The album that made Brian Eno realise he could be a musician
Brian Eno is a timeless artist. In part, this is because he has always been ahead of the curve. His latest album, FOREVERANDEVERMORE, is another trailblazing triumph. As our very own Jordan Potter wrote in appraisal: “Much like a musical scientist, Eno toys with new ideas and pushes the bounds of perceived possibility. [and beyond the innovation it is the] art opens the door to feeling, permitting entry to darkness or light. Despite the album’s apocalyptic conceptual orientation, the tone is predominantly one of beauty as it portrays the natural world we seem to have turned our back on.”
This trick of making the avant-garde manageable has propelled his career and changed the course of music in the process. Brian Eno might not be a name who leaps to the forefront of the annals of music history, but it crops up more than most amid the back pages. As the star famously said himself: “My reputation is far bigger than my sales. I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years.”
The former Roxy Music star humbly continued: “Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”
Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that the aforementioned New York proto-indie outfit were an abiding influence from the get-go. Eno told the Quietus when discussing the Velvet Underground’s self-titled banana album: “This was probably the most important pop album for me in that I think it’s the moment where I realised that I could be a musician. It was partly that this band was semi-non-musicians, but it was also because the songs borrowed a lot from what I knew about experimental music at the time.”
This collision of the avant-garde world of boundary-pushing with the rock ‘n’ roll notion of having something to say being more important than being a virtuoso was also illuminating to Eno’s future collaborator, David Bowie. As the Starman said: “It was the fringe, strange bands that nobody ever bought, like the Velvet Underground, that actually have created modern music. And you kind of think, where’s ‘Yesterday’ in all this? Where’s its influence on modern music?”.
Exploring the depth of the world that Lou Reed and his cohorts created was something that drove Eno into musicianship. It was feeling more so than expertise that inspired him. “I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‘Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'” He once explained.
Adding: “Someone like Bowie never wrote those sorts of songs. People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them. Bowie played a double game as well as he appeared to live it, too. He played with the form and the expectations brilliantly.”
