Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Sounds MAY 18, 1974 - by Martin Hayman

THE WILD BUNCH

Martin Hayman jumps into the Tardis, goes into the future with typewriter over his shoulder and ends up on the beach with Eno, Phil Manzanera and John Cale.

Just before I went away on my holidays I spent a pleasantly twilit afternoon talking with Eno, and later Phil Manzanera and John Cale arrived and it was a conversation whose interest level stayed consistently well above that which is wont to be heard amongst the communicators od rock and roll... but then these are not bounded by a frame of reference which has anything to do with rock and roll.

As Eno says, if you conceive of contemporary rock and roll as a black box, most musicians will be thinking in terms of the process which is occurring within that box. Cale, like himself, was more interested in the inputs which went into the black box, and whose total was the process which was occurring within the box.

I am now sitting on some far away beach and this afternoon might be from a different time, (You understand I am writing in futurity) and this conversation, and the thoughts in it, seem as transient as the Tardis but nonetheless have in the same way a certain substantive existence at some point in time (assuming I write them down correctly interpreted).

I arrived at Eno's Maida Vale apartment at the heure bleue. The only non-appearing superstar in rock music opened the door - a new transformed Eno, his fragile pallor evaporated by the sun of the Canary Isles, his skin glowing a healthy, er, cafe au lait shade, but the fronds of long hair still stuck out behind his ear at right angles to his head, like fair plums.

As he served coffee, Kevin Ayer's Bananamour was playing gently in the background and as an opening sally Eno remarked, "I've decided I feel a great affinity with John Cale and Kevin Ayers. They're both interested in using different styles which make their own very difficult to categorize." This led further to the supposition that it made life very hard for the record companies whose business it is to sell such records without an easily-grasped handle; and in fact Cale's later arrival prompted speculation on what sort of name this newly convened school could describe itself by, "Les chevilles exotiques" being proposed and rejected.

But you notice we are already falling victim of the journalist's manipulation of time for his own sinister ends, for our intrepid reporter has only just walked through the door, and it is not for some couple of hours that the Welshman makes an appearance.

It can be no secret that Eno is working with John Cale on the first solo album he (John) has recorded since the dreamy (sublime, as it has been described with unusual semantic clarity) Paris 1919 and his first for Island Records. Also present - Phil Manzanera on guitar, Archie Leggett on bass and a Fred Smith on drums. Eno and Phil are to be credited as co-producers of the record, which gives some idea of their depth of involvement, as Eno says "discussing the whole form of music".

It's an appropriate teaming actually. The similarity in the timbre of the two men's voices was striking and immediately noticeable when Eno's Warm Jets was released and went well beyond Chris Thomas' production, which was common to both records. It came as no shock to find in Warm Jets's (rather eclectic) record collection an album of Noel Coward. Now if they could round up Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett, that would indeed be a mighty harmony foursome.

"I think this is his best solo album probably," says Eno of the new Cale pieces. "He's probably more certain of what he wants to do than ever before. He's much more in control of it. Again it's got this thing where it's inconsistent throughout which is a quality I'm learning to like a lot."

They have reached the point where Eno thinks an album gets really interesting, where the basic work has been done and they are in the process of adding and taking away bits and pieces, "hybridising". It's not been done in an altogether conventional way. Rather like Eno's own solo album, it's not been built up in a chronological sequence. Most rock albums are built up from a sort of foundation in the backing tracks through various logical stages to a finished product. What Eno attempted to do with his album was to allow all stages of the process of making an album co-exist simultaneously, so that the beginning might just as easily be reviewed and re-done as the final overdubs and mixing. This way he feels you get a better feel for a complete work. It's a more deistic artistic pose as well because it involves seeing a conscious process extended spatially rather than chronologically, like God overseeing simultaneously the creation and the dissolution of the Universe.

This is where the exploitation of the tape machine comes in. "The important thing is that it's to do with the manipulation of time: it's incredibly exciting working with time. Most people regard a tape machine as a mere tool rather than an extension of their brains." Of his artistic relationship with Cale he says: "If you're prepared to steal as I am - I don't consider there's anything wrong with it - and keep your ears open... one of the things that John is really aware of and that I'm particularly interested in is the summology of sound, that is the sum of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

"My tendency, because of my own instrumental limitations, is to find the simplest common denominator of a piece of music. That works particularly well in combination with John because he's a particularly skilled instrumentalist on keyboards and viola and as a result tends to find the most complex way of doing the same thing. It's the same with Phil - he does some amazing guitar.

"I like John because he's one of the few people who's relating himself to what goes on outside music. The range of his references is so wide. It can be quite difficult to understand him at times because he can be talking about something perfectly seriously and suddenly he'll refer to say The Wild Bunch as an example of what he means.

"My new things are very simple and I can already see the reviews. People will say that I put it together when I didn't have enough material for the album. That's the sort of criticism which can hurt. But John came around one night and I played them to him - he thought they were great, the best I'd done. From someone I respect as much as him, that give you a lot of confidence. We occupy sufficiently different areas to get on really well without treading on each other's toes."