by Dayal, Geeta
Percy Jones had strong memories of the Oblique Strategies cards being shuffled and drawn during the recording sessions on various occasions. “The first time he did it, I thought we were going to have a game of poker or something,” Jones said, chuckling. “I had no idea what was going on.”
While the cards could be useful tools, the instructions on the cards were indeed followed to the letter—sometimes with potentially disastrous results. “If the cards foretold that something had to be erased or turned upside down, they were,” said Barry Sage. If a song was being worked on intensely, and a card that was drawn suddenly proclaimed that the tapes had to be deleted, they were.
Eno’s playfulness in the studio was key. “My quick guide to Captain Eno: play, instinct/intuition, good taste,” wrote Robert Fripp in an e-mail. “Eno demonstrated his intelligence by concentrating his interests away from live work; and his work persists, and continues to have influence. The key to Brian, from my view, is his sense of play. I only know one other person (a musician) who engages with play to the same extent as Brian. Although Eno is considered an intellectual, and clearly he has more than sufficient wit, it’s Brian’s instinctive and intuitive choices that impress me. Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower.”
Eno is popularly characterized as a brainy studio boffin, an egghead theorist and solemn architect of “sonic landscapes”; meanwhile, his friends and collaborators describe him as lighthearted and fun to be around, with a relaxed, anything-goes attitude— both in the studio and in life. How to reconcile these two poles? Leo Abrahams, who worked with Eno on a number of recent recording projects, said that he’d observed Eno working on two different levels. “When I see him work on things that are on the more ambient levels of what he does—like the album Neroli or certain things that were on his last record, or the J. Peter Schwalm stuff—that’s when you’d almost see that reputation of the boffin, if you like, being justified, because there are certain things he knows how to do with instruments and effects that nobody else knows how to do,” Abrahams said. “It’s amazing watching him fashion that; I think that’s a lot closer to his visual work, which again is extremely painstaking. But then again, when I see him working on songs— more song-based records—he’s really hands-on, and not at all precious about sounds. He likes things to be distorted and he likes things to sound really rough, and he does lots of things that an engineer will say ‘That’s wrong, you can’t do that!’ He likes to sing with the speakers blaring out, so you hear the music in the background of all the vocal tracks and stuff, just because he doesn’t like using headphones. It’s a deceptively slapdash approach, if you know what I mean. It’s quite rock and roll, and it’s not what you’d expect from the person who made things like Music for Airports or 77 Million Paintings. A similar thing was said by Rhett Davies; he described to me a few of the situations of what it was like in the studio, and it just sounds like a huge amount of fun, basically, and very experimental and not so boffin-esque and not so painstaking.”
Eno mixed it up in the studio at around the time of Another Green World in other ways. “Sometimes you’d be into something really intense, you’d be working on a piece of music and discussing it, and then he’d say: ‘Anybody want some cake?’” said Percy Jones. “Eno would pull out a cake and he’d cut up slices of cake, and everyone would eat some cake, and then we’d forget all about the creative process!”
At other times, Eno could be found recording in odd places, such as the stairwells of Basing Street Studios. Sometimes he would be preparing pianos à la John Cage, stuffing the hammers and strings with all sorts of metal odds and ends; at other times he and Rhett Davies would be constructing giant makeshift tape loops in the control room. “I had to duck under this tape,” remembered Jones. “They had a tape loop going around the whole room—it was probably 20 feet on a side—you’re talking about an 80-footlong tape loop. There’s no way you can have a loop that long on a machine, so they just made their own supports, just pencils stuck in the corner, and … I can’t even remember what it was playing; I was struck by the size of the tape loop. He was doing a lot of stuff with sound, well before synths really caught on, certainly before the digital revolution.”
Eno used other offbeat tactics in the studio. “I tried all kinds of experiments, like seeing how few instructions you could give to the people in order to get something interesting to happen,” Eno said in an interview with the NME in 1976. “For example, I had a stopwatch and I said, ‘Right, we’ll now play a piece that lasts exactly 90 seconds and each of you has got to leave more spaces than you make noises,’ something like that, and seeing what happened from it.”
