Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector CHRISTMAS 2024 - by Ian Shirley

"HE ALWAYS BROUGHT THE SANDWICHES!"

Eno cut his production teeth on a number of projects from the mid-'70s onwards. This included helming the debut LP by Ultravox! recorded in 1976. John Foxx recalls what it was like to work with Eno in the studio.

I read that you got Eno to produce your first LP by introducing yourself to him. Was that the case?

Yes. Eno had just parted from Roxy. He occasionally came into the cafe at Island Records, where I asked him if he'd produce our record. He came down to rehearsal later to check us out [They were all working at St. Peter's Square in Hammersmith - Ed.] Brian recorded some of the songs on his wee dictaphone and went away. A couple of days later, I got a call. He said, "OK - let's go."

Was there anyone else in the frame or was it only Eno?

There were two others - Chris Thomas, because he'd done great production work with Roxy - and Lee Perry, because I liked that deep bass and the sheer wildness of the sounds he got.

Billy [Currie, Ultravox! keyboardist/violinist] and I went down to some of those sessions in Basing Street - it was great to meet Marley; he was clearly the king of it all, but everyone was at the controls, moving in a sort of Lee Perry choreographed dance. There was no engineer/musician demarcation. It was a pure joy to see - all Perry's magic stuff laid out on the console and a complete takeover of the studio. Truly using the studio as a musical instrument. Inspirational.

At our own sessions, we found that Brian and Steve Lillywhite had a similar attitude. They also destroyed that old hierarchy. At last, we were free to move in on the controls, make suggestions that were listened to, and get involved in the process.

Previously, musicians were strictly forbidden to go too near the faders. Engineers were completely territorial. They'd also tell you: you couldn't have a sound if they judged it "too extreme" or "too distorted". Eno, Lillywhite, Lee Perry and a few others broke all that down forever.

Can you recall what it was like the first day going into the studio with him?

We set up the gear with Lillywhite getting the sounds going. Terry Barham, the Island house engineer, also pitched in. He was an affable and experienced character who'd recorded Marley and many others. Brian always brought packed sandwiches for lunch break, lovingly made by Ritva, his girlfriend at the time. I think we half expected the glitter and peacock feathers, but he wore conventional clothes and corduroy trousers - I assumed to signal that he was now poised to be a serious producer.

How did the sessions go?

All very quick and efficient. We'd brought Steve Lillywhite along as insurance. Together, we'd already recorded around half the album during weekends at Marble Arch Studios, where he worked. Though Steve was very young, he was by then an experienced, able and thorough recording engineer. He quickly became house engineer at Island - [Chris] Blackwell really liked him and offered him the job.

By this time Eno had published the first edition of five hundred of his Oblique Strategy cards. Did he deploy them? What was the response?

We thought they made interesting and sometimes useful suggestions. You can easily get into an impasse in recording studios, which are notorious psychic hothouses, so Brian had assembled prompts to ease ways out of that.

Coincidentally, Warren [Cann, drummer] and I were reading The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, which is all about the charms and dangers of chance, though carried to crazy logical extremes, so it all fitted very well. I think the only thing we disagreed on was one of Brian's statements that the process of recording was more important than the result.

My Sex was composed in the studio. I imagine Eno treated your vocal for it?

I wasn't sure exactly how to do the vocals. I didn't want to try to sing it in any way. Brian suggested a sort of semi-spoken approach, which worked well. I'd already written the basic song, but it had begun as a sort of conceptual piece - for instance, I wanted a real heartbeat as that basic drum; that's where the double beat came from. The original plan was to have my girlfriend and I miked up while we made love. I hoped the heartbeats would eventually synchronise together. I also thought we might use the resulting signals to trigger a synth or two. It was to be an attempt to make music by other means - a real love song. Obvious technical - and other! - problems made it all impractical. We did try recording an actual heartbeat, but it wasn't dear enough. Eventually we came back to reality and settled on either a drum machine or Brian looping a drum sound he had on tape. (I seem to remember we tried both, so not sure which one we ended up with).

Then I recorded the song, playing the basic chords on an acoustic guitar over the looped drum beat, and singing, or speaking, the vocals. I left a gap in the middle for an instrumental part, which Billy [Currie] and Eno immediately got to work on - and they came up with that very nice melody. Chris [Cross] added his usual fluid bass, and I had an idea for a sort of Bernstein guitar figure, which Stevie [Shears, guitar] played. Only took an afternoon and it was all done. Best thing on the album - and new direction established.

That was also when Chris became fascinated by Eno's EMS suitcase synth and later got one of his own, along with a Minimoog. Using Brian's equipment gave us all lots of ideas. During the recording of the album, Brian often used an early cocktail-lounge type drum machine to set a tempo by providing a regular click-track, so any editing would be simpler. This wasn't intended to appear on the finished recording, and was erased afterwards, but sometimes, listening to playback, I grew to realise I was enjoying the different feel it could give. So, I bought one later, a TR77. This came into its own when I was writing Hiroshima Mon Amour a few months later.

