Brian Eno
At WHQ we love Brian Eno… It’s really hard to know where to begin in speaking about him, as he has been such a massive influence on us. It’s true to say that without Brian’s influence & inspiration there might not be a World Headquarters Club….
So, what we willl do is start at the begining & for those of you who are like us, Brian fans, please bear with us as a lot of people still are not aware of his work & we are gonna share what he means to us, with them now, to turn them on to him too.
Roxy Music.
Roxy music were not always the cod, mainstream band that they ended up as. When they first came out they were far out & totally fresh & new. When you think of them you probably think of Brian Ferry..?
But when we think of them & the records they made that we hold dear & that have truly stood the test of time, we think of Brian Eno. As a founder member of the band, he gave them that glam, art school experimental attitude that they had in the early days when they actually mattered.
Once he left in 1973 he took the experimental vision of the band with him. He went on to change the face of modern music & art, while Mr Ferry & his chums simply plodded on towards the mainstream, eventually drifting off into their current location, totally irrelevant in divorcee mothers day compilationland.
Post Roxy, Brian then embarked on a solo career throughout the rest of the 70’s, recording arty type albums & stuff that was always interesting, far out & experimental.
Our favourite album from around this period is called ‘Another Green World’.
We listen to it every day in Summertime every year & have heard it thousands of times with out ever tiring of it. It’s totally beautiful & unlike anything else you will ever hear.
Brian is a rubbish singer & he sings on a lot of his early albums in a way that makes them sound really odd, but he’s a genius, so he’s allowed.
Ambient Music.
Ambient music, as a concept, is something that kids like Aphex Twin & numerous other people have made wads of money from in recent years.
It was Brian Eno who single handedly pioneered this genre in the 70’s.
His masterworks in this field include the seminal ‘Ambient one : Music for Airports’ & ‘ Ambient two : The Plateaux of Mirror’ which also features piano by Harold Budd.
These are essential records & if you do not own them you are only living half a life. Of the two, Plateaux of Mirror is our favourite & we listen to it at least once every day & have done since it came out.
Both are as ignorable as they are listenable & provide the ulimate, in calm, reflective music, that probably would be pigeonholed as ’chill out’ were these outstanding records released today.
They paint our world & colour our lives, they also calm excited animals & they soothe your soul. Brian did a lot more ambient works, collaborating with many great artists, but we are not overstating things when we say we could not live without these two particular recordings.
We have literally heard them thousands & thousands of times & will continue to listen to them, daily, most probably right up until the day we die.
Bowie.
Brian worked with David Bowie on some of his finest albums, Low, Heroes & Lodger. He didn’t do all the production on them, but he contributes to them greatly & his infuence is quite literally all over them.
Low especially can only really be seen as a Bowie/Eno album, such is the influence of Brian on it. Brian brought new sound treatments & joined the dots between the experimental Berlin sounds of bands like Kraftwerk & David’s mad take on things. These are some of the best records ever made.
The group of artists involved these recordings included the revolutionary guitar players Robert Fripp & Adrian Belew who crop up throughout Brian’s work around this time & during the Talking Heads period.
Talking Heads.
For many people this band were their first concious point of contact with Brian. From the late 70’s he’d produced Talking Heads albums including the seminal ‘Fear of Music’ which includes ‘Life During Wartime’ a WHQ anthem.
But it was with ‘Remain in Light’ in 1980 that with Brian’s production guidance, Talking Heads hit the point of superstardom.
As a record it was just so different to anything that had ever gone before…
Brian was producing like a fiend at this point & took the band into a multilayered world of African type beats & stunningly mindblowing intricate funk. The crazy thing was, he created it all by layering beats & rhythmic patterns in a quite simplistic type of way, with a result that is earthshatteringly complex & mad astonishing.
Everyone knows the biggest hit from the album ‘Once in a Lifetime’ & if you go & listen to it again now, with fresh ears, it’s hard to imagine any way it could be improved upon even now, with all the technology that exists 30 whole years since it’s release date.
Other tracks like ‘Born under Punches’ & ‘The Great Curve’ just add to & take this record & Brian’s production of it into hyperspace. As with so many of the projects Brian has been involved in, he colaborates with the band on the production duties, acting as judge & catalyst to make the magic happen.
Go & play Remain In Light today & you’ll be stunned. When you do, make sure you keep an ear open for ‘Listening Wind’ on there too, which given the current state of the Middle East now, three decades later, is so prophetic as to be bonafide spooky…
Other colaborations.
Brian has also produced & conrtributed to the careers of many other artists as diverse as Robert Fripp, Devo & Grace Jones.
