
Eno's macabre sense of humor comes
very much through in the lyrics too.
The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch for example,
was supposedly inspired by
somebody in Paw Paw, Michigan who
breathed fire on his victims and killed them.
Eno obviously took that and made it into
a slightly macabre song.
And there's even barbecued kittens I think
as well, followed by Baby's On Fire.
Which he wrote the day he left Roxy Music,
but it also fits in this whole
configuration thing and it's actually
quite macabre imagery, and there's a lot of
that on that record.
♪ Baby's on fire
♪ Better throw her in the water ♪
♪ Look at her laughing
♪ Like a heffer to the slaughter ♪
♪ Baby's on fire
♪ And all the laughing boys are bitching ♪
♪ Waiting for photos
♪ Oh the plot is so bewitching
♪ Rescuers row row
- Initially, I was a little skeptical
that this weirdo was doing these songs.
Looking back however, one reason that record
was such a pleasure was that
we had enough humanism already.
You know?
He wasn't the Allman Brothers.
Fine, the Allman Brothers are fine but
we wanted something different and so
there was a skepticism and an irony,
a sarcasm, I mean Baby's on Fire is a very,
that's a terrific song.
Because the tone is so wonderful.
I mean, no American rock band would
do anything with that kind of tone,
not in 1974, unthinkable.
And it was wonderful.
It was a tonic.
- It's an album with great tunes.
Baby's on Fire is incredibly catchy.
Here Come the Warm Jets is
an example of an attempt to make
a commercial record by somebody
who doesn't really have that much interest
in commercial rock music.
So you have a lovely kind of,
you have a lovely collision in a way
between these two impulses.
And really, Here Come the Warm Jets
is the first in a series of records
where Brian is slowly removing the foreground
of the traditional rock record.
On Some Faraway Beach is perhaps the first
intimation of ambient music,
aside from the things with Fripp,
where you have this kind of destructured
rock music, decentered balladic form.
And it's very beautiful, but it's also rather
strange and mysterious.
(ambient rock music)
Whereas a lot of the record has this
pounding quality, and it's quirky,
and it's strange and it's idiosyncratic,
almost Dadaist, there are these moments,
these kinds of pools of lucidity
that exist within in the record,
which are definitely sign posts for the future.
- [Narrator] Here Come the Warm Jets
was a considerable success,
reaching the top 30 in the UK,
and gaining favorable reviews from
the mainstream rock press on both sides
of the Atlantic.
Publicity however was problematic.
Although there was a planned trip to the US
to perform interviews, without a band
behind Eno, there could be no tour.
Yet one evening he happened to witness
a performance by pub rock regulars, The Winkies,
and impressed by their playing,
he offered them the chance to become
his live backing group.
- The Kensington was a very famous pub
in West London, most of the pub rock bands
played there, Dr Feelgood, Beats Mancanny,
Ducks Deluxe, us, blah blah blah,
and he was basically looking for a band.
I liked him, I thought he was on okay guy.
He did music that I'd never heard before.
I hadn't.
That was the buzz.
And I didn't know what to make of it,
I'm thinking, keep your mouth shut,
keep your ears open, be a good guy,
and just get on with it and see what happens.
And that was what I kept trying to tell myself.
We were given the album,
I went home and learned the bass parts,
and I'm assuming that Guy and Philip,
and Mike did the same sort of thing.
I felt sorry for Guy and Phil,
because the basslines
they're there.
You just simply, oh my God, that's what it is,
boom boom boom boom, learn it.
But when you got all this
Phil Spector stuff going on,
you think, how on Earth do interpret that
on a guitar?
What can I do?
And you're up a gumtree really because
it doesn't matter what you do,
it's never gonna sound like that,
so you've gotta sort of meet it halfway somehow,
and again I thought Philip and Guy
did a really excellent job.
It wasn't easy.
Before Eno hit the road with The Winkies, however,
EG persuaded him that a single would be needed
to further promote the album.
Taking his new backing band into the studio
for their only official recording,
the result was an original composition,
The Seven Deadly Fins, released in March 1974,
the single failed to reach the UK Top 40.
- The most difficult thing
which when you listen to Seven Deadly Fins,
I think we gave it our best shot,
as a band, was interpreting stuff
to not make it sound like yet another
boring rock and roll band.
Because that's not what Brian wanted.
It's difficult you see because
a guitar sounds like a guitar.
Unless you've got a guitar synth,
it's always gonna sound like a guitar,
it can't sound like anything else.
I suppose we were very sympathetic to the idea.
Brian treated Guy's guitar solo,
it starts off quite conventionally,
and then it goes off the wall.
Mike's drums are very interesting and quirky.
I just played rock and roll bass.
We did a good job, we gave it our best shot.
(rock and roll music)
♪ Oh the French girls with the strings of pearls ♪
♪ It's such a burning shame
♪ That the local boys with their country joys ♪
♪ Never make them daisy chains
♪ They're swapping disappointing incidents ♪
♪ While at the dogs another ship rolls in ♪
♪ And suddenly the door breaks down ♪
♪ It's the seven deadly fins
♪ Oh oh oh
- Seven Deadly Fins is an attempt
to make a hit single.
I dont know exactly where that comes from,
whose idea it was, but you can imagine
it probably came from either management,
record company, and I think Brian treats it
a little bit like an art project.
Okay, how do I turn what I'm doing
and in Here Come the Warm Jets,
into a palatable glam rock single?
♪ Ooh
It wasn't a hit.
So it didn't work, but by the same token,
I think it's another example of Brian saying,
okay what are the parameters?
And how do I slot myself into that?
It doesn't sound incongruous in the same way
that a couple of years later he released
a cover of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Wim Oh Wey.
Presumably with a similar purpose.
But also failed to chart, but somehow
he inhabits it, it doesn't sound like a novelty item
for novelty's sake, it's kind of de-gimmicked
somehow because he brings to it a,
I dont know a certain kind of joie de vivre,
or just, it kind of grins at you,
in a certain way.
- [Narrator] In the same month, Brian
and the Winkies began the UK tour.
Yet despite positive early reviews
for both the inexperienced front man's
vocal performances, and the abilities of his band,
soon into the shows, Eno was become uncomfortable
with being in the spotlight, and grew disillusioned
with the touring process.
- Brian is not a front man.
He hasn't got that personality.
He did it, but I think he may have been
stressed by it.
There are certain people that can do
certain types of job, and Brian is
a creative musician, certainly creative
in the control room, very innovative,
off the wall, quirky, you name it.
But giving it the, no, it's not his personality.
To front a band
is one hell of a responsibility.
I don't think Brian actually wanted to do that.
Whether sometimes you are actually
put into that situation because you are
forced into it, then that's another matter.
I think Brian was obliged to promote
Here Come the Warm Jets.
What are you gonna do with it?
And it got an audience, because he
just left Roxy Music, so what are you
gonna do with the thing?
Put in on a shelf and hope for the best?
No.
So he sort of had to do that.
- [Narrator] Despite his discomfort with
the whole process, the tour was eventually canceled
due to more serious concerns.
Only five dates in, Eno began to suffer from chest pains,
and he was diagnosed with a collapsed lung.
He would later claim that despite the health scare,
he was relieved that something had pulled him out
of his commitment to tour.
- I think Brian's relationship with
the road was always one-sided.
He didn't wanna be on it, basically.
I think with The Winkies, it's sort of,
it was an exercise in expediency I think.
There would be pressure from the management
and the record company to actually
promote this record, and to get,
find a way of getting Brian on the road,
so when he stumbled on to this pub rock band,
who were very good, and looked the part,
he thought, instant band, let's do it.
And I think again it was probably not
much more thought than that,
this could work, and they got on,
and they rehearsed, and off they set for the shires.
But it didn't work, he hated it.