Eno was also fond of drawing out various mathematical charts for some of the performers to use—charts that didn’t ascribe to any conventional musical notation. “I can certainly remember Phil Collins, especially, being told to drum in a mathematical way that Brian laid out,” Sage recalled. One particular mathematical strategy apparently made Collins so aggravated that he began flinging things across the room. “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers,” remembered Jones. “‘Percy you play C-sharp,’ or whatever, to specific numbers. Then he started a metronome or some kind of click—follow this piece of paper and play these specific notes against this correct number. It started out sort of okay, and then people started to lose their way and it sounded more bizarre, and at one point Phil was throwing empty beer cans across the room to hit a bicycle. I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else.”
Eno’s whimsical studio experiments continued apace on future albums. The masterful ambient record On Land, released in 1982, took over three years to finish, and Eno’s flights of conceptual fancy would sometimes drive his collaborators crazy. In an article on Brian Eno in People in 1983, Arthur Lubow noted:
Musicians can find him maddening to work with. “He spent three days twirling hoses,” recalls one disenchanted instrumentalist. “One day everyone was playing with gravel in little boxes, and he would say, ‘That’s a lovely sound.’ Another time he brought back a set of slides from the Museum of Natural History which he projected on a sheet as we were playing, so we’d really feel like part of the environment. Everyone would stand around in the dark watching a slide of a monkey.”
Though there were definitely frustrating moments, most of the musicians who worked on Another Green World have fond memories of the recording sessions. “[Eno] was more critical of him self,” said Jones. “He used to apologize for himself. He’d say ‘I’m not really a keyboard player,’ and we’d say ‘Oh that’s alright, we don’t care.’ He would sometimes say the bass was too busy, and I never took that as a critique, really. I figured it was his record, his stuff—he’s perfectly entitled to tell everybody what he wants. The cool thing about him was, if he didn’t like what you were doing, he would be very specific about what he did want you to do. He was very good like that, in that he would listen to what you were doing and say ‘Take that line you were doing, those two bars, and loop it, keep repeating it, for a while.’ You always felt in touch with him, that he could always tell you what you wanted.”
Eno’s canny ability to cherry-pick the best two bars out of a long, meandering sequence, or the most promising idea out of a huge slew of them, would come to be one of his most valuable skills as a producer. His friend Christine Alicino, who dated Eno in the early 1980s and collaborated with him on the early video art piece Thursday Afternoon, said that one of Eno’s most appealing qualities was his ability to always find the good in something, and zero in, with almost laserlike intensity, on that thing. “It always amazes me,” she said. “Sometimes you have to go out to see a band because it’s a friend or a friend of a friend, but as soon as you go he totally enjoys it; there’s always something he gets out of a situation. He might not like all the music, but there’s one phrase that he likes, and he se
es one thing and that makes the whole thing worth it. Once when we were on Market Street, there was this guy playing on tin cans or something, and Brian was so into it and videotaping it. There are so many people who would just walk by that man.”
Eno kept using the Oblique Strategies for years; he still uses them to this day. In an interview with Interview’s Ingrid Sischy in 1995, David Bowie described how Eno used a twist on the Oblique Strategies cards—something resembling charades— while producing Bowie’s 1995 album Outside. “What Brian did specifically on Outside and he’d done it in various ways on our 1970s sessions was put everybody in another space before they started playing,” Bowie said. “He walked into the session and said, ‘I’ve got something very interesting for us to look at today.’ And out of his little bag he pulled these six flash-cards and gave one to each of us. He didn’t tell me he was going to do this. He said, ‘I want you to read these cards and adopt the characters on them for as long as you can when we start playing.’ He said to our drummer [Sterling Campbell], ‘You are the disgruntled ex-member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that you were not allowed to play.’ And then the pianist [Mike Garson] was told, ‘You are the morale booster of a small rag-tag terrorist operation. You must keep spirits up at all costs.’ My card said, ‘You are a soothsayer and town-crier in a society where all media networks have tumbled down,’ so I knew it was my job to pass on all the events of the day. Because of this set-up, when we started playing, everybody came into the music from a very different space from where they would normally. So you had six really vibrant personalities with interpretive abilities playing from idiosyncratic points of view, and the confluence of all that produced an extreme atmosphere that was quite outside what one might have expected from a bunch of rockers.”
