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Brian Eno’s ‘Film Music 1976 – 2020’
11.20.2020
10:31 am
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Portrait of Brian Eno by Cecily Eno

Brian Eno was creating soundtrack music for films even before he joined Roxy Music in 1971. His first project was a repetitive, proto-ambient score for Malcolm Le Grice’s experimental short “Berlin Horse” in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1976 that his music appeared in another film, Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane. Since then Eno has worked with some of the world’s finest directors, including Peter Jackson, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dario Argento, Jonathan Demme, Danny Boyle, animator Ralph Bakshi, Al Reinert, and several others. The fruits of these several decades of work—which has seen hundreds of his songs used in films, TV shows, documentaries, advertisements and of course the Windows 95 startup sounds—has been collected together on Film Music 1976 – 2020.

The lead track from the album, “Decline and Fall” originally featured on the soundtrack to 2017’s O Nome da Morte, (AKA 492: A Man Called Death) and that film’s director, Henrique Goldman, was personally commissioned by Brian Eno to make the song’s promo video.

Goldman says of the piece:

“Our video juxtaposes two cinematic narratives set in Brazil, one of the main frontiers in the final battle between Man and Nature. The first comprises fragments of a drama about the tortured soul of the assassin portrayed in O Nome da Morte, and the second depicts a magical natural phenomena – the Invisible River of the Amazon – a meteorologic process on a colossal scale, whereby rainforest trees continually spray billions of gallons of water into the atmosphere.

The video is foreboding and suspenseful. Somewhere in the vast Brazilian landscape, something momentous lurks in the background. An unforeseen, greedy and merciless force disrupts the divine stream of life. The same force drives the hitman, who stealthily steps out of the shadows to kill for money. As rain and fire, fiction and science, birth and death, nature and civilisation, art, love and greed continually juxtapose each other, we become aware of the delicate natural balance that is being severely disrupted by our civilisation.”

Brian Eno’s Film Music 1976 – 2020 is already out in the UK on double vinyl and CD, with the US release coming on January 22nd.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.20.2020
10:31 am
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The Drive to 1981: Robert Fripp’s art-rock classic ‘Exposure’
06.27.2020
10:05 am
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In 1977, King Crimson founder Robert Fripp—who’d left the world of music in 1974 when he dissolved the group—moved to NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen (and then later a place on the Bowery) and immersed himself in the city’s punk and new wave music scene. Inspired by New York’s frantic energy and wanting to combine the new sounds he was hearing with “Frippertronics,” the droning tape loop system he had developed with Eno, the final product was his solo record, Exposure.

The ambitious Exposure is one of the ultimate art-rock documents of late 70s New York, a classic album that sadly seems to have fallen through the cracks for many music fans. It’s a brilliant and underrated missing link between what was to become King Crimson’s next incarnation, the “Berlin trilogy” of David Bowie and Brian Eno (and indeed Fripp and Eno’s own collaborations), Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and believe it or not, Hall and Oates!

That’s right, Exposure was meant to be seen as the third part of a loose trilogy that included Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel’s second album (both produced by Fripp). Daryl Hall’s management threw a wrench in the works, concerned that Hall’s decidedly more esoteric solo material might confuse his fan-base expecting catchy, “blue-eyed soul” AM radio-friendly pop tunes and that this would harm his commercial appeal. Additionally, they insisted that Fripp’s own Exposure album be credited as a Fripp/Hall collaboration. As a result, Fripp used just two of Hall’s performances on the album, recording new vocals by Terre Roche and Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill.

Sacred Songs didn’t come out until 1980 and sold respectably well. Both albums include the snarling buzz-saw rave-up, “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette.”:
 

 
The first voice you hear in the “Preface” is Eno’s and the voice before the phone starts ringing is Peter Gabriel’s. The vocal however, is obviously Daryl Hall, but not as we’re used to hearing him. Fripp later described Hall as the best singer he’d ever worked with and compared his musical creativity to David Bowie’s. High praise indeed.

Another highlight on Exposure is Peter Gabriel’s amazing performance of his “Here Comes the Flood,” perhaps the best version of the many he has recorded: Gabriel disliked the orchestral arrangements for the song on his first album, considering it over-produced. He did a different version on Kate Bush’s Christmas TV special in 1979 and still another on on his Shaking the Tree greatest hits collection. The rendition heard on Exposure is sparse, haunting and moving. I think it’s one of his single greatest vocal performances. Eno, Fripp and Gabriel are the only musicians on this track:
 

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.27.2020
10:05 am
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‘Here Comes the Warm Dreads’: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry & Adrian Sherwood meet Brian Eno uptown
11.29.2019
12:04 pm
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Lee Perry and Adrian Sherwood by Kishi Yamamoto
 
When Rainford, the collaboration between dub legends Lee “Scratch” Perry and On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood came out earlier this year, the reviews were stellar, but I will admit to being a bit skeptical.  A five star MOJO review asserted “Rainford is a late-career answer to 1978’s Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread and beyond all reasonable expectation, fully its equal.” 