Because I don't think he liked necessarily
being the center, completely the center of attention,
that was one thing, which he hadn't been before
on stage, he'd always been this kind of
second figurehead kind of thing,
and that's a nice position to be in
if you're essentially more oriented
towards the back room, which as a creative person
that's where he wanted to be, increasingly,
but he only lasted four or five dates,
and his lung collapsed.
Almost psychosomatically, if that's possible,
but a number of incidents in Brian Eno's life
where he's hospitalized or is bed-ridden,
and a sea change occurs because he
has time just to lie there and think about
nothing but, what am I gonna do now?
And he didn't like touring, clearly,
and he lay there in bed recovering
from a collapsed young, saying to himself,
why do I need to tour?
That's not really what I enjoy doing,
why don't I do what I enjoy,
which is tinkering around in studios
making weird sounds happen?
And doing projects.
And so it's again back to this idea of art,
rolling out of bed in the morning and doing art,
not being a show pony
around the sticky-floored venues of
Great Britain and elsewhere.
- [Narrator] Yet Eno didn't turn his back on
live performance altogether.
In fact, within two months of the final Winkies shows,
he was back on stage with Gavin Bryars'
anarchic Portsmouth Symphonia Ensemble
at the Royal Albert Hall, recordings of which
he would eventually produce for it
to release later in the year.
Elsewhere, Island Records had secured
the solo services of ex-Velvet Underground
artists John Cale and Nico.
And to promote the label's signing
of these icons, suggested a show
which would include ex-Soft Machine
guitarist Kevin Ayers, and Eno himself.
Despite his reluctance to appear live,
the Velvets had been one of Eno's key inspirations
while at art school.
A group that fused the avant-garde with pop aesthetic.
And he found the idea of playing with
his teenage idols too tempting to resist.
In June, the four very different artists
performed at London's Rainbow Theater.
Perhaps more important as a spectacle
than as a concert, its success nevertheless
allowed Eno to collaborate closely
with artists who had been such an influence upon him,
and in July and August, he worked both
on Cale's album Fear, and Nico's album The End.
Following further contributions to the new LP
by prog legends, Genesis,
in September he returned to the studio
to record the follow-up to Here Come the Warm Jets,
with ex-Roxy Music cohort, Phil Manzanera,
now assisting him in the production of the record.
- With Taking Tiger Mountain,
you definitely see a kind of parallel
with Sergeant Pepper in a weird way.
Because Brian's come off the road
in the way that The Beatles had come
off the road in '66, and it's kind of
a tabular rasa moment, the
canvas is empty, what shall I do?
Rather than what can I,
no consideration of an afterlife
for the record, necessarily.
So for the first time he has this
clean slate to work on, and oddly
he just puts a band together rather than
just bringing disparate sort of players
in a curatorial role that he'd used before.
There's an element of that obviously in
assembling any band.
But it is a kind of core band.
And this time he has a lot of fragments
that he's already been working on
in the interim since the last record.
He spends a lot of time with Phil Manzanera
sorting the wheat from the chaff,
which could be, what could work with what?
And I think Manzanera had quite a big role
in sorting out what key went with what,
and if this section could work with that section.
So a number of the songs were begun that way.
So there was much more source material,
more firmly worked out than on the previous record.
- [Narrator] And amongst the core of the
four-piece band that Eno put together
to record the album was Winkies bassist,
Brian Turrington, a musician who he
had also drafted in on the sessions
for John Cale's Fear LP, and who had become
a trusted collaborator.
- Maybe he just liked me in the way that I played.
And I was very fortunate and honored
to have been involved.
I mean I was in for a day, out for a day,
in for a morning, out for a day and a half,
in for an afternoon, and it was fairly fast.
Money being blah blah blah,
but we were there to do a job and that's what we did.
Brian was definitely as it were, in control,
calling the shots, but I wasn't asked to do
any particular type of playing, I think I was
quite lucky, if that be the word,
to just basically get on with my style.
What I seemed to do, worked good enough,
in other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Simple as that.
You have a very, very, very basic chord sequence,
it goes that chord, for that number of bars,
that chord, blah blah blah, that chord,
there you are, what you do with it,
have a good time.
I'm not gonna write notes down, I'm not gonna dictate,
I'm not gonna have a baton and that,
so people improvised and it was like
an experiment.
And on the title track, I played piano on it.
Now I was there as a bass player,
and I was downstairs with a piano,
and there was half a dozen people upstairs,
and they had done the title track,
and a set of headphones there,
and they were doing something, and it was coming through.
And I was sort of, oh, I'll just play along,
I wasn't doing anything, I was down here,
I'll play along with this (hums).
And they all looked at me and I thought,
oh my God, they heard it.
(ambient music)
And Brian thought it was really good,
cut a long story short, I went back there,
did it for real.
Didn't ask.
Just did it.
And that's interesting.
Didn't even know that the microphone,
the piano was micced up into the control room,
didn't have a clue.
And that was really spontaneous.
And it's nice when those things happen.
Very rarely, but that's the way it went.
- [Narrator] Released in November 1974,
the album failed to chart both in the UK
and the US.
Yet the music press were far more receptive
and positive than they had been
for Here Come the Warm Jets.
And Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
was roundly acknowledged as the work
of a unique voice in popular music.
- It wasn't so much that Taking Tiger Mountain
was a more conventional record
to Here Come the Warm Jets, and was therefore
better received, it was that we were used
to the fact that this guy could actually
be taken seriously as somebody who could make songs,
and so we were ready for it.
♪ In the haze of the morning
♪ China sits on eternity
♪ And the opium farmers sell
♪ Dreams to obscure fraternities ♪
♪ On the horizon the
♪ Curtains are closing
- Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
is obviously a very different record
from Here Come the Warm Jets.
It's actually a far more focused record.
The eclecticism that we see
on Here Come the Warm Jets isn't as present there,
and I think for one significant reason is
that he's actually got a band with him,
but more importantly that even having a band,
I think he's got Phil Manzanera there,
very much in the co-producer's role.
If you look at the songs themselves,
quite a number of them are structured
in such a way that the break does come
at the expected time, the sound what
is created in there might not be what you expect,
there's definitely a sense of organization in those songs
which is quite orthodox, in a sense.
- Again, I think there's a balance
being achieved between a kind of
avant-garde gesture and a rock gesture.
I think it perhaps tips one way and another
even within individual songs on the record,
I think Phil Manzanera did create
or help to create more rigid structures.
But within that, within those parameters,
you've got unorthodoxy of various kinds.
And so you have everything from sort of
hymns to proto-punk thrash music,
but it's still not a record you could compare.
If you compare with Country Life,
the Roxy Music record, or I think,
I think Country Life was relatively contemporaneous,
that sounds incredibly orthodox by comparison,
even some of the same players,
and it's interesting how the divergence
has very quickly separated towards
different polarities, even in so short a time.
- The most interesting track was Third Uncle.
'Cause it was just like something that I
got an arrangement credit for,
wrote the bassline, it went through a Revox tape machine,
and it just hurtles along at a rate of knots.
It's just bizarre, bizarre piece of music.
And I made a mistake on it, you see,
I'm going on record now.
It's thumping along into two or three chords,
and it goes up there and it goes back there,
and then when it went back there,
my finger slipped, and instead of playing a G,
I played a G sharp.
And that note thumps out, duff, duff, duff,
whatever, and when I did it, I think,
oh my God, what have you done?
And I didn't stop.
So I did it again, and I did it again,
and then we come to the end,
and I'm like this, I'm thinking, oh my God,
what have I done?
And I said to Brian, look I'm really so sorry.
I made a mistake there.
I said, I hit the wrong note.
He said, "But it's brilliant".
I thought, is it?
♪ There are sings there are blues ♪
♪ There are moves there are shoes ♪
♪ There are turks there are focus ♪
♪ Bearing knuckles bearing scooters ♪
♪ There is you
♪ Then there was you
♪ I'll put my fingers by toes
♪ By my uncle by this pose
♪ By these shoes coming at it
♪ Don't you call me does it feel by you ♪
♪ It looks tight on you
- With Third Uncle almost prophetically looks
towards his work with Talking Heads,
and it's very much like,
Love Ghost A Building On Fire,
or more songs about buildings and food.
