Brian Eno: 10 top collaborations

But despite his protestations about his musicality, there’s no denying Brian Eno has always been a creative, an artist and a unique visionary. From his early experiments with the possibilities of technology in music, to his means of furthering creativity with his Oblique Strategies, he’s trodden a path all of his own, whilst simultaneously bringing out the best in some of the most iconic names in music.

As we get set to welcome Eno to our Royal Festival Hall for back-to-back gigs in October, we took a look through his many remarkable collaborations, and picked out 10 standouts. Harold Budd, Karl Hyde, Laurie Anderson, Baaba Maal, Ultravox, Grace Jones, Paul Simon, Sinead O’Connor, Laraaji and Coldplay… that none of these ten artists made our list should tell you everything about the depth and quality of Eno’s back catalogue.

Roxy Music

Where else could we begin but with the band that brought Eno to prominence? His time with Roxy Music was as relatively brief as it was emphatic, having been a founder member at the start of 1971, by mid-1973 he and the band had gone their separate ways. But those two and a half years included Roxy Music’s game-changing first two albums, their eponymous 1972 debut and 1973’s For Your Pleasure, on which Eno is credited as VCS 3 synthesiser, tape effects, backing vocals and co-producer. 

Given the increasingly flamboyant outfits he became known for during these years it’s hard to believe that initially Eno preferred to take up a position off-stage at their live shows, working from the mixing desk. But by the time of Roxy Music’s first television appearance, performing ‘Virginia Plain’ on an August 1972 edition of Top of the Pops, Eno had graduated from audience to edge of stage. A truly iconic performance, it has been credited by several music writers as the moment electronic music first truly entered mainstream culture.

It can’t be overstated how unlike their peers Roxy Music were in 1972; imagine tuning into Top of the Pops on this night and, between The Pearls singing ‘You Came, You Saw, you Conquered’, and Pans People dancing to Motown, getting hit with this. Brian Ferry smouldering down the camera lens; Phil Manzanera, looking like a prototype Wes Anderson character, staring off into the distance; Andy Mackay on, wait, is that an oboe? And then just as you’re finding your feet with all this, cue a pair of sparkling silver gloved hands – belonging to a man so far to stage right you’d thought he was an over-excited floor manager – and duly whirl you off in yet another new direction. Seismic.

Robert Fripp

Whilst still with Roxy Music, Eno, in his down time, had been experimenting with the sound created by a tape-delay feedback system he’d first devised whilst studying at Winchester School of Art. Furthering this experimentation he invited King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp over to his London home studio, with the guitarist playing over Eno’s tape loops, and these guitar parts being subsequently looped by Eno as well. This new musical technique, which would become referred to as Frippertronics, delivered an experimental ambient music, a term Eno would popularise, and a sound that would characterise much of his future work. It also resulted in two 1970s albums by Fripp & Eno, the two-track No Pussyfooting released in August 1973 and 1975 follow-up Evening Star.

David Bowie

Eno and David Bowie’s paths crossed several times in the early 1970s, but it took a backstage meetup on Bowie’s Isolar tour to sow the seeds of a lasting friendship and pivotal working relationship. Having bonded over an appreciation of music coming out of Germany, Eno was called upon by Bowie for what would become known as his Berlin Trilogy. The first of these three albums, Low (1976), saw Eno contribute keyboards and creative ideas and suggestions, but his involvement stepped up with 1977’s Heroes. 

As well as keyboard Eno is credited as co-author on four of the album’s songs, and also with prompting new creative directions among the musicians and Bowie himself, through use of his Oblique Strategies cards to spark creative ideas. Eno also recruited Robert Fripp for the album, who arrived having not picked up a guitar in three years. Yet despite this, and having not heard the tracks before, and with little guidance from Bowie, Fripp successfully put down his guitar parts in three days.

Eno’s collaboration continued with the 1979 album, Lodger, but it’s on Low and Heroes that his influence is more keenly felt, with tracks such as the latter’s ‘Warszawa’ brought to life through Eno’s experimental approach.

Devo

During the production of The Berlin Trilogy, Bowie was sent a demo tape of Ohio new wave band, Devo. Impressed by what he heard, the singer expressed an interest in producing the band’s first album, but so too did Iggy Pop, Fripp and Eno. Bowie went as far as announcing publicly that he would be taking it on when introducing the band on stage in New York in 1977, but in the end Eno got the nod, with Bowie assisting in between his filming commitments for Just a Gigolo.

So confident in Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was Eno that he fronted the cost of the studios in Cologne, and the expense of flying the band to Germany, in return for a share of any subsequent deals. But it would prove a much more frustrating process than the producer anticipated, with the band often closed to his suggestions and unwilling to deviate from earlier versions of their tracks. This wasn’t lost on some critics, with Rolling Stone’s Tom Carson describing the album as lacking ‘most of Eno’s warmth and much of Bowie’s flair for mechanised melodrama’. But despite this, the album remains popular, and is regularly cited in ‘best of’ lists for both its time and genre.

Talking Heads

Back in the UK, in May 1977 Eno accompanied John Cale to a Ramones gig at London’s Rock Garden, but it was that night’s support act – Talking Heads – that would shape his next few years. The next day Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was round Eno’s flat listening to records, and Eno had soon committed to producing the band’s next album. He would actually produce their next three, starting with More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1978. The 1979 follow up Fear of Music, was duly described by Simon Reynolds in his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 as representing Eno and Talking Heads’ collaboration ‘at its most mutually fruitful and equitable’.