The assorted experimental techniques and tricks Eno used in the studio had another purpose, besides hopefully producing some interesting artistic result; he wanted to have a good time. “It’s almost like when you go to a dinner party and it’s a bit boring and it’s a bit stilted, the conversation, and then somebody will walk in who’s just really fun, and it will transform the whole atmosphere of the room,” Abrahams said. “It’s exactly the same thing, because recording studios can be worrying places. There’s a lot of money being spent, there’s people’s egos to worry about, there’s all kinds of worries. He’s got a completely different agenda—the agenda is to do something that’s culturally worthwhile, one, and two, to have fun while doing it. And when you encounter someone who’s liberated of all the crap you usually worry about when you go into the studio, it’s infectious—it’s like a license to stop worrying about all those things yourself.”
“Ask people to work against their better judgment’’
The beats on Another Green World and the famous Soviet children’s story Peter and the Wolf had an odd cosmic connection.
Eno recruited bass player Percy Jones and drummer Phil Collins through a chance meeting during a 1975 rock remake of Peter and the Wolf. (Eno had been invited to play the wolf.) “They took the Prokofiev score and rearranged it a bit, and did a rock version of it,” remembered Jones. “Brian Eno was invited in. He came in and recorded a synth part and one section, and I wasn’t there at the time. But he was playing over the rhythm section I was in, which was me and Phil [Collins], and apparently he liked what he heard. A few days later I got a call from him asking if I could do some recording with him. At the time I didn’t really know very much about him; I mean I knew him from Roxy Music, which I’d figured to be sort of a pop group, you know, so I didn’t really know what to expect.”
Eno’s pick of Jones and Collins for Another Green World was inspired, but didn’t completely jive with Eno’s sensibilities at the time. Jones and Collins were given to funkier, jazzier excursions in their group Brand X. Eno, for his part, was more in the art-rock and experimental-music camps. “Well, I used to have this little little badge which said, ‘Join the Fight Against Funk,’” Eno admitted in a Synapse interview in 1979. “Because in 1974 or 1975, I absolutely despised funky music. I just thought it was everything I didn’t want in music. And suddenly, I found myself taking quite the contrary position, and I had to chuck my little badge away, because it wasn’t true anymore.” (A curious statement for a man who would soon command monster funk riffs in songs like “Regiment’’!)
When Jones arrived at Basing Street, he was confused, to put it mildly. Jones had experience doing session work, and expected to be told what to play. In the studio, he found Eno sitting at a piano, tapping madly on a single piano key. Eno told him to improvise a line on his bass using the rhythm of his tapping. “It wasn’t what I expected at all; it was sort of out-there, deep stuff,” remembered Jones. “Usually, you go to a studio they give you a chord chart or something to work with; it’s structured. But his initial guidance would be incredibly vague. There was a tune called ‘Sky Saw,’ and the instruction he gave us was he hit a middle ‘A’ on the piano and he just went ‘dun dun dun dun dun dun’ but it had a rhythm, and that was the starting point for the tune. I just started playing ‘dun dun doodle doodle da da,’ put some sort of modulation on it, so we put down that sequence, and that was it, and we moved onto something else.”
“Sky Saw”’s humble beginning was the little seed that blew up into the album’s unforgettable opening track. (The song’s title could be interpreted as a play on “see-saw,” or “sea saw”; Eno explained to interviewers a few years later, rather cryptically, that Another Green World was meant to be a “sky record,” while Before and After Science was an “ocean record.”)