Just listen to the rhythmic part,
the guitar, it's really weird,
it's so far ahead of its time in that sense.
It predates punk, and it predates Talking Heads
by so many years, and yet there is the sound there.
Crystallized in that one song.
- It's a very strange song, seemingly beamed in
from another time, and it's hard to know
exactly when that is because it
does allude to the sound of Talking Heads
who hadn't even been formed when it was recorded.
And punk and post-punk obviously,
I remember seeing Bauhaus do a cover version
in the early 80's, it was extraordinarily,
it sounds like they'd written it.
But yes, Third Uncle, I think
you have to sort of look at the way the lyrics
work on that song, and I think that's probably
of significance to Brian,
is creating this kind of Haiku-like lyric,
than perhaps the music itself.
I think it's just kind of a vehicle for this
almost tirade like,
well it's kind of haiku as a tirade, if that makes sense.
But it's a peculiar song, and it is an anomaly.
- [Narrator] During the recording of the album,
Eno had also introduced the new system
into his methodology.
Developed with the painter, Peter Shmidt,
a close friend and part of the loose
artistic collective Eno had been involved with
since the late 60's, the Oblique Strategies
would be a key device in the studio.
A set of 113 cards, each with a single
creative instruction or suggestion,
they both intrigued and amused a rock press
unused to such a radical practice.
Yet a similar system had previously
been adopted by John Cage, who had relied
upon the random intervention of the
ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, while composing.
The Oblique Strategies were
a set of cards, oracle cards that Eno produced
with his friend, the painter Peter Schmidt.
And it turned out that both of them
had been keeping a notebook
for some months, or maybe a couple of years,
just offering little observations about
the creative process.
Things that you could do when you got stuck.
Suggestions for ways to take things
in a different direction.
They discussed their notebooks together
and they decided to actually put one idea
per card, into a nicely produced
deck of cards just like this.
I'm gonna read a couple of them just at random
to see what they say.
This one here says, "accept advice".
"Discard an axiom".
Ah, "Repetition is a form of change".
"Humanize something free of error".
That's a little more abstract.
Oh, here's a good one, very direct.
"Do something boring". (laughs)
So these cards are meant to be used,
for example, in a recording studio
when you're stuck for an idea.
You've gone through all the coffee,
it's three in the morning and you're
up against the wall, and nobody
has a good idea for how to proceed.
Well, you know, we take out these cards,
pull out one at random, and work from there.
It's kind of a technique which is interesting
because you don't have to believe anything.
I call it an oracle deck,
in the sense of a I Ching,
with the I Ching there's some feeling
that what you do with the cards, or the coins,
it's almost magical.
The universe is somehow working its
way into those cards or coins.
Not really with this, you don't have to believe anything.
It's just, it's more of a psychological prompt.
- [Narrator] With no tour to promote
Taking Tiger Mountain, Eno divided his time
in early 1975 between the interview circuit
and studio work with other artists.
He again provided synthesizers for John Cale
on his album Slow Dazzle.
And joined a familiar cast of musicians
including Andy Mackay and Robert Wyatt
on Phil Manzaneea's debut LP, Diamond Head.
Such projects, not only satisfied Eno's
workaholic tendencies, but they also introduced him
to musicians who he would later call up
for his own creative ventures.
These future collaborators included bassists Percy Jones.
- I think it was the summer of 1975,
it was July or August,
kind of getting into the end of summer,
and I'd been
working on a concept album of Peter and the Wolf.
That album was being done by Robin Lumley
and Jack Lancaster.
Robin Lumley and myself were both in
a band called Brand X,
at the time which was a sort of
jazz, rock, crossover.
So they used the core of Brand X on this record.
The rhythm section, which was myself
and Phil Collins ended up doing a lot
of the backing tracks for Peter and the Wolf.
They had guests come in to overdub,
and Eno, Brian Eno was one of them,
and I think he was the wolf.
Because they all were characters
in a Pre-cof-iaf thing.
So he came in and
did a synthesizer part.
And I wasn't there at the time because
we tracked the backing tracks earlier,
but apparently he liked the rhythm section,
he wanted to know who they were.
And then subsequently, both Phil and myself
got a call from him,
could we come up to Island Studios
to work on some stuff with him?
So that was the introduction to Brian Eno.
And at the time, I didn't really know
what to expect, musically.
- [Narrator] There was no way that the
musicians invited to participate in Eno's new project,
Another Green World, could have known what to expect
as he essentially cast aside convention,
and brought John Cage's chants techniques
into the modern rock recording studio.
When the group of musicians assembled in June 1975,
including the Brand X duo of Jones and Phil Collins,
as well as John Cale and Robert Fripp,
there was only track already written.
Eno intended to use the studio as a tool,
and for controlled improvisations by the players
to gradually form the album's material.
Initially however, this was not as successful
as it would eventually become.
- Another Green World is an example of a record
that is a complete tabula rasa,
going to the studio with nothing except
some Oblique Strategies cards,
and a few hired in instruments.
He was feeling the pressure because the initial
experiments where he set out the parameters
in an almost Cagean way, and just say
let's see what happens didn't produce anything.
It was kind of turning to sort of oral plasticity,
kind of the colorless ball of sound,
and he couldn't extract anything from it.
Which is always the downside of working that way
when you're being spontaneous.
And hopes, kind of hoping the chance,
this aleatory processes are gonna lead you somewhere,
and sometimes they lead you nowhere.
- He would sound extremely proud and very
confident in the press, and then he'd privately go home
and be in tears, he'd be crying.
He'd be like, the studio is so expensive.
It's not working at all.
You know, the first four days of work
on Another Green World, absolutely nothing came out.
Eno was using a very expensive studio,
Basing Street Studios in London,
and if it didn't work,
it was like 500 pounds a day to use the studio,
and so you're just kind of hemorrhaging
massive amounts of money to do this experiment,
so it was a very gutsy move by him to do that
with Another Green World.
- The very first session that we did,
I had no idea really what to expect.
I thought maybe it might have been
similar to Roxy Music or something,
because that was the only part of Brian Eno
that I knew about at the time.
This is one of the things about him that
I found so interesting is that his
starting points for pieces of music was,
were quite vague, well vague is not the right word,
but very open.
And I remember distinctly,
when we were doing Another Green World,
the starting point was Eno went over to,
it was a piano in the studio, acoustic piano,
he went over and he hit an A.
And he went (makes hitting noise).
And that was it.
And he said, play off of that.
So it sort of went into (hums).
I think it was four chords,
but with a lot of passing notes,
and major, minor thirds, so it was slightly altered.
I remember at the time it was,
it sounded like a really nice,
had a good feel to it.
So that was it for then.
I remember when I eventually heard the finished record,
Sky Saw and Over Fire Island
initially were just bass and drums.
So that was my recollection at that time
of those tracks, and then when I put the record on,
that was like, wow, this is
such cool stuff, because of everything
he'd done with it.
(ambient rock music)
Even though the starting points were often
very open and kind of vague,
the example I just gave it,
could have gone a million different ways.
And it just happened to go the way that it did.
But on the other hand, he could be very specific
in that you
sometimes record something,
and he'd pick out maybe two measures
of four measures.
And he'd say, "I like that, make something of that,
"sort of loop it".
In that respect he was very specific,
once the thing got rolling,
he seemed to know where to take it.
I found it very easy to work with him,
because he was very relaxed,
and kind of laid back and he
never seemed to get into a fluster
about anything really.
And I remember one day we were
working on an idea, we were having this discussion
about where it could go.
Just very intense debate,
and then he suddenly said,
"Let's have some cake".
