Brass Trax

Brian Eno is a hard man to put into words. The self-confessed “non-musician” who purportedly can’t play or read a lick of music nonetheless shares responsibility for a massive body of work that comprises everything from the glam rock of Roxy Music to the alienating and funky tape experiments of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; from the diaphanous Ambient 1: Music for Airports to the muscular arena rock of U2. A prodigious theorist of his own music, Eno falls somewhere between prophet and charlatan, bullshit artist and autodidactic philosopher.

To say that Eno is a study in contradictions is to state the obvious, and David Sheppard’s new biography On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno is anything but obvious. In 434 sprawling, occasionally grandiloquent pages, Sheppard lays bare Eno’s contradictions, offering a thorough overview of a man whose work and influence remain inseparable from the fabric of contemporary popular music. The book is an authorized biography, with its objectivity suitably compromised, but it offers a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of an artist who bridged the gap between the avant garde and the popular, between high and low art.

Eno was born in Suffolk, a homely stretch on the eastern coast of England, the son of a postman. Humble beginnings for a man who would become part of the British rock aristocracy. A tinkerer by nature, Eno quickly found himself in art school, where he would forsake a career in painting to dabble in sound art, fixing second hand recording equipment and synthesizers to use as instruments. As a student, Eno was enthralled with the then faddish ideas of John Cage, whose music of chance celebrated the random outcomes of systems rather than the virtuosity of the composer. Eno outfitted his hip theories with a vain and outlandish wardrobe that drifted in theme from Victorian undertaker to androgynous scene maker, depending on what he was doing that day. Needless to say, he stood out in the crowd.

Eno’s art school connections and recording gear would bring him into the orbit of Roxy Music, the nascent glam rock project of Bryan Ferry. What the band lacked in chops and touring experience it made up for in music industry connections and hype. By the time its first record was released, Roxy Music would be the talk of the British music press.

Eno, performing under his surname alone, was more than Roxy Music’s recording technician—he sculpted the band’s sound. By feeding the ensemble’s instruments through his synthesizers, Eno made the ragtag performers sound polished and otherworldly, their amateurism effaced by noise and gimmickry. The music struck some critics as terrible, but most were beguiled. Roxy followed the album with a hit single, “Virginia Plain,” and solidified its position in the pantheon of British glam rock.

Listen to “Virginia Plain” by Roxy Music

Eno polished his stock as the mysterious mastermind behind the band, even as Ferry handled all the songwriting and heavy lifting required to make the music in the first place. Nonetheless, it was Eno who got the interviews, and, significantly, Eno who got the groupies. The legendarily priapic pervert—who reportedly holds one of the world’s great collections of pornography—would present Roxy Music with tales of sexual conquest and Polaroids to boot. It wasn’t long before the tension between the two Brians became untenable, and Ferry chased Eno out of the band.

That was fine with Eno. As his prominence increased, Eno had been making the rounds of the British avant garde, befriending composer Gavin Bryars, erstwhile King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and Velvet Underground violist John Cale. At the same time, Eno learned the theories behind American minimalism, becoming especially impressed by Steve Reich’s process music, which allowed the composer to create musical systems—like a microphone on a swinging pendulum—rather than to write conventional notes. The seeds for Eno’s future experiments had been germinated.

1973-74 was Eno’s annus mirabilis, during which he released three great albums (Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), and, with Fripp, (No Pussyfooting)) and one decent one (Lady June’s Linguisitic Leprosy, recorded with Kevin Ayers and Lady June). Eno’s work during this year would distance him from the glam world of Roxy Music and lay the primer for his later work in ambient music.

Here Come the Warm Jets, while undoubtedly a great record, still bore the stamp of Roxy Music. Add a few superfluous flute parts to “Baby’s On Fire,” and there would be little evidence that it wasn’t a Bryan Ferry original. Nonetheless, tunes like “Blank Frank,” with its reverb-drenched Fripp guitar workout, and “Here Come the Warm Jets,” with its soaring guitar fuzz, marked Eno’s stake in the developing territory of art rock.

Listen to “Blank Frank” by Brian Eno
Listen to “Here Come the Warm Jets” by Brian Eno

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), by contrast, was all Eno. Composed using his newly devised Oblique Strategies, a collection of gnomic koans (”Do nothing for as long as possible”; “Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention”), which Eno would eventually publish as a card deck, Taking Tiger Mountain would come together, in parts, by happenstance. It’s a robust expression of Eno’s aesthetic—minimalism gone weird. It’s a song cycle glancingly about Communist China (the album’s title comes from a Maoist opera) replete with obscured references to espionage and combat. Fertile area for a man obsessed with systems and their interaction.

Listen to “Fat Lady of Limbourg” by Brian Eno
Listen to “Third Uncle” by Brian Eno

1975 would visit tragedy upon Eno. An accident on the ice would nearly kill him, splitting his head open and leaving him helpless in a London road. During his convalescence, Eno would have the epiphany while listening to 18th century harp music and the rain blend together that would lead to ambient music. The results, Discreet Music and, a few years later, Ambient 1: Music for Airports would strive to be self-effacing sound events that blended into the ambient environment rather than standing apart from it. The idea was a radical application of modern, academic ideas about music; it brought avant garde composition out of the classroom and, literally, into the environment.