Really? The unequivocal statement above bites off an awful lot, of course, but damn if that album wasn’t—beyond all reasonable expectation—really amazing.

Next from the Perry and Sherwood team-up comes Heavy Rain, the dub version of Rainford. The press release, echoing the MOJO reviewer claims “If Rainford is 2019’s Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread then Heavy Rain is its Super Ape,” but this time I was less skeptical. The two greatest dub producers alive, plus the talents of the great Jamaican master trombonist Vin Gordon and another fellow known for his prowess in the studio, Brian Eno? 

The track that features Eno’s contribution is a radical reworking of “Makumba Rock” one of Rainford‘s highlights. Here titled “Here Come the Warm Dreads,” it’s my understanding that Eno only worked on the right channel of the mix. It’s super trippy, almost disorienting. TURN IT UP LOUD. And smoke a joint, would you? Don’t waste it!

Heavy Rain is released on black vinyl, silver vinyl, CD as well as available for download and streaming on December 6th via On-U Sound.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.29.2019
12:04 pm
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Footage of Iggy Pop, Grace Jones, & a yodeling Brian Eno on Dutch television in the 70s & 80s


An ad for Dutch music television show ‘TopPop.’
 
After launching in September of 1970, the music television show TopPop, the Dutch response to Top of the Pops, would give the British show a run for their money by providing bands, musicians, and performers a venue to creatively mime for their lives every week. During its eighteen-year run, the show hosted pretty much every band and musician known to man and a fair share of Nederpop (a word coined to describe the pop scene in the Netherlands). Loads of them such as Slade, David Bowie, Queen, Debbie Harry and Blondie appeared on the show multiple times. Many acts also filmed exclusive video content for the program, especially during the 1970s as promotional video material was not yet a regular industry practice. If for some reason a musical act wasn’t able to make it to the Netherlands, the show had a secret weapon—Dutch ballerina and choreographer Penny de Jager. The gorgeous de Jager and her ballet troupe went all out when the opportunity presented itself, such as her Aladdin-themed dance-off to Queen’s “Someone to Love,” or turning the TopPop studio into the Dutch version of Soul Train for the Commodores soul standard, “Brick House.” There are a few instances of TopPop traveling to film their guests like heartthrob David Cassidy, who the show shot on the grass at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. Then, in 1974, TopPop packed their bags and flew to Los Angeles to film Barry White at his home.
 

A photo of Brian Eno from his appearance on ‘TopPop’ in 1977.
 
TopPop stands out in the vast sea of music-oriented television programming thanks to their creative presentation of their guests’ performances. This included various mind-enhancing stage designs, optical effects, or perhaps mini-narratives in a vein that would later become the norm on MTV. I can personally tell you that your life is not complete unless you have seen Brian Eno yodeling while he falls through a backdrop of trippy 70s-style effects. And, since I’m a special kind of Black Sabbath geek, one of their more infamous TV performances was filmed for TopPop, a fantastic black and white video of the band grinding out “Paranoid” while some sort of bizarre motorized art project spins behind them. Sure the bands were lipsynching, but that didn’t have to mean it had to look dull. 

Iggy Pop was another of TopPop‘s regulars, and you’ve probably heard about him trashing TopPop‘s studio during what was supposed to be his lipsynched performance of “Lust for Life.” This would be one of many times Iggy would appear on TopPop seemingly with no other goal but to fuck everybody’s mind up. Following Iggy’s unhinged destruction of the studio, Dutch journalist and TopPop contributor Mick Boskamp interviewed Iggy, perhaps for damage control purposes, asking him if he rehearses his “acts” or do they come to him “spontaneously”? Iggy replied that trashing a European television studio wasn’t something he would rehearse because it was just not something he “does.” “I just come in and do it.” Which accurately sums up his unhinged ambush of TopPop‘s defenseless studio. 

There are over 3000 videos from TopPop on their YouTube channel, so feel free to use the rest of your lifetime digging through the Dutch treats it contains. A few of my personal favorites are posted below.  
 

Brian Eno doing “Seven Deadly Finns” on ‘TopPop.’
 

One of Iggy Pop’s gonzo performances of “Lust for Life” taped for ‘TopPop’ during which he destroys a chair in 1977.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.13.2019
02:32 pm
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‘Apollo’: Brian Eno’s ‘zero-gravity country music’ gets the deluxe treatment
07.10.2019
01:21 pm
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Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, the seminal collaboration between Brian Eno, his brother Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois was recorded as the score for what ultimately became For All Mankind, the landmark, Oscar-winning 1989 feature documentary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The music was made in 1983 when director Al Reinhart was still calling the work-in-progress “Apollo.” It would take Reinhart nearly a decade to sort through six million feet of 16mm film related to the moon mission and then enlarge the individual frames to 35mm. The film features footage of the landing with real-time commentary, as well as the Apollo astronauts sharing their recollections of the momentous events surrounding it.