And he went under the desk,
and he pulled out this big cake,
I think it was a fruit cake,
and he had some paper plates and stuff,
and he sliced it up, gave everybody
a piece of cake, so everything stopped,
so everybody's eating cake.
And then 10 minutes later, everybody finished their cake
and everybody had completely forgotten
what we were talking about.
To this day, it's just gone.
I think he got the best out of his musicians.
By making them feel involved,
because it was fun, we felt like we were
doing some new stuff.
And you could make suggestions, and he'd listen,
and I think that's how he got the best out of those guys.
Certainly, speaking for myself anyway.
And I remember going home from those sessions
and feeling good about it,
like I did something good today,
you know that kind of feeling?
Which is always very gratifying.
- [Narrator] The experiment paid off.
Released in September 1975, like similarly
ground-breaking records that had come before it,
Another Green World polarized audiences
and critics alike.
Where Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain
had still loosely fitted into the musical landscape
of the era, Eno was now exploring uncharted territory.
An album unlike any other to emerge from
the peripheries of the mainstream,
over time it would be hailed as a masterpiece.
- It's such a unique record.
It somehow defies categorization,
it's not ambient, but could be.
It's not classical, but could be.
It's not rock, but could be.
It's not ethnic, but could be,
it's all of these things but it's not any of them,
it's Eno, basically
♪ The passage of time
♪ Is flicking dimly upon the screen ♪
♪ I can't see the lines
♪ I used to think I could read between ♪
♪ Perhaps my brains have turned to sand ♪
♪ Owe me oh my
- Another Green World has a kind of
peculiar quality that it seems like
it's a kind of unorthodox rock record,
but actually it's not really a rock record at all.
There are only a smattering of songs,
but it feels like there are more.
It feels when you listen to the record
that it's half and half, but it isn't.
It's very carefully sequenced.
But also because the nature of the songs
is such that they fit together.
They're of a piece, the instrumentals feel like
comments on the songs, or vice versa.
And it's a very alluring record because
it's full of beautiful melodies,
again something that I think is overlooked in Eno.
♪ Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled ♪
- Why do I take Eno seriously?
Another Green World.
Another Green World is one of my favourite records
of all time.
It's a record,
it's a record I play.
It's a record when I was in Honduras
adopting my daughter, that was the
record we played for her to put her asleep.
It was a record that has really meant,
and that was nine years after it came out.
It was a big deal in my life, and it still is.
I love every minute of it.
The way it's sequenced, it's just a brilliant
piece of work.
It's my opinion,
it's as perfectly realized as an album can be.
(ambient music)
This is a masterpiece.
It comes like right in the beginning
of the punk explosion.
Serious change in the air, musically
but this record has nothing to do
on the surface, with what any of that change is about.
It's called Another Green World,
and people say, oh it's a technology record,
and yes, I suppose it is but
there's also something really pastoral.
I think I may have used the term technopastoral
when I reviewed it, if not, it'll do.
It's also a record that translates
perfectly well to CD.
Old records were made with sides then,
and sides mattered, really mattered sometimes.
Like on Before and After Science,
where the two sides are really rather different.
But in this case, it just flows,
beginning to end.
- Another Green World is one of my favourite Eno albums,
absolutely, it's a tour de force,
I don't think anybody would disagree.
There's a certain beautiful appreciation
of the role of the miniature,
which I think in influence,
the more melodic settee pieces,
Debussy, you almost look to the classical music
of late 19th century France, really,
and this sense of creating small moments,
and to me that's just perfect.
(ambient music)
- Eno at that point was making electronic music
that wasn't abrasive or any of the things
we'd associated with the 60's electronic
composes like Stockhausen, it was quite lullying,
quite sedative, and I think people,
a lot of people had a problem with that
before it was too tranquil, almost like muzak.
He's doing this music that's kind of
like just fading away into the sort
of twilight zone, and so it's very,
it's sort of coming out of psychedelia in a way,
like the more dreamy dejected side of psychedelia
that you get with certain Pink Floyd songs,
but it's also looking ahead to ambient music
which is very much about kind of surrender
and the individual blending into the environment
and sort of fading away, losing a sense of yourself.
So it's really radical record.
- [Narrator] During the same period,
Eno was also working on an equally radical
concept for a record label.
The release of Another Green World in September '75
was the first signal to his audience
that a new Eno was emerging,
one who would be moving even further
from the conventions of rock,
and attempting to take them with him.
His long haired androgynous appearance
of the Roxy days was morphing into a modest
and academic image more befitting an avant-garde composer.
And Obscure Records was the real evidence
that Eno's interests lay outside of the rock world.
A concept developed over time with his
Portsmouth Symphonia colleague, Gavin Bryars,
it was a label focused on promoting the work
of experimental composers, and would eventually
release 10 titles between 1975 and 1978.
Despite their initial reservations,
Island Records agreed to manufacture
and distribute the results of this experiment.
- The Obscure Label's significance is
completely underheralded.
It gave the first exposure to Gavin Bryars
on record to Michael Nyman, to Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
Et cetera.
And I think one of the things that Brian
says about it now is that he wanted
to set it up because he wanted to release
Sinking of the Titanic.
(ambient music)
- He went to see Gavin Bryars,
and he told him that I really gotta work on this
because of their friendship over the years,
and Eno find himself with the Sinking of the Titanic
was absolutely monumental piece of music,
and should be heard by the world in general.
The Obscure Album series of 10 records
that Eno persuaded either the records
to put out in the early '70s is possibly
the single most important thing he
did for the European and American avant-garde.
What he was doing was basically opening
the doors to hundreds of thousands of people
to the avant-garde, to this music that
had been struggling underneath the mainstream
for years and never been heard.
- [Narrator] Among the experimental composers
whose work had thus far been unheard
outside of the avant-garde underground
were John Adams, Michael Nyman and Harold Budd,
all of whom would become major names in modern composition.
Eno had a hand in the production of all of the LPs,
and was intent on finding suitable material,
and even relatively unknown artists within
the experimental field itself.
David Toop, whose work was captured
on the fourth Obscure Records release,
was one such composer.
- It was a big jump,
to suddenly be in Basing Street Studios.
(laughs) In this big studio and
given not much time, a few days,
but given some time in a studio like that
with an experienced producer, Brian,
and an experienced engineer, Rhett Davis,
and the opportunity to make some work
in that situation, yeah it was great of course.
Suddenly you had a position to work from.
The records were reviewed and
people were baffled by them or they liked them,
or they hated them, or whatever,
but there they were.
They weren't something that was just
a little gig somewhere that you could totally ignore
and say it was nothing to do with
the rest of the world.
And yeah, that was a great initiative.
(ambient music)
You could say that Brian really caught
the zeitgeist, and in some respects by accident.
He was getting advised of course,
but he was in a pivotal position.
He was in this world where he had power,
and let's face it, most of the artists,
all of the artists on Obscure had very little power
in that sense, at that time.
For all of us it presented our work
to a much bigger audience.
And I look back now and I think as A and R decision,
it was pretty solid.
That idea of channeling this very
yeah, obscure, sometimes difficult music
through the same channel that everybody else
who was very successful and famous was going through
was quite revolutionary.
- The fact that his name was on it,
I think allowed a lot of people who never
would have listened to this art music.
Gave them sort of permission to go out
and buy these albums, it made them curious.
They wouldn't have gone out and bought
non such album.
There were recordings being made
of some of these very composers, John Cage,
and others, but nobody was aware of them
except the obscure avant-garde music collectors.
So that crossing of bridges and using
his impomater to get these things made,
I'm sure that the only people who bought them
were other musicians really but (laughs)
or people who became other musicians.
I'm sure that a lot of people bought these albums.
A handful of people thought it was the first
beautiful note they'd ever heard in their life,
and other people were, what is this boring music?
I think that we need these wonderful windows
to discover things.
- [Narrator] And this window also gave Eno
the opportunity to release work of his own
that entirely fell outside of the domain of popular music.
