Discography: Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets

Over the years, Here Come the Warm Jets has been classified as art-rock, experimental rock and even progressive rock – none of which is wrong necessarily, but at the same time it’s worth remembering that at the time of its release, Brian Eno was still a bona fide pop star. In the UK and Europe, Roxy Music had been one of the most exciting, if divisive groups of the glam rock explosion, and glam, despite its rock suffix, was largely a movement that appealed to a very youthful demographic via singles rather than albums, and whose image was – as the name suggests – often as important as the music. And if Roxy Music were controversial, especially among the kind of rock critics used to taking Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer seriously, then Eno was, with his especially outrageous appearance and ambiguous musical talents, the band’s most divisive figure. But he was also, for many fans, its focal point. His later presence as a thoughtful, almost professorial figure belies the fact that he was once the most provocatively camp element in an already formidably camp group, and Here Come the Warm Jets – from its title to its cover and its weird but accessible songs – is the place where the Eno who outraged audiences in the Midwest by mincing around the stage in glittery platform boots meets the Eno who talked seriously about John Cage and musical structures.

One of the things that most impressed the young Brian Eno about rock ‘n’ roll, pop and even easy listening music in his childhood is that nothing in his life so far had given him any context for those kinds of sounds. Sadly, very few people will ever hear Here Come the Warm Jets in quite that way. Compared to the life of an English child in the 1950s, we just grow up now knowing, via TV and the internet and cinema and a pervasive youth culture, too much. By any standards, Here Come the Warm Jets still sounds like music from another planet or dimension, but unlike many of Eno’s later works that are in themselves context-less, it is an album that is crammed with context. Like its cover photo, the album is littered with the detritus of culture and pop culture, but it’s molded into forms that are as close to conventional rock music as Eno has ever come. His later pronouncements about music and especially in later years about his lessening interest in rock, tended to focus on what was important to him in music but missing in rock; a sense of spirituality, the expansion of awareness, the idea of discovering new worlds through music as he had with the alien music of his early life. All of which has much to do with sound but very little to do with songs and the personal ways that people connect with them. But interestingly, one of the ways that Here Come the Warm Jets is successful, especially by Eno’s standards, is as a collection of good songs.

If you play Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure and then follow those with Roxy’s Stranded and Here Come the Warm Jets, you can almost hear the tearing sound as the artists veer off in two slightly, rather than very, different directions. All of the weird, unidentifiable instrumental freak-outs that punctuated Roxy Music’s debut and popped up here and there on its successor disappeared from Stranded, but Eno makes up for it by making a peculiar tone or break or solo a feature of every single track on Here Come the Warm Jets. It remains though – even if it’s surprisingly rarely noted – an extremely Roxy Music-like album. Part of that is because of its personnel; Roxy’s guitarist Phil Manzanera and sax player Andy Mackay had opposed Eno’s firing from the band and resented, up to a point, Bryan Ferry’s dictatorship and both they and Roxy Music drummer Paul Thompson appear on Here Come the Warm Jets, with Manzanera co-writing a couple of the album’s most memorable songs. More generally, Eno’s vocals, not just on the parodic “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” but almost everywhere on the album, are very Bryan Ferry-like in their smooth, clipped, very English tones. Roxy Music’s ethos of pop art retro-futurism too was a shared enthusiasm rather than just a Ferry obsession, and even Here Come the Warm Jets’ artwork with its vaguely decadent pop culture clutter – including one of the nude playing cards that also appeared on the cover of (No Pussyfooting) – is essentially a Roxy sleeve in which Eno himself takes the place of the usual pin-up girls. These are all positive things, just in case that wasn’t clear.

Eno later said that around the time he was making his first few albums he despised funky music – interestingly and perhaps not coincidentally, Roxy Music’s biggest commercial success also came around that time, with their most funk-flavored single “Love Is the Drug” – and it’s notable that though many of the songs on Here Come the Warm Jets employ fairly conventional pop song structures, they are either pre-funk, like the doo-wop flavored “Cindy Tells Me” or else relentless Velvet Underground primitivism dressed up in unusual and iridescent colors.

It’s hard to say whether Eno had any real commercial ambitions for the album, although he was desperately short of money and living in something approaching squalor at the time. His idea of bringing together musicians who weren’t obviously compatible to make music that subverted expectations and conventions was a bold one, but the results were often surprisingly accessible, even when they were strange. The opening Eno/Manzanera track “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” has the melodic, post-Velvet Underground drive of Roxy Music at their most glam. Catchy but unusually textured, with Manzanera’s layers of springy, glistening guitars laid over galloping, heavy drums – played, oddly, by Hawkwind’s Simon King – the song features Eno’s voice at its most extrovert and confident. Every detail, apart from Manzanera’s twangy, surf-toned solo, is subordinate to the song’s overall rushing effect; it’s a dynamic, almost aggressive opener where audiences may have expected something camp and effete. How Eno arrived at the song’s title, which obliquely/irreverently references the New Testament – “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” – is anybody’s guess, but his lyrics were usually, like his songwriting in general, as much the product of chance and intuition than conscious inspiration. He rarely approached lyrics or songs with the sense of having an idea and wanting to express it. But there was art involved too – Eno’s lyrics were written in response to the music he had made and not separately from it, and the results on Here Come the Warm Jets rarely feel entirely random. “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” comes across as a sly meditation on ennui, excitement and inspiration that opts in the end to say “Why ask why?” – simultaneously the expression of a jaded, seen-it-all-before pop star and a commitment to the magic of mystery over an analytical dissection of life and its meanings.