Now the original album has been expanded with additional material and remastered by Abbey Road’s Miles Showell. The music from Apollo has been used to great effect elsewhere, making it familiar to millions. Danny Boyle seems especially fond of it, using the Apollo music in Trainspotting28 Days Later, and during his opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics held in London.

But what’s with the pedal steel guitar? Have you ever wondered about that? New Scientist magazine interviewed Eno in 2009 when his moon music was performed at London’s Science Museum and here’s what he said:

Why is there pedal steel guitar in the Apollo composition?

When director Al Reinert approached me about doing the Apollo music – which ended up in the 1989 film For All Mankind – he told me there was music on the moon shot. Every astronaut was allowed to take one cassette of their favourite music. All but one took country and western. They were cowboys exploring a new frontier, this one just happened to be in space. We worked the piece around the idea of zero-gravity country music.

Now you know. The eleven new tracks on Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks finds the brothers Eno and Lanois working collectively again for the first time since the original sessions in 1983. It will be available on July 19 as a 2XLP 180 gram vinyl release in a gatefold sleeve, as a limited numbered 2CD edition with 24-page full color hardcover book, standard 2CD edition, special digital edition with exclusive cover art and a standard digital edition.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.10.2019
01:21 pm
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Brian Eno, Debbie Harry play movie soundtracks on ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell’s internet radio show
06.28.2018
08:18 am
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The March 3, 1979 issue of ‘Record Mirror’
 
Last summer, I posted clips from MrDeMilleFM, the new internet radio venture of former Stranglers singer and guitarist Hugh Cornwell. It’s devoted entirely to movies and their music, and it’s fun. Hugh’s got specials on William Wellman, John Frankenheimer, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame and Steve McQueen; he’s got interviews with Ken Loach, John Sayles, John Altman, Peter Webber and David Puttnam. Behold his mighty hand!

Since that time, two episodes of Cornwell’s old internet radio show, Sound Trax FM, have surfaced in the MrDeMilleFM archive. These will interest DM readers, because Hugh’s guests are Brian Eno and Debbie Harry, playing and talking about their favorite movie music.

Among the records Eno spins during his 80-minute visit with Cornwell are Samira Tewfik’s “Hobbak Morr,” the source for “A Secret Life” on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “I’m Deranged,” the immortal track from Bowie and Eno’s Outside that David Lynch took as the theme for Lost Highway. Speaking about which, Eno praises the still unreleased album-length improvisation he and Bowie recorded at the beginning of the Outside sessions:

In a room together, we played for 72 minutes a kind of suite, really, which he improvised the singing over, and it turned into this amazingly complex and interesting story which finally became something called “Leon,” which sort of became the backbone of the album Outside. But the original improvisation, which I listened to not very long ago, is absolutely incredible! You think: How could anyone do this without having a plan in advance?

 

 
Debbie Harry’s episode is too short at 47 minutes, but she brings along the best song on the Performance soundtrack and talks about working with David Cronenberg on Videodrome and John Waters on Hairspray.

Tracklists and the shows, after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.28.2018
08:18 am
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Outsider Art: Stunning pics of Bowie & Eno visiting mental patients in Austria, 1994
01.19.2018
09:41 am
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In 1994 the well-known artistic impresario André Heller invited his chums David Bowie and Brian Eno to his native Austria in order to spend a day in the town of Klosterneuburg, on the northern edge of Vienna, to visit the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic (universally known as “Gugging”). The visit to the clinic formed one of the primary inspirations for one of Bowie’s longest and most challenging albums, Outside.

Fortunately for us, Heller also invited his friend, Austrian photographer Christine de Grancy, along. De Grancy took plentiful photos of the encounter but quite astonishingly, she desisted from even developing the negatives until about a year ago, on the occasion of Heller’s 70th birthday. Forty-four splendid photographs of that intriguing day are currently on display in the Crone Galerie in Vienna.

The story of Gugging as an enlightened place of artistic healing has dark roots. During World War II, Gugging was the site of the Nazi-sanctioned murder of hundreds of mentally deficient patients. In the late 1950s, a psychiatrist named Leo Navratil chose Gugging to be the site of his project involving the exposure of the artistic process to mental patients as a form of therapy. Rather than hide the patients or shut them down with medication, Navratil felt that the artistic process might yield beneficial effects on even schizophrenic patients. Over time, he did discover that some of his patients had authentic artistic talent, and Gugging became linked with the artistic movement started by Jean Dubuffet known as Art Brut, which in the U.S. we would be more likely to call “outsider art.”