Obscure's third release was Discreet Music,
an album on which he continued to develop
his unique artistic approach.
The second half of the LP was made up
of deconstructions of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major,
one of Eno's most beloved works.
Notated and conducted by Gavin Bryars.
Yet it was the A-side's title track
that spotlighted his singular vision
of the potential of technology and chance.
- Eno had set up these machines
to make music by themselves.
It was the fullest realization of Eno's
interest in cybernetics and systems.
He had actually built the system that made music.
And that made pretty interesting beautiful sounding music,
in a very kind of simple way.
You can actually look a the back of Discreet Music LP,
and make Discreet Music based on
the diagram that's on the back.
- It really is almost automatic music.
It's Eno setting a system in motion
and then standing back, and maybe adjust,
making a couple of little adjustments on the way,
on the fly, but for the most part,
just standing back.
It literally is a matter of
getting a tape loop going, and then
how many times are you gonna loop that?
How many times are you gonna let it play?
It was music played by machines.
(ambient music)
- It's funny though, I actually feel like
through almost all his stuff,
there's still this very strong sense of
it coming from a mind and a personality,
this attractive, inquisitive,
brilliant mind, there's a sort of serenity
and calmness to it, there just seems to
be part of his personality.
Even when there's no words, and there's no voice,
somehow in a funny sort of way, even though
it's meant to be emptying out his personality
and almost be this music without any author,
without any controlling self governing it,
it all feels like Eno.
(ambient music)
- In aleatoric music,
the choices made by the composer
reflect a lot more about the composer
than the composer would like people to think.
And these choices really reflect
decisions by the composer to create
a certain kind of experience.
Even though the experience is modulated
by this random intervention.
Eno, I think deep down he's sort of a romantic,
because you see underneath all of this
aleatoric process and generative processes,
you see decisions that are actually
quite humanistic and warm.
And so these intellectual decisions
are then informed by what I think
as we see over the years
a beautiful sense of melancholy melody.
And that permeates all of his best work.
A very quiet, specific kind of moodiness.
- [Narrator] The creative approach to
the first side of Discreet Music
was not the only innovation on the release.
As related in the sleeve notes accompanying the LP,
back in January 1975, Eno had been knocked down
by a taxi and rushed to hospital.
While recovering from his various injuries,
he was visited by ex-girlfriend, Judie Nylon,
who brought with her an album of harp music.
The resultant listening experience
while watching the winter rain against his window
would lead him to formulate a new concept.
And this concept he would term, ambient music.
- when he lies down he realizes that
he's put the record on such a low volume level
that he can hardly here it, and he decides
to just lie there and experience it at,
again, accidentally, as a new way of experiencing music.
Not only to experience it, but he
proceeds to make 45 records (laughs)
to be listened to under similar kinds of circumstance,
or not circumstance but a similar way,
to the extent that the volume of the music
you're listening to frequently falls
below the threshold of audibility.
- Sometimes a word can make a lot of difference,
and it suddenly lights up what the phenomenon is.
That phenomenon had been going on,
the phenomenon of music you walk into
and walk out of it.
LeMont was an example of that.
And the other so-called minimalists later, right?
Philip Glass and Steve Rich.
I think Brian, when he stamped it ambient,
then it suddenly lit up that idea
and explained in a simple way to other people,
it wasn't so esoteric, it was more like,
well hey, we have dinner parties,
and we put on music, and we're not listening
to it second by second, it's like
a kind of atmospheric.
So it was a good idea, an interesting idea
to put those atmospherics as,
hey, you're not supposed to be listening.
You can do whatever you want here.
- [Narrator] The concept was in fact far older
than the work of the American minimalists.
The French composer, Eric Satie,
had at the beginning of the 20th Century
developed a similar notion of mood-enhancing
background compositions, he had termed Furniture Music.
The concept and Satie's work had been revived
later in the century by Eno's great inspiration,
John Cage, who redefined even Satie's most
famous piano pieces, the Gymnopedies,
as furniture music, and a precursor
to his own experimental work.
Eno's concept of ambient music was a natural
progression of this model.
- Eno got an inspiration from Eric Satie
and the idea of furniture music,
the music that was just kind of decor
to your life, and it was something that kind of
tinted the mood in your home environment.
His idea was that it had to be
interesting enough that you could pay attention to it,
but ignorable,
it had to have that capacity to drift
back into the background.
And that's a very opposite to rock
kind of idea, rock is supposed to sort of
dominate your attention, it's supposed to
leap out of the radio, and
sort of jazz you up with energy,
and he was trying to look at all the
other things music can be, which is something that
calms you down, that sort of
just something you used to enhance your everyday life.
- Satie put it in terms of
music to have in the background in dinner
when the silence between friends would
kind of descend, and you'd need something
to fill in that uneasy gap.
(laughs) The ambient dinner music.
I think it's pretty much the same idea,
and it's the idea of, you want something
to tint the atmosphere, not to be
right in your face.
(peaceful classical music)
- None of his music is ambient.
It immediately hooks your attention.
It sounds simple, but it's not simple, is it?
It's grade A classical music, it's hard to play.
Where what Eno was looking for was
the simplicity of the creation,
the execution and the result.
Everything had to be absolutely simple.
So in many ways, Eno was stripping Satie
right down further.
And actually achieving what Satie never achieved,
because actually Satie used to play his
music to entertain people.
He used to make a living playing his music
in bars and clubs.
And people loved it.
As interludes between more raucous stuff
that will follow.
But his music will be listened to,
where Eno, Discreet Music is so
evanescent that you can put it on,
and you immediately do something else.
It doesn't arrest your attention.
What Eno achieved with ambient is actually
quite unique actually, it's more akin to John Cage.
I think as an idea, it might have something
to do with Satie, but in terms of music
it has very little do with Satie.
- [Narrator] Having established both the
Obscure Records label, and the concept of ambient music,
Eno immersed himself in collaborative work.
The end of 1975 had seen the release
of his second LP with Robert Fripp, Evening Star,
which continued their experiments with
tape delay and systems music.
Eno laid low for the first few months of 1976
before reemerging as part of a new ensemble.
The 801.
Formed by Phil Manzaneea as a short-term live outfit.
The band, which included old Roxy cohort, Lloyd Watson,
played two explosive shows at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
at the Reading Festival in the summer of 1976.
Performing not only cover versions of
The Beatles and The Kinks, but also material
from Eno's solo repertoire.
And although The 801 would bring Eno back to the stage
and to the more basic principles of rock and roll,
he was still intent on pushing the boundaries elsewhere.
And his next project would see him moving farther afield.
Where the punk rock explosion was set
to tear the music world apart later in 1976,
both the mainstream and its margins
had been conspicuously absent of experiment
since Eno had gone solo.
This was not the case however in Germany.
From the late 60's, a wave of bands had
emerged from the across the country
intent on revolutionizing music,
and finding their own distinctive voice
outside of the dominant American and English movements.
Like Eno, a number of these had been using
electronics to form a new musical vocabulary.
Most prominent were Kraftwerk,
the Dusseldorf duo whose proto-techno LP Autobahn
had charted in 1975 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Berlin acts who grew out of the legendary Zodiac Club
such as Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schultze
had also won support in the UK
thanks to their deals with Richard Branson's
fledging Virgin Records.
Eno had long admired the movement's output,
and it was the industrial electronics band,
Cluster, to which he would eventually be
drawn into collaboration.
By 1973, this act, the duo of improvisors,
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius
had become to work with guitarist Michael Rother
of Dusseldorf's Neu to form a new outfit
that move away from the severe soundscapes
of their earlier output.
- If you listen to Cluster '71, or Cluster,
or Cluster 2, the records are so cold.
They are so dissonant, they are so lacking
in melodic, they've got no melodic progression.
They are so astringent,
they feel like what was left in Berlin
after the Russian blew it to smithereens.