Among the music Eno played Byrne following their first encounter were a number of tracks by Fela Kuti. Their mutual appreciation for Kuti’s work cemented their friendship, and also shaped the direction of the third Talking Heads album Eno produced, Remain in Light (1980). Heavily influenced by afrobeat and sounds of both West and North African music, it was a much more experimental album, characterised by a change of the band’s approach to recording led by Eno, as he would later explain during a 1988 talk at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. ‘This whole record was more of an improvised and group generated record, in fact it was the first record they did where they went into the studio without a set of songs… They went into the studio with the assumption that they would work up some material in relation to the possibilities of the studio, which was what I represented in the equation’.

David Byrne

Eno continued working with Byrne, with the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts representing perhaps their most notable collaboration beyond their Talking Heads output. Another groundbreaking Eno album it gave a prominence to ‘found recordings’ and samples, including radio broadcasts Eno had collected whilst living in the United States, as well as religious sermons and an exorcism. 

Though musicians had used such sampling techniques before, as The Guardian’s Dave Simpson commented, never had they done so ‘to such cataclysmic effect’. The album paired the samples with electronic music and Middle Eastern and West African rhythms, and though it suffered mixed reviews at the time of its release it has since become recognised as a hugely influential work for electronic artists in particular.

Jon Hassell

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was initially slated to be a three-way collaboration between Eno, Byrne and the avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell, who had worked with the pair on Remain in Light. Hassell was unable to make it to the early recording sessions in California and on hearing what Eno and Byrne had put together quit the project due to concerns over – depending on your source –, the musical direction, disappointment at its ‘mainstream’ sound, or an outrage at the appropriation of his music. 

By this point Hassell had already recorded his own Eno produced album in the form of 1980’s critically acclaimed Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics. The first real articulation of Hassell’s concept of combining elements of various world music traditions with modern electronic techniques, it sees Hassell’s trumpet come together with Eno’s treatment and tape-loop techniques. Writing in the Spin Alternative Record Guide, Ann Powers credits the album with ‘pioneering the syncretic approach to world music with which so many artists experimented during the 1980s’. Thankfully, Eno and Hassell would eventually be reconciled too.

U2

In late 1983, although fresh off the back of a UK number one with their third album War, U2 were looking to go in a different direction. As lead singer Bono would describe in a 2006 interview, ‘we felt we had more dimension than just the next big anything, we had something unique to offer… we were looking for another feeling’. For this they looked to Eno, but the producer took some convincing. ‘I think he was intimidated by the lack of irony in what we were doing,’ guitarist the Edge told Q Magazine in 1998.

Eno eventually relented and in 1984 they set to work on the band’s fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire. Along with co-producer Daniel Lanois, Eno encouraged the band to experiment and veer away from their previous straight-edged approach to recording, resulting in a greater texture to their sound which would earn much acclaim. ‘The Unforgettable Fire marks the moment when U2 became ‘U2’, wrote Billboard’s Kenneth Partridge in 2014, ‘Eno and Lanois didn’t reinvent the group’s sound so much as they made it richer and more complex’. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in ‘4th of July’ which was fashioned from an impromptu studio jam that Eno had recorded without the band knowing.

John Cale

John Cale was long on Eno’s radar before the pair initially met; Eno it was who, when told by Lou Reed that The Velvet Underground’s debut album only sold 30,000 copies on release,  famously quipped ‘I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!’. It was the mid 1970s when the pair first came together professionally, the former serving as ‘a kind of consultant or advisor’ for Cale’s 1974 album Fear, adding in an interview at the time that ‘John was using me to bounce ideas off of, and get reactions from’. 

The following year their collaborations continued – Eno is credited as synthesiser on Cale’s albums Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy, whilst Cale contributed viola on Eno’s Another Green World – but despite a mutual appreciation and friendship that saw them visit not just Ramones gigs, but  also East Berlin together, it would be another decade and a half before they finally came together for a full collaboration.

Released in 1990, Wrong Way Up, was well received; Pitchfork’s Chris O’Leary latterly described it as ‘an album of contention, contrasts, cycles, and pop songs so layered and euphoric it ranks among the best albums either artist has ever made.’ But that’s not to say it was all plain sailing, as the pair regularly disagreed during its recording. They openly admitted in promotional interviews that at times they hadn’t seen eye to eye; ‘Mutual admiration turned to mutual loathing in the studio’ is how The Guardian’s Steve Lowe described it. Yet despite these tensions in production, the result, wrote Lowe, ‘finds both artists at their most harmonious.’

James

Eno’s ever expanding back catalogue has ensured he’s long been in high demand, and among those desperate to work with him was the Manchester band, James. They’d been pursuing Eno since their 1986 debut album, and in 1992 sent him six hours of rehearsal tapes. Luckily for James, Eno’s wife, Anthea Norman-Taylor, was a fan and encouraged her husband to listen to the tapes. A rough-cut of ‘Sometimes (Lester Piggott)’, still lacking a chorus, swung it for Eno who eventually joined up with James in early 1993 to produce their fifth album, Laid.

Speaking to NME in 2013 James vocalist Tim Booth explained how much ‘Sometimes’ resonated with the producer. ‘In the studio I had to keep telling him I wasn’t ready to record it yet, because I hadn’t finished the lyrics. Eventually we say ‘Okay Brian, we’re ready to record ‘Sometimes’.’ I’d got the chorus ready and I hadn’t told them. He’s prowling around the floor while we were playing the start of the song, just waiting to see what I’d got. I sang the chorus and he kind of went white and sat down while we were playing. I thought ‘Oh shit, he doesn’t like it’. When we finished he didn’t say anything. He had his head in his hands on the desk and we all crowded round him and eventually he looked up and he said ‘I’ve just experienced one of the highlights of my musical life’. We were completely blown away. That someone we held in such high esteem could have such a physical, tangible reaction to that song’. The finished track would also feature Eno on backing vocals.