It is likely an oversimplification to say that David Bowie’s interest in the treatment of schizophrenics derived from the fact that his stepbrother, Terry Burns, suffered from schizophrenia; sadly, Burns committed suicide in early 1985 by permitting himself to be run over by a train at the Coulsdon South train station near London. Many have concluded that Bowie’s early song “The Bewlay Brothers” is a meditation on his half-brother. Eight years after Burns’ death, on Black Tie White Noise, Bowie released “Jump They Say,” which was an even more explicit treatment of the subject: Bowie told the NME that the song was “semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother.” (It’s interesting, isn’t it, that with the term “stepbrother,” Bowie semi-consciously places Burns in the category of “not a blood relation.”) “Jump They Say” was Bowie’s last top 10 single in the UK until 2010, when he scored with “Where Are We Now?

One of the motives Heller had in inviting Bowie to Gugging was to remind him that the treatment of schizophrenics can employ different methods—and yield different outcomes. It’s beyond plausible that Bowie may have felt an exceptional connection to the goings-on at the Gugging clinic.
 

 
The date of the visit was September 8, 1994. I was actually a resident of Vienna at the time. He wasn’t on tour, so there wasn’t a concert for me to attend. Pech gehabt. Bowie and Eno interacted with the patients—and some sort of Jause, the Austrian term for a convivial afternoon snack, was served.

Bowie and Eno spent three hours at Gugging, and de Grancy didn’t even take out her camera until an hour had passed, preferring instead to take the temperature of the moment. De Grancy’s hesitancy in this regard demonstrates something that is quite unusual, which is that these pictures show a Bowie that is about as private as you are likely to find anywhere. Bowie was present not as a rock star but in his role as a working artist and a private individual—an individual who nine years earlier had lost a close relative to schizophrenia. Bowie was consumed with observing the inmates, none of whom, recall, had the slightest notion of who David Bowie was. (We are permitted the fleeting thought that Bowie found this odd anonymity refreshing.)

The 1994 visit was not the first time that Bowie and Eno had been to the clinic. In 1995, the Independent on Sunday ran an interview with the two musicians conducted by Tim de Lisle, in which the two men discussed a visit to Gugging that had taken place while they were cavorting about in Berlin in the late 1970s:
 

“Didn’t we go originally way back in the late Seventies?” Bowie says. “To see l’art brut while we were mixing albums?”

“Yes, well, we probably did,” says Eno.

Needing an ashtray, Bowie slips the cellophane off one of the waiting packets and taps his ash into it. Eno, silently, finds the ashtray.

I ask what the outsider pictures were like. Bowie sighs, as if the question is unanswerable.

-snip-

“What I derived from Gugging the first time,” Bowie goes on, “was the sense that none of them knew they were artists. It’s compelling and sometimes quite frightening to see this honesty. There’s no awareness of embarrassment.”

Eno, who has been murmuring assent, says: “It’s very interesting to see people who are not taking part in any of the ideological arguments. Who are neither for nor against Cubism, or anything. It’s like you could suddenly meet people who didn’t care whether there was a God.”

 
At any rate, a year after that lovely afternoon in Klosterneuburg, Bowie released Outside, which is technically titled 1. Outside. The album represented Bowie’s reunion with Eno, who had been so instrumental in the creation of Bowie’s Berlin masterpieces. The album takes the form of a fractured narrative, which the unwieldy subtitle of the album refers to as “The Diary of Nathan Adler or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue—A Non-Linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle.” (Exhale.) The album deals with “art crimes” and “concept muggings” investigated by the “Arts Protectorate of London,” and features characters named Leon Blank, Algeria Touchshriek, and the notorious art terrorist Ramona A. Stone.

At the press conference to introduce the album (see below), Bowie credited his visit to Gugging as forming “one of the atmospheres for the album.” Here’s the full quote:
 

Gugging was an incredible experience. ... A mututal friend of Brian Eno’s and myself, André Heller, who’s an artist and something of an entrepreneur, suggested we might like to do some work there or with the inmates or—somehow, he wanted us to go and see Gugging and see what’s going on. And what it is, it’s a hospital where 100 percent of the inmates are involved in the visual arts. ... So many inmates in hospitals in and around Austria showed a proclivity for the visual arts that they thought it might be a good idea to give them their own wing where they could sort of examine and create things, and this is the, this is really the foudnation of what’s subsequently become called ‘outsider art.’ And we went and talked to the patients there and looked at what they were doing. It reminded me a lot, of course, of a museum in Switzerland called L’art Brut, which is in Lausanne, that was started by Dubuffet, a similar source of ideas, I think. And I just like the sense of exploration and the lack of self-judgment about what the artists were doing, and it became one of the atmospheres for the album. I enjoyed it very much.

