Parsons Brian Eno

In the 1970s
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-626-4
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: Decades

Brian Eno is arguably one of the most influential musicians working in rock music. Starting out as a synthesizer peacock of the early glam rock era as a member of Roxy Music, Eno not only changed his look but his musical style throughout the seventies and moved from foot-stomping proto-punk anthems to the quiet introspection and inventor of ambient music, via solo records like Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Another Green World. Along the way, he became a much-in-demand producer working with the likes of Ultravox! and Talking Heads and also collaborated with David Bowie on three of the most important albums of Bowie's career in Low, Heroes and Lodger. He also managed to blur the boundaries between rock and modern avant-garde classical music with the founding of his Obscure Records label.
Eno began this decade strutting his stuff onstage to Bryan Ferry's songs and finished it with the serene melodies of Music for Airports. As the decade progressed, he also managed to squeeze in a couple of albums with King Crimson's Robert Fripp as well as becoming part of the krautrock scene. This is Eno's journey through the highs and occasional lows of this astonishing decade.

Gary Parsons is a filmmaker, film historian and a lecturer on film and is a MA graduate in film from Goldsmiths College London. He was a member of various bands from the mid-eighties until the mid-2000s and has been a music reviewer for over 15 years. He has been a big fan of Eno's music since he was 15 and even met him once, although Eno probably doesn't remember that. He lives in Beckenham, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parsons, Gary

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Re-Make/Re-Model – The Forming of Roxy Music 1970–71

There is a certain amount of truth in saying that Eno stumbled into his musical career. It is at Ipswich College, studying art in the 1960s, that Eno truly discovered himself. He studied art under controversial maverick educator Roy Ascott who introduced a different way of looking at art, especially devouring the more experimental aspects of it, including the ‘mind map’ technique that Eno has used throughout his entire career. But it is through his lecturer Tom Phillips that Eno discovered avant-garde classical music, in particular the work of John Cage, who had inadvertently invented ambient music in a piece of piano music called ‘In A Landscape’ written in the year of Eno’s birth (1948). It was mainly the American minimalist movement of composers such as Terry Riley and La Monte Young that initially got Eno interested in creating music. This and his meeting with the British teacher in experimental composition, Cornelius Cardew. It was at this point that Eno began to collect old reel-to-reel tape recorders and then slowly pieced together experimental musique concrète. David Sheppard described his first tape compositions in his 2008 book On Some Faraway Beach: The Life And Times Of Brian Eno:

His first recorded ‘piece’ was the sound of a pen striking the hood of a large anglepoise lamp, multi-tracked at different speeds to form a shimmering, bell-like cloud of tones, over which a friend read a poem. Its hazy reverberations, Eno told me, ‘sounded very similar to the music I make now’.

In 1966 Eno entered Winchester School of Art and it is here that he slowly transformed himself into the person who bursts onto the music scene with Roxy Music. It is here that Eno began to slowly discard more traditional forms of painting in favour of sound painting using his collection of tape recorders.

It was also during this period that Eno discovered the New York band The Velvet Underground, who would have a profound influence on his rock career throughout the seventies. At this point, Eno became a performer with the Scratch Orchestra, mainly focusing on works by La Monte Young. Later he started to perform solo concerts with renditions of his own compositions of his manipulated tape pieces as well as piano works by Toru Takemitsu. It was at one of these concerts at Reading University in 1968 that Eno made the acquaintance of Andy Mackay and the pair struck up a friendship, even forming a mostly theoretical band called Brian Iron and The Crowbars. But it was Eno’s next band that set him firmly on a course for blending rock music with the avant-garde, with fellow Winchester student Anthony Grafton on guitar and Eno on vocals and signal generator. They mixed blues and Stockhausen electronics and called themselves Maxwell Demon (inspired by Eno, Maxwell Demon was the name given to the character in Todd Haynes’ 1998 film about glam rock called Velvet Goldmine. The soundtrack also featured songs by Eno). It was also at this point that Eno invested in his first electric guitar called a Starway, which cost him nine pounds and he would use it on a vast number of his recordings during the seventies.

In June 1969, Eno graduated from Winchester with a fine art diploma and a major interest in both modern classical and rock music. Rather than take on the guise of most avant-garde composers, Eno’s dress sense became more and more flamboyant, releasing his inner peacock to the world and starting a transformation that would reach its peak in 1973. Eno then relocated to London to indulge in the bohemian lifestyle that was flooding out of the city in 1969. It was a time of experimental rock where Pink Floyd had performed a live soundtrack to the moon landings that summer and radical new bands had emerged from the Ladbroke Grove area, some like Quintessence mixing Western rock with Eastern music and philosophy. It was also the year that Beckenham-based David Bowie scored his first hit single with ‘Space Oddity’. Brian scraped a living by being involved with several art ventures and living in one room in a shared house in Grove Park. It was while living here that he began to pick up discarded instruments and electrical goods, including a PA system that once belonged to the cinema advert company Pearl & Dean. It was also during this time that Eno claimed that he starred in pornographic films to make ends meet, although none of these performances have ever come to light.