(ambient music)
They were very depressed,
and they said we're getting out of this whole scene.
We've had enough of Berlin,
we've had enough of the Zodiac Club
and all this rubbish, and all the records
we've made were out, we're going to first
in the country.
So they went to this old stone country house
in the middle of a forest, where they started again.
And this time they started to make
records that were different.
And they brought with them Michael Rother from Neu,
and they started to make records that
were completely different, there wasn't
this cold kind of just (moans)
like a drone or this, there were things with rhythm.
And they made their music from harmonia, they called it.
And this album was what Eno heard,
that was the one that he thought was
absolutely fantastic.
(ambient music)
- [Narrator] Released in January 1974,
the debut album of this new unit Harmonia,
was a relatively low key release.
Yet upon hearing it, Eno was so impressed
that he declared in interview
that they were the world's most important rock band.
Typically, this wasn't simply a statement
to prove his avant-garde credentials,
even before recording Another Green World,
Eno had made his way to Hamburg to watch the group play.
Not content with simply being a spectator,
he had decided to actively participate in the concert,
and join them on stage.
- We met him in person in 1974.
And before we knew about his music of course,
we knew what he did with Roxy Music,
we knew some of his solo stuff as well,
and we liked it, and we were quite happy
when he entered the stage and wanted to play with us.
There was a lot of machinery, organs and guitars
and little machines, hand-made machines
with knobs to turn, was easy to interfere,
and he was at least, he knew everything about tools,
so he was, for him it was easy to
play with us, and for us as well because
it was improvisation and we just listened to each other
and tried to do something relevant of course.
And then we spoke about a project,
not really, we just invited him to come to our place,
our rural place
in the middle of Germany, and he said he would like to,
and two years later, he came.
- [Narrator] It was the late summer of 1976
when Eno finally managed to work with Harmonia.
Arriving with the intention of producing
their third album, he found that limited time
and working with a group of musicians
unwilling to adapt to the more conventional
processes of composing and recording
meant that instead he simply became immersed
in their isolated world.
- We lived in a community when Brian came
and joined us, and what we did was,
everybody had his own track,
nobody, there was no overdubbing at all,
it was just making the sketch,
writing a sketchbook full of little sketches.
But more or less living together and doing work together,
going in the woods, collecting wood,
taking care of the baby, Brian took
care of our baby when he was there,
he liked it a lot.
And he came with us in the woods and
he came with us shopping and he cooked with us,
and I think he liked much more the
being in a community,
sitting with us in the kitchen,
eating with us, talking to us.
I think he came with the idea to produce
somehow what, produce us as Harmonia,
but this didn't work out at all because
we had no time to really take care of
the real studio work.
We had to go to work.
So at the end he was just member
of a four-people group, and he did his part,
and we did our part, it was
a matter of sympathy, for he liked the three of us,
even so we were very different.
He could cope with us,
and we liked him because he's a
very friendly and nice person.
And full of ideas.
Now he was, from the beginning he was a friend.
(ambient music)
When first it meant it came out, this stuff,
it was a sketchbook and nobody really thought
that some day it would be coming out.
I kept most of the material copy of the tapes,
Brian took three tapes when he left,
and after some time I said, what are we going to
do with this material?
Everybody said, oh it's bad.
The quality is bad, music is, we don't know.
Just forget about it.
- [Narrator] But Roedelius did not forget about
the recordings, and set about remastering them
once the technology was available.
Released in 1997, over 20 years after the original sessions,
Tracks and Traces was a vital artifact
of a unique collaboration.
- I think they had a lot of fun.
I think it was very relaxed.
There was no sense of it being a record necessarily.
So all of those prescriptive limitations
were removed.
And I think that enabled creation in a freedom of creation.
I think the music that resulted shows that,
because it's often,
while it has a certain structure
within that there are sequences on a couple of tracks,
and so forth, it is, there is a certain amount of
organization, it's all incredibly fluid,
and it's very organic, it's electronic music
as kind of, as flowing organic sound.
And things meld into each other, it's not
kind of Kraftwerk-ian electronica,
which is mechanical, robotic.
Brilliant in another way, but this
it's incredibly reflective of this rural environment
in which they were in almost.
By the river Wesser, I think it is which,
yeah, it has that fluidity,
a riverine kind of quality and
it's a very beautiful record.
(ambient music)
If they'd been blues musicians,
it would have been similarly organic, you imagine,
this laid back, in the country,
let's kick back and play some licks, almost.
But these licks of a rather alien kind,
this hadn't really been done before, I think.
So in that sense it's a very novel record as well,
and this has the spirit of
the sort of woodshed about it,
and yeah, I think it's quite timeless in that sense.
- [Narrator] Upon Eno's return to the UK,
he became involved in another electronic project.
John Fox, the founder of emerging New Wave band Ultravox
had been heavily influenced, not only
by Eno's work in Roxy Music, but also
by the bands of the German movement.
And convinced him to co-produce their debut album.
While in the studio, Eno took a phone call
that offered work on a far higher profile project.
David Bowie, who Roxy Music had supported
back in 1972 had long wanted to collaborate with Eno,
and his latest project had reached a creative standstill.
- Bowie was very impressed with Discreet Music,
that was the thing he really liked.
He played that a lot.
And he wanted to get some of that
initially on to the record he was producing for Iggy Pop,
which was The Idiot.
In the Chateau d'arivile, in the Northern Paris suburbs.
But it doesn't transpire in the end because
Iggy finishes the record too fast basically.
So Bowie's then kicking his heels in the Chateau,
with some time,
and so starts making tracks of his own.
He's been in a bit of an artistic lull himself,
and a slight writer's block.
Which he's come to Europe partly to overcome.
And so though he begins working on
what would come the tracks for Low,
towards the end of the process,
Bowie remembers Eno, and gives him a call.
He didn't produce it, Tony Visconti was
the producer, but Eno did come and he did
sprinkle his sonic magic on it.
Certainly the synthesizer textures are all his.
David Bowie was very impressed with Another Green World,
and the fact that he had these instrumentals and
songs on the same album and he wanted to do that,
and I think Eno was also instrumental
in convincing Visconti that this was a good idea,
they needed to fill out the rest of the album,
they didn't have enough tracks,
so they started making instrumentals.
This was very, very Eno-esque thing to do,
so that's why you get side two of Low.
It sounds a little bit like an Eno record.
- [Narrator] Released in January 1977,
Low reconfirmed that Bowie was a serous innovative artist,
and became a landmark in his eclectic canon.
Yet the initial response of both his record company
and in some quarters of the rock press,
had been resoundingly negative,
due in part to Eno's contributions.
(ambient music)
- RCA Records hated it, they didn't wanna release it.
It was the kind of record that
record labels generally sort of say,
go in and do us another one please.
And I'm sure Brian was the whipping boy for that,
because he'd gone in there with his
arty textures and, but of course Bowie loved it.
Bowie wanted some of that, Bowie
was trying to reinvent his artistry,
he was trying to find a new way,
post-cocaine binging, post-LA,
post-funk, et cetera to have a new creative spur.
He needed Eno to finish that record,
and also I think to just pull him through
into the next phase of, his next creative of life.
(ambient music)
- Side Two of Low, sounded to me a little bit like
Cluster, actually, but in a very good way.
And I loved it.
I mean, it's a very important album.
I think it's really one of,
that series with Eno are the three best Bowie albums,
I think most people would argue.
And I like the fact they are concise,
that they're song structures.
Which Discreet Music avoids and I think
those pieces on Low benefit
from the melodicism and again it's that
more approachable touch of the melody
and the conciseness I think.
(ambient music)
- Low was just this hugely influential record,
probably in terms of the music that came out
in the late '70s, it had more influence
than some of the more obvious punk landmarks.
Particularly the second side of the album
were these dreamy instrumentals,
that was very, very inspiring to a whole
load of post-punk musicians.