 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.19.2018
09:41 am
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Brian Eno & Kevin Ayers team-up for oddball progrock poetry album ‘Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy’
01.02.2018
04:37 pm
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I’ve been on a bit of a “70s Brian Eno kick” of late, scooping up all of the recent 2XLP 45rpm editions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Here Come the Warm Jets, Before and After Science, etc. and then fanning out through some of his work as a sideman and producer, which was quite extensive during that decade. Aside from the obvious collaborations with Robert Fripp, Talking Heads, DEVO and David Bowie, Eno also made music with Nico (The End), he’s on both of Robert Calvert’s wonderfully loopy 70s solo albums and believe it or not, Genesis for whom he provided “Enossification for two tracks on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (”In the Cage” and “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging”). But the item I want to call to your attention here is the marvellously eccentric 1974 album—newly released by Mental Experience/Guerssen Records in a beautifully published vinyl version with extensive liner notes and lyric sheet—Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy.

When she died of a heart attack in 1998 at the age of 64, her obituary in The Independent called “Lady” June Campbell Cramer “a great British eccentric and cosmic prankster.” That’s already a pretty good claim to fame, but the obit went on to say that her “most achieved performance was herself: she succeeded in turning her existence into living art, bristling with humour.”

“Lady” June—the honorary title given to her due to her upper-crust, aristocratic voice (she sounded like a really stoned Judi Dench) and the fact that she was the de facto London landlady of many a progressive musician from the Canterbury set—was a sort of free-spirited hippie bohemian poetess and multimedia performance artist who ran with the crowd that included Gong and Soft Machine, who she first met in Spain in the early 1960s.
 

 
According to Daevid Allen, who was in both groups, June’s enormous twelve room Maida Vale flat was “London’s premier smoking salon”:

“She was ferocious in the mornings until the first joint arrived: she’d hover over you with a wet cloth demanding that you clean the stove.”

Amongst the other tenants in June’s apartment were Steve Hillage, members of Henry Cow, Hawkwind, Hatfield and the North, Tim Blake and David Bedford. Some of her tenants were more conventional types who were often dismayed by the likes of nine freaky members of Gong suddenly turning up to sleep on the living room floor.

Gilli Smyth of Gong was her best friend, and it was at a dual birthday party June threw for herself and Smyth that a drunken Robert Wyatt fell out of a window, falling four stories and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
 

 
In 1973, June took part in the chaotic BBC Radio 4 series If It’s Wednesday It Must Be… with Kenny Everett and former Bonzo Dog Band member Vivian Stanshall. Later that year she recorded Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy, her surrealist poetry set to music by her longtime friend (and longtime tenant) Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno, a neighbor who lived nearby. The recording was primarily made in the front room of her apartment with Ayers on guitar, bass and vocals, and Eno playing guitar, bass, Imminent, Linearment (sounds mathematical, right?), and something called “Lunar Lollipops,” with Gong’s drummer Pip Pyle and David Vorhaus of White Noise mixing. It is said to have cost just £400. A wary Caroline Records—the arty Virgin subsidiary set up to release things with little to just about zero commercial potential in the first place—pressed up only 5000 copies, but the album sold out quickly when news of her famous collaborators got around. June performed on bills along with Gong, Hawkwind, The Pink Fairies and Hatfield and the North.

“Lady” June Campbell Cramer returned to Spain in 1975 and became an active and creatively fulfilled participant in the artists’ community of Deià in Majorca. It is primarily for the company she kept—and this one remarkable album—that we remember her today. According to the reissue’s liner notes (and her nephew Tim Campbell Cramer) when June died at the age of 64 in 1998, she was cremated and guests at her wake tied little parcels of her ashes to helium balloons and let them go into the Mallorca breeze.
 

“Optimism,” music by Eno
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.02.2018
04:37 pm
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Try to imagine how insane this TV footage of Roxy Music (with Brian Eno) looked in the early 1970s

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Roxy Music: Not just another guitar band.
 
The great Roy Wood said on some late-nite radio show that for a long time he thought Ike and Tina Turner were a cool-sounding R&B band called I Can Turn A Corner. Easy mistake. For a long time, I thought Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music was singing about “wee-wees up the walls, and mashed-potato smalls…” when he sang “weary of the waltz, and mashed-potato schmaltz” on “Do the Strand.”

That I thought Roxy Music could sing about urination as decoration or squidgy y-fronts and not consider it at all out of place in their repertoire gives but some small idea as to how radical, how shocking, how breathtakingly original Roxy Music seemed when they first landed. Their debut single was named after a packet of cigarettes (“Virginia Plain”—actually a painting of a packet of cigarettes). They sang about blow-up dolls (“In Every Dream Home a Heartache”), and a kind of Ballardian love interest contained/hidden in a car’s license plate—the CPL 593H on “Re-make/Re-model.” So why not edible undergarments? It seemed all too feasible in an era of instant mash, Angel Delight, moon landings, Teflon frying pans, group sex, safari suits, and silver hot pants.