In 1970 Eno had another musical epiphany when he attended a Philip Glass concert at The Royal College of Art. Glass’s repetitive and sombre arpeggiations were a bolt from the blue for Eno and he would later find a way of referencing them in his own music. But Eno was already finding his feet on the classical music stage by performing with Gavin Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia, a collection of non-musicians who attempted to play well-known classical standards such as the William Tell Overture and, for the most part, failed miserably to achieve this. Eno was playing oboe, an instrument he had never touched before and stood out among the other members of the orchestra with his feminine and dandy appearance giving him a rather androgenous look among the more staid-looking members. Among the other members of the orchestra were Michael Nyman and Simon Fisher Turner.

Eno was still an enthusiastic dilettante and an amateur performer in music at this point until one fateful day, while waiting for a Bakerloo train at Elephant and Castle, he ended up sitting on the train opposite his old friend Andy Mackay. Mackay asked Eno if he ‘still had some tape recorders’ as he was in a band and they wanted to get some proper demos made. He replied that he did and was willing to record the band, and this is how he entered the world of Bryan Ferry and what was to become known as Roxy Music.

Mackay then told Ferry about his friend with the sci-fi surname and Ferry was so intrigued by Eno’s CV within avant-garde music that he invited Eno to his flat to record some of the songs he had written. In early 1971 Eno joined Ferry, Mackay and bass player Graham Simpson to record Ferry’s embryonic songs. Eno was impressed with Ferry’s songs and felt that he had found something truly original, especially when Mackay’s saxophone entered the situation. Mackay was also the owner of a VCS3 synthesizer that also piqued Eno’s interest. Mackay had barely touched the instrument, but it would become the thing that Eno would be renowned for in the seventies. Mackay encouraged Eno to take the instrument home with him to explore it further. He plugged it through his PA and then fed it into his tape recorders, where he wobbled and manipulated the sounds that the synthesizer generated; finally the self-professed non-musician had found the tool he could work with within a rock band set-up.

Eno began soundproofing a large second-floor landing at Grove Park, where he set up his PA. This gave the band their first rehearsal space where they could begin to play using a louder volume. It was lucky that his housemates were tolerant of the noises being made by the band. It was here that the band started to audition for drummers and after a few non-starters, they finally found Paul Thompson after Ferry placed an ad in the Melody Maker for: ‘Wonder drummer required for avant rock group’. All they needed next was the right guitarist. Eno managed to capture on tape some of the first rehearsals with Thompson as the songs began to sound stronger and stronger as new arrangements of Ferry’s material took shape. Ferry touted some of these demos around to the music publishers in London’s Tin Pan Alley in the vicinity of Denmark Street, but he got turned down by most of them and was told that the songs were just ‘too weird’. In truth, bands like Roxy would normally garner interest from playing the live circuit up and down the country, but at this point, the band were far from ready to embark upon playing in front of an audience.

The band continued to rehearse three or four times a week and slowly, his proficiency with the VCS3 improved and his role in the group slowly changed to being a ‘sound manipulator’ as he began to feed various instruments and even Ferry’s voice through the synthesizer. By the time the band started doing live performances, Eno’s set-up was his VCS3, two Revox reel-to-reel tape machines, a Ferrograph tape recorder, a control keyboard and a customised echo unit; there was a touch of Heath Robinson in regard to the set-up which all added to its strangeness by Eno’s unique sartorial style.

It was at this time that Ferry enlisted ex-Nice guitarist David O’List to the ranks of Roxy, and with O’List’s name added to the line-up, Roxy suddenly started to become a newsworthy act within the music press. O’List soon set about streamlining Roxy’s song arrangements and even got the band to rehearse some of his songs. Although his tenure in the band was short-lived, O’List features on a John Peel session from 4 January 1972, which finally had an official release in 2018 on the debut album’s super deluxe box set. In August of 1971, Roxy got their first interview in the Melody Maker paper courtesy of Richard Williams. This interview was conducted solely because Williams had heard a demo tape Ferry had sent, as so far, the band were making headlines but had not yet had an official release or had even played live. Ferry had also sent a demo tape to King Crimson’s...