Here Come The Warm Jets (1973)
Why does the irreverent and experimental Eno leave Roxy Music? Is it because Brian Peter St John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno finds himself thinking about his laundry during a gig? Not entirely, although, it is a part of it. Ferry wants to experiment with the quality of the music they are making, Eno wants to experiment with the way the music is made. To those not in the know it’s perhaps a little like saying I don’t want to make a cake, I want to play around with a couple of spoons, a whisk and a pot of baking powder and see what I come up with, which funnily enough, seems entirely reasonable. So it’s not about Deconstruction, Postmodern Intertextualism, it’s not even about making great Pop Art. It’s about getting in the studio and pissing about till something sounds unusual and good. Not at the expense of form and logical intention – but rather to slow down or disturb our experience of what it is we are listening: not to make it unrecognisable as music, but rather to estrange, and defamiliarize it. The Russian Formalists – a branch of literary psychology, if you like, had a phrase for it, they called it ‘Deautomatization of Perception’. When sounds melt and words fall apart there is a pronounced change in perception; the usual terms of recognition and genre spotting that govern our appreciation of a record are transformed into pure perception. We are forced to listen with our ears and not our prefabricated ideas about what it is we are listening to. And it’s within this context that all the best music gets made: The Beatles achieved this with everything from Revolver to The White Album, the Beach Boys with Pet Sounds and the soon to be revived, Smile album.
So there you have it: music and understanding out of the routine, turning the familiar into the unfamiliar; a saxophone used like a drum kit, a sound-effect used like an string-section, the sound of an orchestra tuning up as a lead phrase in itself, a chorus coming in at the end of a song, leaving out a snare drum, the list goes on. Eno seeks to reinvest music with perception:
“I want the music to be as much as possible a continuous condition of the environment…in the same way as a painting is.”
Eno triumphed in part with Roxy Music and with a stunning canon of songs like: Virginia Plain, Do The Strand, For Your Pleasure and Pyjamarama. But it’s with his tragically short solo spell that things really got off the ground.
First album, ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ features all four members of the Roxy Music Eno had just left behind – with the exception Bryan Ferry. And what do we have? What we have is an immensely listenable 45 minutes of well-structured, deceptively simple – if slightly bonkers – pop songs with titles as awkward and absurd as the music they serve: Needles In The Camel’s Eyes, The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch, Dead Finks Don’t Talk. It’s twisted, charming avant-garde and not so far away from what the Beach Boys might have sounded like if Bowie had been Wilson’s lyricist on Pet Sounds instead of Tony Asher:
“Lucy please be still and hide your madness in a jar/But do beware, it will follow you, it will follow you.”
See what I mean? ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ is full of weirdness and angularity, predating new-wave and punk by some six years, shrink-wrapped in the tightest of tawdry narratives and unlikely juxtapositions. It’s not short of riffs, not short of hooks, and not short of ideas.
There’s way too much to cover here. As producer of landmark albums for U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, James and Devo, Eno has proved himself of immensurable worth, contributing not only to birth of ambient (as he does with third and fourth albums, ‘Another Green World’ featuring the theme tune to long running BBC arts show, Arena and ‘Before And After Science’) but as consolidator of the avant-garde within the mainstream.
Need some further indication of what this fella is like? Here goes. When Eno wants to knock his musicians off the beaten track, he hands them strange, abstract instructions on flashcards. Get my drift?
Brian Eno – Original Masters
Here Come The Warm Jets (1973) *****
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974 featuring Robert Fripp and Phil Collins) ****
Another Green World (1975) ****
Before and After Science (1976) ***