Roxy Music sounded as if they had just beamed down from outer space and brought along the music of the spheres. In fact, they had. Roxy Music was the sound of the future—but we just didn’t realize it then. Roxy was so overwhelmingly new. No one knew what to think. The group was originally comprised of Bryan Ferry (vocals, keys, and chief songwriter), Graham Simpson (bass), Phil Manzanera (guitar), Andy Mackay (saxophone and oboe), Paul Thompson (drums and percussion), and last but not least, Brian Eno (VCS3 synthesizer, tape effects, backing vocals and “treatments”). Ferry had started the band alongside Graham Simpson. The cool suave vocalist came from a poor working class background. His grandfather had courted his grandmother on a horse and plow for ten years before getting married. Times were tough. Ferry later claimed his parents lived “vicariously” though they were always better dressed than everyone else. It was via his mother that Ferry got his introduction to rock ‘n’ roll—she took him a Bill Haley concert in the 1950s. But Ferry preferred jazz and soul and his ambition was for a career in art and possibly teaching if that didn’t work out.

This all changed after Ferry hitchhiked to London to catch an Otis Redding concert. Redding was one of the greatest soul singers/performers of all time. It was a life-changing experience. Ferry knew he had to be a singer.
 
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Roxy model for the IKEA catalog.
 
Most of his life Ferry had felt out-of-step with his contemporaries. He felt like “an oddity.” It wasn’t until he started studying Fine Art under the tutelage of pop artist Richard Hamilton at Newcastle University that he found the confidence to push forward with his own ideas and believe in his own talents. Inspired by Redding and by Hamilton’s pop art aesthetic, Ferry started writing songs. He also started singing and performing. Graduating in 1968, Ferry moved to London. After a couple of false starts with the bands the Banshees and Gasboard, Ferry formed Roxy Music with Simpson in 1970. Andy MacKay and Eno soon joined, then Thompson and finally Phil Manzanera.

As Manzanera later recalled, the rich diversity of those early sessions together created Roxy sound:

“We’d start off with ‘Memphis Soul’ Stew, and then we’d go into ‘The Bob (Medley)’, this heavy bizarre thing about the Battle Of Britain with synths and sirens. We had everything in there from King Curtis to The Velvet Underground to systems music to ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll. At the time we said this was ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s rock’n'roll. Eno would respond to something that sounded like it came off the first Velvets album, then Ferry would play something ‘50s and I’d play my version of ‘50s. I was always a terrible session player. I could never learn a solo and I stuck that ‘not quite right’ approach onto Roxy. Six people in a band created this hybrid.”

More early Roxy Music, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.26.2017
11:41 am
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Happy Birthday Brian Eno: The non-musician on the importance of haircuts & more
05.15.2017
12:36 pm
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Today Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno turns 69 years old. Twenty-five years ago a filmmaker named Henning Lohner put together an hour-long documentary on the former Roxy Music contributor and producer extraordinaire. Its German title is Solo für Eno.

Lohner was raised in Palo Alto, California, because both of his parents were German-born literature professors at Stanford. In his adulthood, Lohner reconnected with his parents’ homeland, where he served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen and also collaborated with Frank Zappa and John Cage and Steve Reich, among many others. In recent years he has contributed to soundtracks such as The Thin Red Line and Gladiator.

If you do not understand German, have no fear: There is a tiny amount of German voiceover at the start, but the program is first and foremost a document of Eno in his studio. The audio track is almost entirely in English. (There are German subtitles.) Most online sources give 1994 as the date of Solo für Eno but I think it was actually shot two years earlier.

There’s a funny bit at the start where Lohner has tasked Eno with intoning a few of the weightier pronunciamentos from Eno’s past, such as “Exposure is the currency of popular art. Obscurity is the currency of high art.” He doesn’t remember saying most of them. (Brian: You said that at the talk you gave at MoMA in October 1990; it was probably the same day you found a way to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal.)

Frustrated with his inability to impose his essence on the TV camera, he jokes that they should get Laurie Anderson to do it. Then he comes up with a kind of game, he can say them if he is fed an “attitude” in which to say them, such as gleeful, sexy, morose, arrogant…... It’s a bit like watching Eno deploy one of his famous Oblique Strategies, the artistic spurs to creativity he developed with Peter Schmidt in the 1970s.

Eno also has some penetrating remarks on the importance of haircuts…

Watch after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.15.2017
12:36 pm
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‘Another Green World’: The Brian Eno documentary
04.14.2017
12:11 pm
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In 2010 the BBC show Arena did an hour-long program about Brian Eno. They called the show “Another Green World” but it does not focus on Eno’s third album at all, it’s just a nice title.