And I think although Eno, if you look
at the song credits, he doesn't get many credits on them,
and he's not actually the producer of the record,
he seems, just seems that he has such a
presence, and particularly on the second side of Low.
He's so much like a sort of right-hand man,
spiritual mentor to Bowie.
And Bowie talked about leaning on Eno,
because he needed, he wanted to express
what he wanted to express through textures,
he couldn't find the words to describe this
sort ethereal alienated state he was in.
And so that was Eno's province was sonic textures.
♪ Share my failing shall
♪ Kill thy kill thy kill thy
♪ Bribing the shelly shelly shelly on ♪
I think Eno has a lot to do with the
sort of landscape in which these songs take place,
and the atmosphere and the textures that
sort of create the mood.
So in that sense you've got things that
look ahead to ambient music but there's some
still something to latch on to for people,
and that's probably why it was a gateway
for a lot of people into that kind of
more atmospheric, completely unfocused,
unstructured music that Eno would do later.
- [Narrator] Following his stint with Bowie,
Eno returned to his own work and found
that the follow-up to Another Green World
was lacking focus.
Despite having written several songs
and producing numerous sessions,
the results lacked the cohesion he was looking for.
But a new breed of music was emerging
out of the embers of punk, and this he found inspiring.
He called the New York band, Talking Heads,
on their European tour.
And was both impressed by their performance,
and by front man David Byrne.
And the pair struck up a strong friendship.
During a trip to the US with Bowie,
he was also in the audience for a show by
kitsch surrealists, Devo, who successfully
merged punk with Kraftwerk.
And he agreed to produce their debut.
In June however, he returned to more familiar territory,
entering the studio of peerless German producer
Conny Plank, to work with Cluster on a
pair of albums that would once again
see him blending seamlessly with Moebius and Roedelius,
Cluster and Eno, and After the Heat.
- We got together and worked in his studio,
about a week, and did the two records in one week.
Cluster and Eno, it was more or less a Cluster record
with Eno, and the second was an Eno record
with Cluster.
Nothing was planned.
We didn't have any idea when we went in the studio,
we were like we were,
the abilities were, I was not much into
contemporary music, I listened a lot to
contemporary music but I couldn't,
I myself had to find my own turning which,
so I was always on the way to find out
what can I do, and which way can I
collaborate and put my little bits into it?
It was like living in the forest in the community,
Conny Plank's cooked all the food,
we were together, we slept in the same house,
we worked together.
It was, I think that was the reason why
Cluster and Eno was in the same
atmosphere like, Harmonia '76.
(ambient music)
- The Cluster and Eno album I think of
as a sort of partner to Another Green World
in many ways, it seems to share a kind of
vocabulary of atmosphere in a way that's
similar, and obviously the influence of Cluster
is there on Another Green World.
In a way I think we Cluster you have
the Another Green World approach, but you have Roedelius,
and his classical piano parts which are
in and of themselves, beautiful, vignette things.
And I think you get that sense that
he's got something to play off.
When you have someone like Roedelius
who can just play three chords and a counterpoint,
and give you this kind of, sort of genteel
sense of Teutonic heart land romance.
You have a lot to then throw your armory at,
and I think that's really what he did
and I think that, so it relates to Another Green World,
but it's also got its own flavor.
(ambient music)
- There's moments on the final albums
that are astonishing.
What I always liked about Cluster's collaboration
was that you have two almost opposite psyches,
you have such two different personalities.
Roedelius being very sweet, melodic l,
repetitive gentleness, and these
sorts of mischievous destruction by Mobi,
it just makes me laugh,
the two are fighting each other.
You know? (laughs)
And I think that by adding perhaps that
mediating factor, which Eno has been so good at doing
as a producer, he often just becomes a catalyst.
Perhaps he's not even making many of the sounds,
and he's simply creating an environment where
they're doing what they're doing
in a more productive way.
- [Narrator] The two albums not only confirmed
that Eno was an innovative musical collaborator,
but their success, like the Obscure Records releases,
once again proved that he was able to spotlight
and promote marginal artists.
Cluster were a relatively unknown act
outside of Germany, and these LPs
introduced them to a far larger audience.
- It brought us a lot of attention.
It made it so, we survived with it,
because these records sold a lot.
Not really in one short period,
but over the years.
And now it's still selling, it's still selling,
people like these records very much.
I mean, it's quality, it's just,
he knows what's, I think he obviously knows
when somebody's doing well and relevant stuff,
and he helps to bring them out.
I think it's his message, in a way.
Besides his own work.
- [Narrator] Eno's work as a musical collaborator
continued into July 1976,
as he entered Hanza Studios in Berlin
to work on the follow-up to Low.
This time, he was actively involved
in the compositions, and introduced Bowie
to the Oblique Strategies, which the singer
enthusiastically adopted to develop material
in the studio.
Yet the process of recording Heroes,
which would become one of Bowie's most successful LP's,
was not without struggle, and the recordings
required the assistance of one of Eno's
long-term collaborators before the various
pieces finally fell into place.
- Bowie hit a creative zero in the studio.
Even with Eno, they came to full stop, a dead stop,
where they couldn't get any further.
And Eno suggested, well why don't we bring in other people
into this scenario?
And Bowie said who?
Well Robert Fripp is free, he's not doing anything.
He's at home in England somewhere in his house,
and well, I'll give him a ring.
And Bowie said, "Great", and Bowie rang
Robert and Eno said "Robert, sit down,
"someone wants to speak to you, it's very important",
and he put Bowie on the phone, and he said,
"It's David here, David Bowie, can you come tonight?
"Fly to Germany, we want to record a track,
"we're recording an album, and we want you to be on it".
And he said, "What?", and he said "Yes, now",
so literally that's what happened.
Fripp was flown to Germany, came from the airport,
Berlin airport to the Hanza Berlin wall,
with his guitar case, Eno said "Okay, there you go,
"here's the track, start".
That was it, it was like instant.
And Heroes was born, that was it,
once that was started.
The album just went, swish.
(triumphant pop music)
♪ I
♪ I wish you could swim
♪ Like the dolphins
♪ Like dolphins could swim
♪ Though nothing
♪ Nothing will keep us together ♪
♪ We can beat them
♪ Forever and ever
♪ We can be heroes
♪ Just for one day
- Heroes I think is a more successful
record on some terms, than Low.
It works because it's a much
more of a partnership between Bowie and Eno sonically.
And Robert Fripp as well.
So you have a track like Heroes,
itself, the title track, famously
started out as this sort of Beach Boys chug,
keyboard chug, they gave the call to Robert Fripp,
who had been in monastic seclusion until that point,
and jetted into Berlin to play on the
first record he played on for, I dont know how long.
A couple of years I think, and that was Heroes.
They played it back, they played all three takes,
and famously Visconti had put in all three up
to see what they sounded like,
and Eno said, "Let's have all three, they sound great".
And in that sense, that was his, it was done very quickly.
But Brian's involvement in that record
ended before the vocals went down.
- The second side of the album
is definitely dominated by Eno.
There are tracks on the second side
which are like Moss Garden, which are just pure Eno.
It's got absolutely the trademark
of Eno's, these things going across the sky,
these amazing plane sounds, and of course
Bowie's on it playing a Koto,
but the dominance of the track is Eno.
(ambient music)
In a lot of ways it's a better record than Low.
Heroes is a much better record,
it's a much more positive record.
The song side is very strong,
it's as strong, V2 Schneider, all those songs,
the songs are stronger on side one,
the instrumental tracks are again much better.
It's definitely the best of the two records.
- [Narrator] With Heroes completed,
Eno finally set about finishing
his fourth solo album proper for Island Records.
With such a stop/start approach to the recordings,
he had collected dozens of tracks
with a large number of players,
and because the work was so sporadic,
he was struggling to form a coherent whole.
- Several sessions, several weeks,
months passed by.