He produced all of U2’s best albums & more recently the Coldplay bedwetters had their musical credibility restored by the magical hand of Saint Brian.
So even though you may not have known it, you probably already dig Brian’s work.
The Clock of the Long Now.
A few years ago we saw an interview with Brian where he was discussing his involvement with a clock that was being built. We think it was in Greenwich somewhere that it was located..? It was called the Clock of the Long Now.
He was explaining that it wasn’t going to measure time in just the normal denominations that we are all used to, like minutes, hours & days. Instead it was to be in years & decades, right up to millenia. The idea was to challenge the kind of short term thinking we have so much of today, where people get bored if they have to focus on anything longer than the length of a pop video.
He made the point that few people think beyond the life of a government & that this was a major factor in our destruction of the natural environment. Thinking & living in the moment has it’s advantages at times, but as a collection of cultures, the western world is consuming all the Planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. The idea of the Clock was to encourage a more balanced view of time & context in all our lives.
It was an interesting concept, he put the idea over very well & it made a big impact on us.
77 Million Paintings.
This was the first time we had seen Brian exhibit work in Newcastle. He brought his 77 Million Paintings Exhibition to the Baltic a couple of years ago. It was without question the single most beautiful thing we have ever seen in our entire lives.
We sat all day watching it slowly change & it blew our minds. The idea behind harnessing computers to the end of creating beauty sounds stupid. But it isn’t. He toured the World with this exhibition & you couldn’t help but be astounded by it.
It’s a shame the Baltic couldn’t have shown it longer & also a shame that as with so many of exhibitions they have there, they simply relied on the artists name to sell it & didn’t put the hustle into the promotion that the show merited. As a result we felt it wasn’t properly advertised, so more ordinary people (as in, people not on the Baltic mailing list, or ‘luvvie’s’ involved in the arts etc) from the city had no idea how breathtakingly spectacular it was & also had no idea it was on.
Sure it was a success for the Baltic, but we felt it could have reached a lot more people. If you didn’t see it that’s a real shame & that also illustrates the point we are making re the lack of appropriate promotion around it.
The day we saw 77 Million Paintings we were truly amazed & we changed a little bit.
The i phone applications.
With the advent of the i Phone all kinds of people are making applications to go with it. As you would imagine, Brian is bang on it & even though we dislike technology for technology’s sake, that fact he has got involved with it encouraged us to get one.
His Apps include ‘Bloom’ &‘ Trope’. If you have an i phone download them both & they will change your life. They cost about £2.00 each.
He has harnessed the power of music & computers in an astoundingly simple & interactive way. You can make your own music at the touch of a button & loop it endlessly. You end up creating soundscapes that you have never heard before, or will hear again, all with your finger, on your phone.
It’s chill out tastic & has revolutionised bathtime round our way…
In the same vein as his life changing ambient works we mentioned earlier, this is the absolute bomb & an added plus is that the animals in your life will thank you for it too. Infinite relaxing, original art at your fingertips, forever..!
The Attitude of the man.
So as you have probably now gathered, we are into Brian Eno. He is our favourite artist because has done so many meaningful, special & wonderful things. Alongside all that he has been an open & assertive critic of the Iraq war, highlighting his willingness to speak out about political issues & wrong doing that effects us all.
The inspiration he has single handedly given us is immesaurable. He taught us to appreciate true beauty in art & music, taught us the value of working & collaborating with talented people & helped us to believe that we could do things our own way without paying any attention to what other people thought was right or acceptable.
We were extatic to see that BBC 4 recently devoted a whole night to him & if you have access to getting programmes on playback, seek him out. There is a lovely quote in there something along the lines of…
‘When I was young I didn’t wish to fit into standard career paths & aim to be like other people, so instead of aiming for what they aimed for, I just shot my arrow & drew my own target, around where it landed…’
That attitude is how we live too, it’s infectious & has led us to think outside the box & truly interpret the world in our own way, rejecting the mainstream & going instead with our own unique ideas & traditions. That is how the Club was built…
The ability to take time to use integrity & ideas to create, enjoy & share beauty & then stick to giving that more merit than authority, or what people may percieve as the current fashion or ’must obey’ rules of today, is (not just a ridiculously long sentence, it’s also) the very the heart of all Brian’s amazing art & at the heart of World Headquarters Club too.
That attitude is his gift… Not only to us, but also to you, if you simply take time to seek out & connect with any of his outstanding work.
In the same way James Brown was (& maybe even more so…) Brian Eno is the Man.