Brian Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets

Released - January 1974

Genre - Art Rock

Producer - Brian Eno

Selected Personnel - Brian Eno (Vocals/Synthesiser/Guitar/Keyboards/Treatments); Chris Spedding (Guitar); Phil Manzanera (Guitar); Bill MacCormick (Bass); Robert Fripp (Guitar); Paul Rudolph (Guitar); John Wetton (Bass); Andy Mackay (Keyboards/Saxophone); Paul Thompson (Percussion)

Standout Track - Baby's On Fire

I tried to hate this album for such a long time. Around late 2009, the same time I was discovering Tom Waits at uni, my friends Jack and Adam decided that Brian Eno was their new godhead, and hungrily devoured everything he ever did. Whenever they played bits of it, I was left completely cold by it (I remember in particular hearing the yelped cries of "Oh God" that permeate "Dead Finks Don't Talk" and thinking it was "stupid," which is a particularly odd complaint for me to make considering my general taste in music and what I do for a living). Eventually, they made me sit through two separate documentaries on Eno's life and music (and I remember finding it odd that two completely different documentaries on the subject came out at the same time, but that's a mystery yet to be solved) which I actually found fascinating, and before long I was listening along with them. Today when I listen to Eno I find it really hard to identify what it was I objected to in the first place, as pretty much everything about his music speaks so specifically to my sensibilities of what makes music good, but I suppose it was just my being difficult in the face of an unfamiliar artist, which I tend to do every now and then.

Today, what strikes me as most fascinating about Eno's work is the fact that he is an artist whose guiding principle is never "What will sell?" or even "What musical idea am I trying to express?" as he attempted on frequent occasions to implement obstacles to get in the way of certain ideas, and to incorporate accidents and unplanned free-associative moments in his work to obstruct any overarching sense of intention. Rather, his maxim seems to me to be "What will sound interesting?" It feels like the principal link between his rock output and his glacial ambient soundscapes later on in his career - all of them emerge from a desire to treat and sculpt sound in a way that renders it alien and transformative. In the wake of his departure from Roxy Music over musical differences with bandleader Bryan Ferry, Eno's first project was the proto-ambient sonic experiment with Robert Fripp, (No Pussyfooting), but it would be another few years before Eno truly began to drift away from typical rock music and towards ambient wholesale. While (No Pussyfooting) was a hastily recorded and little-publicised affair, the first major concern in the wake of leaving Roxy Music was to continue what he started there in trying to apply sonic treatments and experimental recording techniques to traditional rock music to see what could be achieved.

The end result is one of the weirdest-sounding rock albums ever recorded. It veers madly from cartoonishly ridiculous to psychotically menacing, to, occasionally, pleasantly serene, but always with the same sense of freewheeling inventiveness. Eno recruited together a collection of musicians that reads like a who's who of the art rock scene at the time, from King Crimson's Robert Fripp and John Wetton to Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay. Eno apparently specifically felt that these musicians would be musically incompatible, and their playing together would therefore create unusual accidents in the studio that could be worked with into something interesting. Once collected together, Eno would communicate his ideas to the musicians via dance or mime in an attempt to encourage them to think differently about the music than they usually would. It's the same sort of lateral approach that would inspire the creation of his Oblique Strategies cards with artist Peter Schmidt, and that would help to radically reinvent David Bowie's music when they worked together in the late 70s. Eno contributes instrumental performances himself, but his biggest role on the album is in the distortions and treatments he applies to the performances of the musicians to render them alien and strange, from the heavily distorted guitars of "Needles In The Camel's Eye" or "Here Come The Warm Jets" to the squealing sound applied to the synthesisers of "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch." As for his vocal contributions, the lyrics largely emerged from trying to make sense out of nonsense sounds Eno would improvise along to the backing tracks, meaning there's a kind of freewheeling, word salad style to the vocals that renders them all the more strange and difficult to grasp onto as anything concrete.

It's an album that keeps the listener guessing even after the tenth listen, and is never anything but fascinating even in its less strong moments. The album opener has an almost hard rock intensity to it via Phil Manzanera's roaring guitar riff over which Eno's warbling voice bleats out nonsense, while the strongest moment on the whole album comes with the terrifying "Baby's On Fire." While Eno's nasal, strangled delivery narrates some vague, incoherent stuff about burning babies, the throbbing and deafening bass builds a palpable sense of menace before Fripp lets loose perhaps the most incendiary, brilliant and furious guitar solo in music history, and undoubtedly the finest thing Fripp himself ever recorded, sadly not on a King Crimson record. "Cindy Tells Me" is a fun 50s pastiche with its tinkling piano and cooing backing vocals, and "On Some Faraway Beach," with its languid piano part, grandiose synths and choral vocals, is perhaps the closest Eno gets to a moment of calm prettiness on the album, though the pounding drums make even that strange and unfamiliar.

"Dead Finks Don't Talk" is another of Eno's crowning glories, a pompous, ludicrous masterpiece that sees him narrating nonsensical rhymes in a flat monotone ("Oh cheeky cheeky, oh nauhty sneaky. You're so perceptive and I wonder if you knew") over a rhythmic, militaristic drumbeat. Those aforementioned bleating "Oh God" moments make it all the weirder, and Eno even finds time for a piss-take of Bryan Ferry's warbling, crooning vocal style on the line "As you make your way up there." "Some Of Them Are Old" is a slight dip, but acts as a nice repose before the bombastic instrumental finale of "Here Come The Warm Jets," where a heavily distorted "snake guitar" (a guitar compressed by Eno to sound like a "tuned jet") plays a triumphant theme.

Even years after first hearing it, and having listened to countless weird, pompous and nonsensical prog and art-rock albums, I struggle to think of a record more deliriously and delightfully weird than Here Come The Warm Jets. It's easy to think of Eno as a sort of cold, calculated sculptor of sound when presented with his vast body of ambient work, but his early rock albums are a real testament to the spirit of invention and spontaneity and free-associative nonsense that drives so much of his attitude towards art and music. The album was critically well-received, although Eno was always destined to never become a true popular sensation in his own right in the way that Roxy Music would with their future strings of hit singles. Within a few years, Eno's interest in rock music would wane in favour of purer sonic experiments in his ambient works, while by today much of his involvement with more popular music is only as a producer or co-writer for huge pop acts like U2 and Coldplay. The next step was a similar album entitled Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), which contains a couple of great songs in "Third Uncle" and "The True Wheel," but has never struck me as having the same sense of musical accomplishment or true invention as this record. It would be 1975 when Eno next delivered something truly immortal.

Track Listing:

1. Needles In The Camel's Eye (Brian Eno & Phil Manzanera)

2. The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch (Brian Eno)

3. Baby's On Fire (Brian Eno)

4. Cindy Tells Me (Brian Eno & Phil Manzanera)

5. Driving Me Backwards (Brian Eno)

6. On Some Faraway Beach (Brian Eno)

7. Blank Frank (Brian Eno & Robert Fripp)

8. Dead Finks Don't Talk (Brian Eno, arranged by Paul Thompson, Busta Jones, Nick Judd & Brian Eno)

9. Some Of Them Are Old (Brian Eno)

10. Here Come The Warm Jets (Brian Eno)