Brian Eno’s 13 favourite albums of all time
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 to see the aforementioned New York proto-indie outfit feature in his 13 favourite records of all time. Eno told the Quietus: “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?”.
And it is the fringe that Eno abides by. His favourite records stretch from Afrobeat to folk and a fair dash of disco thrown in there too. As Eno said when expressing his love for Fela Kuti’s classic Afrodisiac which would go on to inform his work with Talking Heads on ‘Once in a Lifetime’: “Afrodisiac has four songs and they’re all absolutely brilliant.”
Continuing: “There’s no disappointment on the album at all. On later records there’s quite a lot of fat, the pieces go on and on and sometimes they’re a bit aimless, but Afrodisiac I suppose was being made as an attempt to push Fela over here, so instead of a piece taking a whole side it takes only half a side.”
All of this might seem like an odd smorgasbord, but quite frankly even Eno’s most commercially inclined outings share that same technicolour sense. He brought the bizarro free-form nature of Soviet music into David Bowie’s oeuvre, he coloured the sound of Roxy Music with gospel rhythms and continues to push on even now. He is, quite simply, always searching out the excitement of something new and looking to temper it with the sensibilities of something tried and tested.
As he said of the list’s 1937 single below: “To me, it’s the birth of funk guitar. This is a song called ‘Go Where I Send Thee’ and was recorded in 1937. The Golden Gate Quartet are an acapella group, so this is acapella but listen to what happens with the rhythm. It’s an amazing thing that four guys, no overdubs or anything like that, could make this amount of rhythm.”
He might not have necessarily invented a genre, but he has certainly furthered some of the most familiar with thrilling new edges. This is reflected in the eclectic list of records that he champions as his favourite. You can check out them out below and delve into them with the cracking playlist we have crafted (NB, not all records are available on Spotify). Enjoy.
Brian Eno’s 13 favourite albums:
- Court and Spark – Joni Mitchell
- ‘Glider’ – My Bloody Valentine
- The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground
- Grande Liturgie Orthodox Slave – Chœur Bulgare Svetoslav Obretenov
- Heartland – Owen Pallett
- Afrodisiac – Fela Kuti & The Africa 70
- Early Works – Steve Reich
- Plantation Lullabies – Me’Shell Ndege Ocello
- Fresh – Sly and the Family Stone
- ‘Go Where I Send Thee’ – The Golden Gate Quartet
- Umut – Arif Sag
- Farid El Atrache – Farid El Atrache
- The Dynamic Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir in Concert – Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir
