Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Disc AUGUST 18, 1973 - by Ray Fox-Cumming

AT HOME WITH ENO AND HIS BARE FLOORBOARDS, SYNTHESISER AND ELECTRIC LARYNX

Eno is the surname, his first name is Brian. Eno (or Brian if you prefer) lives in a tiny alley-way off Portobello Road. "It's the first door you come to; if it's open walk straight in. If it's not, bang on it loudly and yell."

But was it the first door on the left or first on the right? Try left. Crash, crash, yahoo.

"What do you want?" yells back a voice from within and a large, affable negress appears at a first-floor window. A couple of minutes of non-communication then: "I think you should try opposite."

Opposite, the door is open. "Walk right in," the man said. A flight of precarious bare wooden stairs leads up into a small room, which, bare-boarded, is totally devoid of all furniture bar a small bookcase lined with knick-knacks, two tiny children's wooden chairs and a mattress covered with bedding and a black fake-fur rug (or was it a coat?).

Eno's grinning face appears through an open doorway leading into another room, which, again bare-boarded, houses nothing but a symthesiser, tape-recorders, rows and rows of tape boxes and the bare essentials of a kitchen. "Hello," says Eno, whose eyes bear slight traces of grey-blue make-up. "I'll be with you in a minute. I just have to finish taping something."

AEROPLANES

For the next couple of minutes the most strange noises emerge from the workshop. Sounds a bit like aeroplanes, and is.

Eno produces an album starring the US Air Force Starfighters. The whole LP is devoted to plane noises, bombs dropping, etc. Eno explains that he picked it up in America where he suspects it sells quite heavily on the quiet.

But what is he doing with it? It transpires that he is helping Bob Calvert with his Hawkwind offshoot project Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters, but that is only a tiny part of Eno's current operations.

All those tapes lining the wall, what was on them?

"All my own stuff," smiles Eno proudly, "one-and-a-half million feet of it. I worked it out."

And how much of it usable?

"Oh, I don't know. Everything I record goes straight up there unless it's exceptional, in which case I work on it immediately. Otherwise it just sits up there until I take it down and give it another listen."

SPARTAN

Eno spends most of his time in this Spartan retreat. "I have no other flat. Sometimes I stay with girlfriends but often I end up sleeping here. I work most of the night."

In these modest surroundings Eno has recorded what must be the cheapest album ever made with ex-King Crimson man Bob Fripp. "It cost £3.98 in all," claims Eno laughing, "and it's a great album. He was coming round to see me and I said 'you might as well bring your guitar with you' and we ended up cutting side one of the album in forty minutes flat, having no idea previously that we were going to do it at all."

There's no release date set yet, but when it does appear it will be under the names Fripp and Eno.

SOLO ALBUM

Another completed project is a single with Roxy Music's Andy Mackay, due out probably next month. Principal concern at the moment is his own solo album, which he hopes to have ready for release in November.

"It looks like being a strange contradiction between the lyrical and the melodic, to which I have a strong tendency. I seem to have a knack of writing hooklines."

He plays a rough cut of a track he's working on at the moment. The melody is both strong and catchy. Eno's sung the lead vocal and dovetailed high and low snatches in behind - they are his voice as well.

"My voice is rather thin but I make up for it through having a wide range of nearly four octaves."

The main vocal sounds lie Kevin Ayers.

"Yes. Somebody else said that. I've also been told I sound like Syd Barrett and some people have said it's like Lou Reed. I'm delighted."

Eno is also interested in experimenting with voices for use as instruments and has thought of using them as rhythm.

"I have invented a device I call the electric larynx, whereby I can take my voice and pitch it an octave or a fifth higher or lower as I want, so that it becomes an instrument. If it catches on - and I think it will - it will give rebirth to a skiffle kind of situation where anybody will be able to play. I have to do this because I'm not in any way competent on any other instrument.

"I always work very, very slowly at home and I always reckon to waste quite a lot of time. It doesn't matter because it is not expensive studio time.

"I have become interested recently in using a completely different range of sounds for bass. On this album I shall use a steel band, tuba, synthesiser and drum machine.

"Most of the experiments that have been done in rock music have been with the melodic instruments. All the bands one thinks of as being progressive have kept a hard core rhythm section as an anchor. I want to experiment with the rhythm section."

NEW BAND

Once the solo album is completed, Eno will turn his attention to the band he is currently in the process of forming. It is to be called Luana And The Lizard Girls, the name being a borrow from William Burroughs' controversial novel Naked Lunch. Plans for that, though, are still very much in the embryonic stage.

Perhaps the most peculiar of his many involvements is with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which, he explains, "is an orchestra made up of people who would like to play instruments but who are not really musicians. They play popular light classics and the aim, of course, is to get better so that one day they will be playing properly., Of course, that will never happen, because as people get better they will leave and new raw recruits will come in to take their place." A Portsmouth Sinfonia album is in the pipeline.

The commercial viability of the Portsmouth Sinfonia is perhaps questionable. Eno related with relish one concert they played at Bath when not a single person showed up to listen. "They played just the same though."

Why?

"Why not?" he says with a giggle. "Anyway, you never know, someone might have arrived before the end."

Did they?

"No."

Lastly, what, Eno, do you consider the most commercial aspect of your work?

"My face. Me mush, mate."