On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Time of Brian Eno, available to buy from http://www.amazon.co.uk

 

Even if you think your record collection is Eno-free, it almost certainly isn’t.

 

Pop’s conceptual grand magus since leaving Roxy Music in the mid-70s, the self-proclaimed “non-musician” has produced, played or otherwise collaborated with everyone from David Bowie, Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson to Robbie Williams, Belinda Carlisle and Coldplay, and work with Philip Glass, Pavarotti, Devo, Elvis Costello, Paul Simon and Camel in between. He even provided the start-up tones for Microsoft Windows 95.

 

Music journalist Sheppard’s is the first proper full-length critical biography of the “professor” (actually, he is a professor) to coincide with his 60th birthday - and it’s a fascinating read. The journey from a very quiet, insular childhood in Suffolk to his current celebrity as musician, producer, visual artist, writer and political campaigner is a long and tortuous one, packed with interesting encounters and dry anecdotes. There’s nothing much in the way of drugs or rock?n?roll but there is plenty of sex, as brainy Brian turns out to have had an insatiable taste for the ladies for the best part of six decades. There are also comical tales of Eno producing the pre-Midge Ure Ultravox, his first big gig behind the mixing desk, in a studio shared with the Rolling Stones (who took the night shift). The studious Eno - who brought his own sandwiches in his briefcase every day - would frequently find a comatose Keith Richards asleep in one of the studio chairs, fail to rouse the rock legend and wheel him out, still asleep, into the corridor so he could get some work done.

 

More seriously, Eno’s long-standing collaboration with U2, a baffling torture for some of his less forgiving fans, is explained by Eno’s friend, the artist Russell Mills, as a meeting of minds: “Brian doesn’t particularly tolerate dunderheads; he enjoys wit and lively debate and needs to work with people whose intellect is on a par with his. U2 fitted the bill and it worked.”

 

Unfortunately, nobody steps up to the plate to defend his recent work with Coldplay, however.

 

Despite legendary, genuinely ground-breaking work on his own albums, with Talking Heads leader David Byrne and King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, Eno’s main contribution seems to be giving musicians time and space to think about the process of making music, a gift that often guides artists to career-best work.

 

Sadly, Sheppard’s interest wanes while Eno is still in his mid-30s and the last 20 or more years are skated over very quickly indeed. The book often seems both pretentiously over-written and under-edited (Gandhi is “Ghandi”; the veteran pop singer is Cliff Richards; and, according to this, Eno was releasing CDs in 1976).

 

Still, no serious Eno watcher would want to be without it: even though Sheppard repeatedly says Eno is deliberately slowing down his musical output, there are still albums with Herbie Hancock, David Byrne and U2 due for release in the coming months. He hasn’t quite finished experimenting. He probably never will.

^are you on Red Bull or something? That's like the 50th thing you've posted today...:stunned:

Yay for famous name-sakes

The life and times of Brian Eno

 

The world's leading 'failed musician': Brian Eno

 

Andy Miller reviews On Some Faraway Beach by David Sheppard

 

Seek out your copy of the second Roxy Music LP, For Your Pleasure, and turn to Karl Stoecker's portrait of the group. You see the man on the far left posing with a mean guitar, in platform boots, peek-a-boo feather blouson and glamour-model pout? That man is Brian Eno. Last month, he turned 60.

 

Eno's journey from pop-star androgyne to Liberal Democrat youth affairs adviser has no precedent in modern politics. Vince Cable may have dallied with ballroom dancing, but has he also collaborated with David Bowie, invented several musical genres, synthesised new perfumes, or appeared as himself in Father Ted? Not that we know of.

 

As David Sheppard notes, "One drawback for the biographer is the sheer volume of 'stuff' that Brian has accomplished… Writing about Eno can sometimes feel like folding down a skyscraper into a suitcase…"

 

He marks the presence of a garden shed inside the walls of Eno's West London studio, a very English think-tank for a man who has taken "pottering about" to a whole other level.

 

Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, the son of a postman. He grew up in the golden age of art schools and popular music.

 

First, he made pop records that recalled such counter-culture luminaries as Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. Then he launched an experimental record label, issuing LPs by Michael Nyman, and the Penguin Café Orchestra among others.

 

He was in the vanguard of new sounds - ambient music, world music, electronic manipulation and sampling. And in true swinging Sixties style, he was hustler and shagger par excellence; as Sheppard makes clear, it wasn't just Eno's thinking that was promiscuous.

 

"Whichever woman he was with," notes one interviewee, "he'd take a Polaroid as a souvenir… He would lay them all out on the floor at the end of the tour." (First Nick "30 notches" Clegg, now this; these Lib Dems are insatiable!)

 

During the Eighties, Eno relaxed into his role as rock's most employable boffin, a producer who used his belief in process and Oblique Strategies to enliven albums by Talking Heads, U2 and so on.

 

He became synonymous with a kind of safe avant-gardism, bestowing credibility without scaring away a mass audience, a function he performs to this day - Coldplay's new album was co-produced by Eno and marketed accordingly.

 

These commissions allowed Eno to pursue his many interests outside music; notably art and technology. Which brings us back to the problem of the skyscraper and the suitcase.

 

Sheppard's account of Eno's prodigious first creative decade is very good. Unfortunately, Eno's subsequent career - 25 years of installations, lectures, charity work and political activism - proves too diffuse to handle, partly because Sheppard's interests lie elsewhere and partly, perhaps, because only Eno himself would be able to give a full, informed account of it.

 

But until such time as the world's leading "failed musician" (his description) produces a sequel to his 1994 diary A Year With Swollen Appendices, On Some Faraway Beach provides an extensive introduction to a lifetime of constructive, and very English, pottering.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/05/boshe105.xml