Brian Eno

London, 1975. Brian Eno is crossing Harrow Road, and gets hit by a taxi. He spends several months in hospital, hardly able to move. A friend brings him a CD of some Renaissance harp music, puts it on, and leaves. The speakers aren’t very good, and it’s raining heavily, so Eno can hardly hear the music. Unable to reach the record player, he decides to listen anyway. As the quiet harp music blends with the rain, he thinks the effect is quite nice. He decided music doesn’t need to grab the attention, but can just hangs around in the background, creating an ambience. He calls it ambient music, and a genre is born.

Oddly, the master of subtle background music started out as a glam rocker. After art college he played synthesiser with Roxy Music for their fantastic first two albums. In a band of poor dressers, he managed to stand out as easily the worst. He’s on the far left in this video:

After Eno left Roxy, the band became fairly dull, while Eno released a trio of stunning solo albums. The first was Roxy-ish glam rock, but in the second and third he started moving towards a more downbeat style:

He is perhaps best known for his atmospheric ambient music, which is sometimes written for a specific purpose: in 1978 he released Music for Airports, and then Music for Films. He also wrote the Windows 95 theme tune. In a 1996 interview, he explained:

“The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional’, this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’”

As well as making his own music, Eno has been a serial collaborator and producer since the 70s. He produced three Talking Heads albums, helped on Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger), and has made seven albums with U2.

Nowadays he experiments with ‘generative art’, sings in a gospel choir (though he’s an atheist), and is still making and producing music.

Why to hear... He invented a genre. He also made some pretty fantastic music in genres which already existed.

What to hear... For Your Pleasure (Roxy Music), Taking Tiger Mountain, Another Green World, Music for Airports