In the typical Arena style, the show is almost more of a loose essay than a straightforward documentary. Time is spent with the composer, then there’s footage of Eno playing with Roxy Music, then a clip of Eno on stage with Richard Dawkins, none of it sequenced with any rhyme or reason. It can be a very effective method of getting an impression across. Eno is so charming and interesting that it’s no trouble hanging out with him for a bit

Some wonderful moments…. Eno admits to an unseen interviewer that yes, he did get more women than Bryan Ferry but he can’t say how much that bothered him. (It almost certainly did.) Eno enthusing about Donna Summer’s “State of Independence,” produced by Giorgio Moroder, praising its unlikely mix of Kraftwerk-y rhythms and gospel. He also admires the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” most saliently because it was so obviously composed in the studio, which was Eno’s signature method as well. He actually plays a faltering rendition of it on an acoustic guitar, which is just odd.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.14.2017
12:11 pm
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David Bowie’s Laura Ashley wallpaper tribute to Lucian Freud (with a Brian Eno assist)
04.10.2017
12:54 pm
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David Bowie once concocted an intriguing homage to Lucian Freud by combining an artwork of his with a lush Laura Ashley wallpaper pattern. It was exhibited at that year’s “New Afro-Pagan and Work: 1975-1995” show and soon after taken up by Brian Eno for a charity he was involved with.

The fashion event was called “Pagan FunWear,” for which the beneficiary was the charity War Child; it showcased, among other things, “a quirky leather tie” by Lou Reed, some “strange shoes” by Jarvis Cocker, and “a suit of bandages” by Bowie. According to Paul Gorman, Eno also put together a “soundtrack” for the event called Antennae #1, which took the form of a limited edition box that included a CD of Eno’s soundtrack, a photo by Anton Corbijn, a watercolor by Patrick Hughes, and a “scrap” of Bowie’s wallpaper.

Eno helpfully supplied an “instruction manual” for those who ponied up the hundred pounds for a copy of Antennae #1, which today can be purchased on eBay for 275 pounds (about $340), although all you get is the CD, none of the other fun doodads such as the swath of Bowie’s wallpaper.
 

 
Here’s the wallpaper, which as mentioned incorporates an image of Freud’s:
 

 
Gorman discussed an encounter with Bowie in connection as a result of that event:
 

I met David Bowie when I was a member of a small think-tank for the charity War Child, working on the 1994 London art show Little Pieces From Big Stars which exhibited and then auctioned artworks produced by musicians. The exhibition and auction dinner were organised by Brian Eno and his wife Anthea. Bowie was very engaging, evidently super-bright and witty.

 
Gorman noted his impression that the wallpaper represents something like the essence of Bowie’s work and personality: “The fact that this shred depicting the great and serious artist Freud uses as its base a quintessentially English Laura Ashley print makes it funny, and, somehow, for me, very, very Bowie.”

Interestingly, Bowie himself was not entirely effusive about Freud’s work. In 1998 he desisted from signing on to the painter’s greatness, telling the New York Times that “I admire the trickery of his work, the cankerous skin, which is nice and grungy. But I don’t buy into him being the greatest painter that we have,” presumably referring to the United Kingdom there.

According to Reuters, Bowie actually created two Laura Ashley wallpapers for the “New Afro-Pagan” show. The design of the other pattern featured a minotaur, but the Laura Ashley people apparently insisted on censoring the private parts of the creature. This led to Bowie humorously noting of the work process with Laura Ashley, “It’s been a good working relationship, apart from the castration, that is.”

Hey Laura Ashley, when are you going to make a product line of this so that us Bowie nuts can use it for real?
 
via Church of David Bowie
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Francis Bacon’s lost painting of Lucian Freud turns up after 45 years
‘Song portraits’: What does music by Radiohead, Stevie Wonder & David Bowie LOOK like?

Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.10.2017
12:54 pm
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Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Beefheart, The Residents, Sun Ra & more as ‘South Park’ characters
12.02.2016
10:10 am
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The Residents
 
If you like your music adventurous, you’ll probably get a huge kick out of Noise Park, a Tumblr that features South Park versions of many avant-garde, experimental, and generally out-there musicians. Whoever is making these charmingly made the decision to follow his or her own esoteric musical tastes, which is a nice way of saying that a good many of the subjects are a bit obscure (Blevin Blectum, Moth Cock, Rotten Milk, etc.), which has the effect of turning it all into an inside inside joke of sorts.

But a lot of the subjects are quite well-known, covering the more cerebral end of the musical spectrum (Kraftwerk, Beefheart, Residents). I spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with a plausibly minimalist South Park episode plot involving Terry Riley, but I failed. Then I switched to Throbbing Gristle and my brain exploded.

Some of the images on the blog are actually reworkings of The Wire magazine covers, which is a good indication of where the tastes run.
 

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
 

Brian Eno
 
Lots more after the jump…...

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.02.2016
10:10 am
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That time Brian Eno posed nude for Bob Guccione
09.15.2016
12:07 pm
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From 1973 to 1980, Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse, had a magazine for the hetero women’s market called VIVA. The full title of the magazine was VIVA, The International Magazine For Women. If it was a response to Douglas Lambert’s magazine Playgirl, Guccione was moving awfully quickly, as the first issue of Playgirl had a cover date of June 1973. (Vol. 1, no. 1 for VIVA: October 1973.) One of the curious things about VIVA was that it was an early employer of Anna Wintour, who served as the fashion editor. (Wikipedia drily notes that Wintour “has rarely discussed working there.”) Noted erotic photographer Helmut Newton also worked for VIVA.