Did Eno encourage the band? Come up with suggestions?

He was always encouraging. The great thing he did was give implicit permission to take chances. We were all discovering the new possibilities of recording. Brian was also in the very early stages of becoming a producer and it was clear he was determined to do it in his own way. He'd had some valuable experiences with Roxy and was keen to carry through his previous interest in avant-garde music, which he was aware was infiltrating popular music. For instance, we both loved Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles, and George Martin. This was a kind of music that couldn't exist without a recording studio; a creation of radical ideas, incorporating looped tapes, drones and other repurposed recordings. We both took this as clear evidence that the entire form of modern music was altering fundamentally by absorbing these possibilities.

But for this album and the band, it was still early days. Out of necessity - limited time and budget - the songs were to be recorded straight down, all of us playing together, as we'd rehearsed. I remember Billy being a bit taken aback at the final reverb added to his parts on Slip Away. He wanted it to sound less lush and more hard and spare. The rest of us thought it was fine, so Bill let it go. Very gracious. We also used Brian's dummy head microphone system to record I Want To Be A Machine. This was an actual life-size model of a head with stereo microphones placed in accurately sculpted ears - it was said to give a faithful stereo reproduction of wherever it was placed. Brian also used it to record the ambient wind sounds in the well by the studio, which became the intro. But it seemed very delicate - adding any overdubbed sounds would destroy that effect immediately.

Brian and Steve got a nicely distorted vocal sound for Wide Boys. We called this "the Burroughs track" - I wrote it as Wild Boys, then changed it because that seemed a bit too obvious and Wide Boys made it more London.

Eno the non-musician is a matter of lore, but he knew his way around synth, guitar and other instruments. Did you talk about music and chords when recording? Or was it about feel and translating the songs you already knew inside out?

There wasn't really a need for structural work, since we'd already ironed out all the arrangements. He'd been to rehearsals, so he knew we had the songs down. Brian also liked the idea of allowing us to sound the way we wanted.

By this time Eno had worked with a lot of musicians on his solo and other recordings. I assume he was very good at putting the band at ease to get the best from them.

As well as admiration for Roxy, the reason I'd asked him to work on our record was because I really liked some of the pieces on Another Green World. Tracks such as Sky Saw had some adventurous and extreme sounds for the time. I also liked Becalmed very much, it was at the other end of the spectrum, but equally important. It was a breakthrough record, a new kind of music - a marvellously strange mating of a new sort of jazz without all the cliches, cocktail lounge music and avant-rock. We discussed the great potential of music that could only be generated in a studio and how studios could now be regarded as a new sort of musical instrument.

Were there any problems with songs? Were parts recorded live and then overdubbed?

No problems. Plenty of fun and very swift work. Mostly we recorded the songs live in the studio, then replaced or added parts where necessary. All the songs had been rehearsed, so they were relatively easy to record. Hearing playback always gave everyone a shock: it's like experiencing a recording of your own voice for the first time.

Along with that, a few new angles and ideas would arrive, which we'd go to work on. Only My Sex was made from scratch in the studio. But, given the chance, that was where I'd have abandoned all the rest and started again, because I realised it was something completely new. And, at that time, no one else was doing anything like it.

You have to remember this was late summer, 1976. But Island decided to hold the record release over until the new year, which was very frustrating - things were happening fast, and I wanted it out as soon as possible. Everything around us was becoming geared to a sort of sub-Ramones template. While I really liked the excitement and the year zero approach, I also realised that, as with many other things we liked, it was necessary for us to consciously move against them at times. Great things were happening in Europe that no one else seemed to have noticed, and which I was determined to acknowledge. Brian was well immersed in all that. I knew it was vital to follow my own instincts about songwriting, in order for the band to be able to claim its own unique territory. Otherwise, you can easily get narrowed down and relegated to just one brief moment.

After that, I always kept at least one or two songs to take chances with - to be made in the studio, often at the end of each album. Hiroshima Mon Amour, Just For A Moment, Dislocation, were all this kind of thing- I felt these were the best songs. They were evolving and breaking new ground and I wanted them to form the true direction of the band. By the time of Systems Of Romance [1978], that would finally be happening.

So, working with Brian gave us access to a new, evolving generation of music technology that I knew must alter the nature of the music itself. It also galvanised me into evolving a way of writing and recording that realised the band's future direction and later, my own.

Finally, you were there when a certain Thin White Duke called and spoke to Eno, leading to the 'Berlin Trilogy'. It seems apt as, with Systems Of Romance, you also spearheaded the European sound working with Conny Plank. Any recollections of the call?

I remember when Brian came in saying he'd just had the call from Bowie to work on his next album and wasn't sure if he should do it - but you could tell he was secretly pleased. We all howled, "Go on, Brian - you've got do it!" That Bowie album later became Low and the relationship extended into other albums afterwards. All that served to properly set Eno up as a producer, in exactly the way he wanted. I was quietly pleased to have got to Eno before Bowie did.

Electricity And Ghosts: The Visual Art Of John Foxx is published by Rocket 88.