“He’s got this great production technique—I think it naturally comes to him, I don’t think it’s a deliberate thing—but he kind of plants these little seeds of ideas, like when you were saying he was just playing that little rhythm on the piano,” commented Abrahams. “It might not obviously have been a fully fledged composition, but there was obviously something in it that he liked. And I think instead of doing what a conventional composer would do, which would be to work with these very small elements and then extrapolate them deliberately, he kind of plants these little seeds in people’s minds and lets the musicians kind of go free with them, and then it ends up sounding like Brian Eno nonetheless, because it’s his seeds.”
The final version of “Sky Saw’’ incorporates Jones’ fretless bass and Phil Collins’ drumming, a searing viola solo by John Cale, additional bass guitar by Paul Rudolph, and various effects by Eno. “It wasn’t ’til the record came out that I heard what he’d done to it,” marveled Jones. “He’d taken that rhythm track and put all this stuff on top of it, and made it into a really strong piece of music. It was really interesting how he initiated the tune; he could have gone a million different ways with an introduction like that. I always came out of those sessions thinking, ‘I did something cool today.’ It was fun, it was innovative—he broke some ground in a way.” “Sky Saw’’ would go on to live another life as the track “M386’’ on Music for Films, and an early Ultravox tune, and in many other guises.
Jones and Collins also put down the rhythm track for “Over Fire Island,” the second track on Another Green World. Much to Eno’s chagrin, a similar bassline appeared on the Brand X album, released in 1976. “We did a tune on the first Brand X album called ‘Unorthodox Behaviour’; it’s pretty much the same bassline,” said Jones. “Phil and I pretty much just took that, and recorded it for Eno, and I think at that point the Brand X record had been recorded and hadn’t come out. Brian actually got a bit miffed when the Brand X record came out and he heard the same bassline. I can’t remember exactly what he said; he looked a bit miffed: ‘How come you’ve got the same thing on the Brand X record?’ Phil and I just looked kind of vague and I think the subject got dropped; it wasn’t mentioned again. Despite it being the same sort of rhythm section thing, the two tunes were very different. What Eno did with it is radically different from what Brand X did with it, but that’s where that bassline came from.”
/> The spare drum and bass workout of “Over Fire Island’’ ends in buzzing, alien electronic noise—what sounds like a UFO landing—laying the groundwork for the blinding effulgence of the unearthly next track. “St. Elmo’s Fire” is the album’s grand statement, its crowning achievement. It features some of Eno’s most imagistic, rapturous lyrics:
Brown Eyes and I were tired
We had walked and we had scrambled
Through the moors and through the briars
Through the endless blue meanders
In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon
The most enthralling part of the song, though, was the sonic backdrop for these lyrics. The subtle clicking noise at the beginning of the song is a treated “rhythm generator,” a precursor to the modern drum machine, and the textures are spare—a minimal piano motif that darts between octaves, a smattering of organ and “desert guitars,” and Eno’s lean voice—all combining to make an understated setting for Robert Fripp’s transcendent “Wimshurst guitar” solo.
A Wimshurst machine is an electrostatic generator that was invented in the 1880s, an ancestor of the better-known VandeGraaffgenerator. The Wimshurst discharged large high-voltage sparks that jumped wildly between its metal plates. Eno issued a challenge to Fripp to play a guitar solo that sounded like the darting sparks of an electrostatic generator; this gelled well with Fripp’s sensibilities, and the end result was incandescent. “Brian has better taste, a more interesting mind and developed sense of play than almost all the musicians I have known,” remarked Fripp. “A good professional musician knows what they’re doing, so they do what they know. This is death to the creative life. So, working with Brian is usually a lot more fun and musically creative than working with good professional players (mastery in musicianship is necessary to go beyond the strictures of professionalism).”