In the December 1974 issue of CREEM, there’s a single-page article by a writer named Kathy Miller under the title “ENO: Naked and Neurotic” that reported on Eno’s decision to pose for a nude photo spread for Guccione’s VIVA. The session apparently happened, but the pictures never ran. The whole thing’s a bit mysterious, and for all intents and purposes, Miller’s tittering, gossipy item seems to be just about the only true source for it all. (A scan of Miller’s article is embedded at the bottom of this post so that you can see it for yourself.)

The reason CREEM’s Miller was the one who reported on the incident was, the photoshoot took place at what was ostensibly a CREEM interview. It wasn’t a formal shoot and there was no formal contract or offer—merely Brian Eno and his representative, Simon Puxley (actually a close friend of Bryan Ferry’s), making an offer to do some “test shots,” which apparently then happened.
 

December 1974 issue of VIVA, which did NOT have naked pix of Brian Eno
  
According to Miller, the photographer was a woman—Eno says during the session that he could never pose nude for a dude. In a reference to his famously active sex life, Eno also boasts that “thousands have seen me nude.” Then there’s this:
 

The session hit a crescendo of surrealistica as Eno began twisting like a pretzel, saying, straight-faced: “Get a bun shot.” After suggesting that he be photographed spread-eagle “with all my rudeness showing,” Simon reminded Eno, who seemed a trifle hurt, that VIVA didn’t care about his genitalia, just his supple Grecian bod. He ran the gamut of tease poses: Eno teething fetchingly on a sheet, Eno fingering a glass of white wine “decadently,” Eno calling some girl on the phone whilst naked. After sprawling on his tummy, Eno was in a mild state of arousal. “Forgive me if I have a hard-on; it is certainly the way of nature. I can’t sit up,” he moaned.

“Yes, VIVA doesn’t like erections,” Simon thoughtfully mulled, “but they’re only test shots.”

“I’ll cover it with a book,” which Eno did unil he was once again discreet.

 
In his 2008 biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach, David Sheppard reports on the incident:
 

[Eno] was eager to essay the nude poses as he’d recently been approached by VIVA—press magnate Bob Guccione’s then newly launched “adult woman’s” magazine, one of the first to put full-frontal male nude shots between the staples. Whether VIVA actually saw the undoubtedly svelte Brian Eno as potential centrefold material remains unclear, for ultimately no Eno spread ever graced the magazine’s pages. Certainly Eno could see no reason why the CREEM session shouldn’t provide an opportunity for some trial snaps.

 
The whole thing seems to have been a bit of typical 1970s porny fun, all pretense, no real thought of Eno ever appearing in the magazine. The shoot was suggested as an occasion for “test shots,” which has to be defined as the very first steps to getting approved for publication as a nude model in the magazine, and Puxley uses the phrase a second time when he is mulling over VIVA’s likely take on Eno’s erect penis appearing in the photos (“they’re only test shots”).

The long and the short of it is, it seems the Brian Eno did pose nude for a magazine owned by Bob Guccione, but the pics were never used.

Obvious question: Whatever happened to those pictures??
 
Much more after the jump, including Eno yodeling…....

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.15.2016
12:07 pm
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Brian Eno answers a fan’s question about his makeup 1973
05.17.2016
09:30 am
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Too much blusher, Bri?
 
The question came from Brenda in Barnwood, Gloucester, who asked:

What make-up does Eno use on and off stage and does he sing on any tracks of “Roxy Music”?

Brenda was one of three readers who sent in questions for Brian Eno to Melody Maker, April 21st 1973. Eno was more than happy to share his favorite makeup tips:

My make up is the same both on and off stage to a greater or lesser degree. It consists of a large selection of things including Quant, Revlon, Schwarzkopps and Yardley. I just choose whatever colour appeals to me at the time.

On my eyes I use six different colours by three different makers. I’m using Quant crayons quite a lot at present

 
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His favorite crayons by Mary Quant.
 
Quant crayons came out sometime around the late 1960s—dates vary between 1966 to 1969. These make-up accessories were de rigueur for many a young girl and ambitious glam rocker. According to those who used and liked Quant’s crayons—they were “really high quality, the colors were great and they blended incredibly well.”

Alas, these exotic crayons are no longer available, but questioner Brenda Merrett is still a fan of Eno.
 
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As for singing with Roxy Music Eno replied:

I don’t sing lead vocals at any time—only backing vocals. These are nearly always done by Andy MacKay and myself. Examples are “Would You Believe,” “If There Is Something” and “Bitter’s [sic] End.”

Eno joined Roxy Music after a chance meeting:

As a result of going into a subway station and meeting saxophonist Andy Mackay, I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I’d walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now.

After the jump, Brian Eno singing his debut single “Seven Deadly Finns” on Dutch television…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.17.2016
09:30 am
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