Brian Eno’s favourite song by “enormously important” The Velvet Underground
If you ask the average Joe Bloggs on the UK high street whether they have heard of Oasis, you will be met with an affirmative answer from practically everyone. However, if you say, “How about Brian Eno?” fewer will be familiar. This is, of course, rather ironic, given that Eno’s influence spans wider than that of most living musical artists.
While Eno’s presence in the pop charts might not be as potent as that of Liam Gallagher or Madonna, his name never ceases to crop up on popular record sleeves as a collaborator or in the moths of reverent musicians as an essential luminary. Many will know Eno for his early work with Roxy Music yet this three-year spell of synth-experimentation was just the first domino to fall in a remarkable career of solo success and collaborative coups.
After leaving Roxy Music, Eno pursued a solo career that initially followed a similar avant-pop direction, attracting the attention of contemporaries like Fobert Fripp and David Bowie. In 1975, he released his first ambient album, Discreet Music. Work in this field reached an early high in 1978 with the arrival of Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a revolutionary album that crowned Eno as the ‘Godfather of Ambient’.
Concurrently, Eno had begun work with Bowie on his critically acclaimed Berlin Trilogy, which paved a colourful road towards similarly fruitful collaborations with Talking Heads for three albums between 1978 and 1980 and U2 on their 1987 masterpiece album The Joshua Tree.
Eno’s work on U2’s immensely popular late ’80s release and later on Coldplay’s Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends likely marked his closest brush with pop chart success. However, listeners have a habit of remembering the musicians on stage rather than the unseen producer behind the scenes. Otherwise, Eno’s career is one of dignified artistry, avant-garde colour, and oblique strategy.
With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Eno is a long-lived Velvet Underground fan. “My reputation is far bigger than my sales,” Eno once famously stated when reflecting on his success. “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. 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!”
Eno appreciates his position as an artist’s artist and a crucial cog in the works of 20th-century musical evolution. “I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways,” he said.
Bowie and Eno were among The Velvet Underground’s few early fans in the UK. The band’s avant-garde yet accessible approach to rock ‘n’ roll, which debuted in 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, had an incalculable influence on both musicians and the music that dictated their subsequent triumphs.
In 1991, Eno appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs to pick out his eight favourite songs of all time. Neighbouring selections from Fela Kuti, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, and Gene Chandler was the Velvet Underground’s 1967 classic ‘Sunday Morning’. “
This was a time when everyone was singing about flowers in their hair, and The Velvet Underground came out with songs about ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting for The Man’,” Eno mused. “They were very tough. Urban. And I thought with some very good songs.”
The Velvet Underground remain one of Eno’s favourite bands to this day. In 1990, he worked with John Cale on the critically lauded art rock album Wrong Way Up, satiating a longstanding teenage dream. Furthermore, in 2016, Eno recorded a blinding cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Set Free’ for his 26th studio album in a heartwarming tribute to songwriter Lou Reed three years after his death.