He was just accumulating tracks
that were becoming more and more of a headache
to navigate his way through and
to find a way to edit.
And this process never really stopped.
It just ground on and on and on,
until he had enough tracks to make a record.
I think, I don't think I'm doing him a disservice
to say that in the end he had to say,
this record's never gonna be finished,
let's agree that it stops here and
put it out.
- [Narrator] And so in December 1977,
the LP was finally issued.
Eno himself had reservations,
concerned that an album culled from
such disparate sessions would be incoherent,
with certain tracks recorded in a recognizable
rock format, and others taken from his work
with Cluster, and his own ambient experiments.
Yet Before and After Science won widespread
acclaim upon its release.
And after Another Green World and Discreet Music,
the rock press in particular were glad
to see the return of Eno the songwriter.
- Before and After Science was
a really troublesome record to make.
Because having had a certain degree of
success with Another Green World
and the various collaborations that followed,
he kind of put off, what's my next thing gonna be?
'Cause for the first time, he hadn't had
a hospitalization where he was lying there thinking,
I've got the shining light of a new idea has occurred.
That didn't occur so they didn't have time
to have a thought really.
And lot of the ideas he'd had had
been played out in the collaborations.
In a way, the next logical record
would have been Music For Airports,
which came out in '78, which was the ambient
dawn record.
Whereby the whole process of removing
the foreground instruments that had begun
in the beginning of his solo career
had sort of found a logical Rothco-ian fruition.
Where as this record between,
Before and After Science is,
it's kind of awkward in that lineage,
and I think because it was awkward to make.
(fast rock music)
♪ Dark alley
♪ Black star
♪ Four turkies in a big black car ♪
♪ The road is shiny
♪ The wheels slide
♪ Four turkeys going for a dangerous ride ♪
♪ The lacquer crackles
♪ The engine roars
♪ The ship is turning broadside to the shore ♪
♪ Splish splash I was raking in the cash ♪
♪ With biology a purpose keeps my nose above the surface ♪
♪ Kings lead hat but the innocence inside her ♪
♪ It will come it will come it will surely come ♪
♪ King's made hat was a mother to desire ♪
♪ It will come it will come it will surely come ♪
- I love Before and After Science.
But it was more in the same direction
as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
It was interesting in that Another Green World
and Discreet Music, which both came out in 1975,
signified this very strong change
in the way that Eno's sails were sort of blowing.
But then you have, Before and After Science,
which is sort of more of a rock record.
I think there is some really incredible
beautiful songs on Before and After Science.
There are incredible spastic kind of rocking songs
like King's Lead Hat.
Then you have incredibly beautiful soft
sort of hushed lullabys like Spider and I.
Really, really beautiful songwriting
on Before and After Science.
- [Narrator] As had been done with the Bowie records,
Eno divided the album between an uptempo A-side,
and an downbeat, semi-ambient B.
- On all those records that subdivide the Bowie records
that he worked on before, the quieter stuff
always comes second.
That seems to be the hangover over the party, as it were.
And that this record's no different to that.
It's not the most cohesive record,
it doesn't really read in the way
that say Another Green World does.
That lovely kind of processional trip
that he takes.
It's much more isolated essays or vignettes almost,
but there's some beautiful things on it
and again it's that range,
it has a track that's co-authored by Roedelius,
which takes us back to the Cluster,
rural idyll, there's King's Lead Hat
which is a jokey Talking Heads mon-kay track,
and All Stations In Between.
♪ Here we are
♪ Stuck by this river
♪ You and I
♪ Underneath the sky that's ever falling down ♪
♪ Down down
♪ Ever falling down
- Before and After Science, my two favourite tracks
are on the B-side of Before and After Science,
By This River, and Julie With,
those two songs are so static,
they move so slowly, they're literally
sound painting on to tape,
you put them on, and by the end of them
you're in a different place,
you're brought into an environment.
And they have incredible beauty,
and almost religious, there's something very
sacred about that music.
Eno has finally found a complete mastery
of his own talent, his ability to sing,
to construct sound, to play instruments,
to make music, this is music now.
This is no longer experiment, this is truly music.
It's evolved into music.
(ambient music)
- On the second half of Before and After Science,
I think you have much more interesting
successful songs like
Julie With, By This River.
They have these characters that
we've never really seen in rock before
that are very kind of listless,
they've got no willpower, they've got no drive,
they're kind of marooned in some sense.
And I think that Eno was drawn to these
passive, serene, slightly, melancholy scenarios,
just because they were so different from rock music,
and also probably because it suits his personality.
He's not like a rock rebel.
And with his music, he was really kind of rebelling
against rebellion, the sort of ossified
notions of rebellion, exemplified by a band
like The Rolling Stones, which he didn't like at all.
And also by punk at that time was
kind of the opposite of what he was looking for.
- [Narrator] And as the music scene shifted around him,
Eno's next act of rebellion would be
to abolish song structures entirely in his own work.
Although he would go on to produce
more conventional albums by other artists,
Before and After Science was Eno's last vocal album
for two decades.
With hindsight, the clues were there
on the album's more downbeat abstract side.
- By the time of Before and After Science,
I mean, you can hear on the second side
he is moving off into the ether where
he has remained ever since.
King's Lead Hat ends the first side,
and then that second side, while that's okay,
he's definitely thinking about other things
besides writing good songs.
- If you look at The Beatles' most creative period,
let's just say between Help, Rubber Soul,
Revolver and Sergeant Pepper,
that's a four album sequence
that has some consequence.
Eno's sequence has a similar consequence,
but he emerges on the other end
not as The Beatles did with the White Album
where they threw out all the experimental stuff
and said, "Let's get back to basics".
Eno emerges on the other end of his development,
and really goes into the ambient style.
So this series of what in my book I call
Eno's progressive rock albums I see really as
stripping away the elements of rock and roll
one by one, until by those final tracks
on Before and After Science.
You are already in the ambient style.
- [Narrator] The album's release marked
a turning point in Eno's career.
1978 would see him moving to New York,
and forging new creative relationships
with the younger generation of musicians.
It would also see him further the concept
of Obscure Records to a new series of releases
that would draw him into collaboration
with more experimental artists,
and spotlight his concept of ambient music.
Yet his later achievements were only possible
due to this first period of his career
when he had emerged from one of the most
important rock acts of the era to establish himself
as a truly unique figure in music.
A fearless collaborator and sonic architect
who produced his own form of pop,
while at the same time bringing experimental music
closer to the mainstream than it had ever been.
- Brian Eno made the stuff sexy,
he made it interesting, he made it fun,
he made it fleshy and had life.
Part of the problem with a lot of this
kind of academic experimental music,
it's very kind of stiff and uptight
in a certain way.
Meanwhile, Eno was making it not so very serious,
but more rock and roll and more interesting
for your average listener to tune into.
- [Narrator] At the same time
the sheer level of activity during this period
of his career produced many of the seeds
that were allowed to bloom later.
For many, his early experiments,
his collaborations and his four vocal solo albums
released between 1973 and 1977
remain the most important works
in his extensive canon.
- It's only five years, put five years
where this individual has made more music
than 100 individuals in a lifetime.
In five years.
To start with Roxy Music and end with
Before and After Science, and Bowie,
it's just nothing could be better really
for an artist, to end on a high.
And then for the rest of his life now,
he had established himself as a producer,
as a composer, as a studio boffin,
as a theorist, he was set for life.
- Brian's creative life is incredibly
accelerated in this mid-70s period,
he's practically working on something
every time he's awake, he's working on something.
There was no one else like him in that sense.
You don't really see the newspapers
looking for the new Eno at any point
because he is a singularity.
He's the art school, he's the particular
kind of music, he's a kind of rock star,
he's a kind of producer, he's a kind of artist,
he's a kind of executive.
He's all these things and he's
either or a dilettante or a polymath,
in which side you come from.
Probably a mixture of both.