Today Brian Eno is best known as a visionary, founding theorist of ambient music, and the wildly successful producer of David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, and U2. But first as a founding member of Roxy Music, and then on four pioneering albums in the '70s, Eno directly shaped the direction of rock music as well.
Astralwerks has beautifully reissued Eno's classic rock-oriented early albums, Here Come the Warm Jets ('73), Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy ('74), Another Green World ('75), and Before and After Science ('77), wherein the Great Pate consumed whole the barriers of rock 'n' roll sonics, song structure and sensibility accompanied by a who's who of British art-rock notables including Robert Fripp, Phil Manzanera, Chris Spedding, John Wetton, Robert Wyatt, Phil Collins (how soon they forget), John Cale, and Fred Frith.
Born in the English village of Woodbridge, Suffolk on the 15th of May, 1948, he was educated by the De La Salle order. Then, disdaining conventional employment, Eno enrolled in a two-year course at the Ipswich Art School. While he was at Ipswich he began to experiment with tape machines and by the time he left for the Winchester Art School in 1965, he had accumulated 30 recorders, although only two were in full working order.
While his ear bowed towards avant-garde music, including the music he composed with his band, Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, Eno also had a budding taste for rock ’n’ roll, spurred by the release of The Who’s "My Generation."
"I thought 'Oh-oh - rock music is going to do something' and realized that this area - which I'd previously imagined to be rather unserious - might actually turn out to be interesting after all," he said.
Soon thereafter Eno had a random encounter with a saxophone player whom he had met at an avant-garde concert in Reading. That player, Andy MacKay, had joined a band called Roxy Music. At the end of 1971 Eno received a phone call from the band, asking him if he would consider helping them out, mostly because he owned a Revox and they wanted to make a demo tape.
Article comments
1 - Steve Rhodes
I saw Eno give an interesting presentation last year for the Long Now Foundation. He talks about some bigger issues, but also about some of his current thinking about music.
There is audio and text online you can download. It is worth both listening and reading it since the text version has images of slides he used.
I also took some cameraphone photos which are at the bottom of this page.
2 - Eric Olsen
super cool Steve, thanks, you get around