Listen to “1/1″ by Brian Eno

The vocal albums Eno would release during the remainder of the decade—Another Green World and Before and After Science—would cobble together his disparate influences to become virtual showcases of the best of 70s art rock. Another Green World, with its John Cale-meets-Krautrock fusion still tops critics’ best-of lists, and its best moments “Sky Saw,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “I’ll Come Running,” rank among the best music Eno has ever made. (Cale, along with fellow-travellers Phil Collins, Robert Fripp, Percy Jones, and Brian Turrington, contributed vastly to the album’s success.) Before and After Science, with its angular perkiness and pastoral interludes, would presage post-punk.

Listen to “Sky Saw” by Brian Eno
Listen to “St. Elmo’s Fire” by Brian Eno

As the seventies neared a close, Eno’s solo recordings would be eclipsed by his work in the production booth. Starting with David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, which would see the erstwhile glam rocker reborn as a brooding intellectual, Eno worked his magic on a series of bands, reshaping them in his own image. (As Sheppard emphasizes, Eno was not the actual producer of Bowie’s Berlin work, and it’s easy to overstate his influence on those records. Still, masterpieces like “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and “Heroes” would be unimaginable without Eno’s hand twiddling the controls.)

Listen to “Always Crashing in the Same Car” by David Bowie
Listen to “Heroes” by David Bowie

After Berlin would come Eno’s sojourn in New York, a city with which he formed a mutual appreciation. (”Eno is God” became a common graffito around Manhattan.) Besides curating No New York, the epochal statement of No Wave, Eno would befriend a skinny and unassuming Scot, David Byrne, and produce three albums with his band, Talking Heads. Fusing a newfound love of African music and funk with the band’s angular energy (the Heads, too, were funk fans), Eno would help the Talking Heads release some of the best popular music ever recorded. Eno and Byrne grew close; recording sessions with the other band members grew invidious; and Eno would eventually leave New York behind. But his experience in the studio with the group would ready him to make an arguably bigger impact when he helmed the recordings for arena rockers U2.

Listen to “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” by Talking Heads
Listen to “The Jezebel Spirit” by Brian Eno & David Byrne
Listen to “Bullet the Blue Sky” by U2

Sheppard’s biography does an excellent job of charting Eno’s connections among the various popular and avant garde music scenes that he occupied. The book ties Eno’s music to his ideas, and Sheppard, a musician himself, has a knack for pinpointing what is great about any given Eno track and for identifying the continuities that make an album cohere. On Some Faraway Beach furnishes the recipe for Eno’s alchemy: the mad science that made avant garde art into pop culture.

Sheppard never condescends to the reader, even when discussing music theory, and deploys a rarefied vocabulary that is frankly surprising in a book about rock music. Unfortunately, Sheppard’s excessive erudition occasionally obscures his point. Sheppard comes from the British music press, where a certain level of eloquence is prized, but he shares the corresponding habit of overburdening his sentences with superlatives. These unwieldy grammatical units, in turn, tend to mask changes in tone, say from disinterest to irony or sarcasm. And you can’t begrudge a reader her wish that the superfluous adverb “duly” be struck from Sheppard’s vocabulary; it appears on nearly every page.

Questions of style aside, On Some Faraway Beach suffers from a more serious fault: Sheppard rarely criticizes Eno. You could walk away from the book imagining that Eno was a true rock and roll saint, that he never recorded or produced anything that just sucked. Surely, after 41 albums recorded under his own name and countless others recorded for other people, this cannot be the case.

Sheppard remains obsequious when discussing Eno’s personal life and opinions. While it might not be the rock critic’s place to pass moral judgment on his subject, characterizing a 1979 sex tourism jaunt to Thailand as “indulging in local hospitality” might ring as unaccountably neutral. Indeed, Sheppard generally dismisses Eno’s troubled relationship with women in general—witness a discarded wife, a pile of cast-off ex-girlfriends, and a nasty habit of fetishizing ethnically “exotic” women‐as irascible charm. Eno’s quasi-racist embrace, in the seventies, of Krautrockers Cluster, who, in his words, offered “a sort of alternative to the African root that most other pop music had taken (sic),” finds an equally receptive audience. (The irony that Eno’s triumphs with Talking Heads would come by way of colonizing African pop music goes unremarked upon.)

Being Eno’s bro has less dire consequences for Sheppard’s book. We get a fair share of amusing anecdotes. Eno can’t drive. Eno and David Byrne hate Los Angeles. (Byrne begrudged Angelenos their leisure: “Everybody was just relaxing in the sun all day, tossing Frisbees around.” Eno was less equivocal: “L.A. is a city ‘I roundly despised for everything except its benign temperature and a couple of nice people I met there.’”) Eno’s friendly advice to free jazz titan Don Cherry was to add more repetition to his music.

Indeed, criticism aside, On Some Faraway Beach presents a striking vista on the life of Brian Eno and a staggering argument that he is one of the great curators and futurists of our time. That it’s essential reading for Enophiles should go without saying, but it should also be on the bookshelf of anybody curious about how the avant-garde infiltrated popular culture over the past three decades.

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