That almost poetic, philosophical but still playful side of Eno comes across in some of the album’s most appealingly atmospheric and poignant songs. “On Some Faraway Beach” looks forward to the fully realized melodic but less rock-based style that Eno achieved on Another Green World a few years later; idiosyncratic but tranquil. The similarly poignant “Some of Them Are Old” is a tentative version of something that Eno would explore in more fully, but with less extraneous detail, later. Hymn-like – indeed almost Salvation Army band-like – its tone and texture hints at Eno’s future preoccupation with the emotional color of timbres and textures, while still functioning as a song. Before long, he would prefer to render these kind of ideas in purely musical terms, finding the aspect of voices and especially lyrics distracting, but in fact, the lyrics enhance the music’s mood of warm solemnity, while also injecting it with a layer of irony. As with “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” the lyrics are sometimes absurd but never seem meaningless; in fact Eno is an underrated lyric writer, not least because it has never been an aspect of his work he dwells on very much. Like – again – Bryan Ferry on the early Roxy Music albums, at this point Eno’s lyrics were inclusive, trawling, though not in an indiscriminate way, culture and pop culture. They have the feeling of being distilled from their source material and crafted into fragments that are rich with meaning and association, but rarely specifically about any one thing.

Although Eno’s self-conscious eccentricity would survive in some ways on his second 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) before fading into something less studiedly weird, Here Come the Warm Jets is pretty much the last gasp for the mischievous, outrageously camp Eno of the early Roxy Days. That aspect of his persona comes to the fore in several songs – as well as the album’s supposedly golden showers-referencing title – especially on “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” and “Dead Finks Don’t Talk.” Though the title and lyrics of “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” mysteriously reference the allegedly pyrokinetic African American man A. William Underwood who was born in Paw Paw, Michigan in the 1850s, both it and “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” share the same pointed, jeering tone. The lyrics of “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch” seem to be as much about an unhappy relationship as about a long dead man with supernatural abilities. “My, my, my, we’re treating each other/ Just like strangers/ I can’t ignore the significance/ Of these changes” seems – as “Dead Finks” does even more – like a comment on the experience of being ejected from the band he helped to make successful. But in case that seems too much like raw emotion, the song also takes the “funny noise solo” that Eno pioneered in Roxy’s “Editions of You” to its logical, or at least most ridiculous conclusion. The solo, which must be Eno himself – the album credits state that “Eno sings all other vocals and (occasionally) plays simplistic keyboards, Snake guitar, electric larynx and synthesizer, and treats other instruments” – sounds like the extended torture of children’s fluffy toys and makes an interesting/funny change from a guitar solo, while considerably lightening the song’s tone. “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” is equally but differently absurd. Musically light, elegant and atmospheric, Eno supposedly and just-about-plausibly improvised its lyrics as a kind of stream of consciousness experiment when listening to the backing track at home, only later realizing that it was obviously Bryan Ferry. Well, maybe so, but his vocal Ferry impersonation at the end of the song can only have been deliberate; it’s pretty funny though.

The musical variety of Here Come the Warm Jets makes it feel alive where some of Eno’s albums with vocals can become a little dull and dense. At the most pop extreme, it features the Eno/Manzanera composition “Cindy Tells Me.” That song channels, in a nostalgic and very glam way, the spirit of the ‘50s music Eno grew up with, but giving it a space-age feel with Manzanera’s phased, distorted guitar. Presumably the aura of 1950s Americana conjured by the doo-wop chord sequence inspired Eno to meditate playfully on the demise of the Norman Rockwell image of the ‘50s, because the lyrics seem to be a kind of satire about the women’s movement. They are also very Bryan Ferry-like, with their mix of sly pop-star’s-eye-view observation and cerebral humor; “Cindy tells me, the rich girls are weeping/ Cindy tells me, they’ve given up sleeping alone/ And now they’re so confused by their new freedoms/ And she tells me they’re selling up their maisonettes/ Left the Hotpoints to rust in the kitchenettes/ And they’re saving their labor for insane reading.” “On Some Faraway Beach” is equally melodic but has an almost cheesy bittersweet note to its irresistible mood of nostalgic reflectiveness.

Cinematic, with celestial wordless backing vocals, it builds and builds to an ornate melodic crescendo and then disappears, leaving just Eno’s very pretty, slightly clumsy piano, but somehow all the time maintaining the feel of a piece of music that is selling something.
At the other end of the spectrum, Here Come the Warm Jets is as strange and challenging as anything put out by a more-or-less
mainstream artist at the time. “Driving Me Backwards” takes the kind of staccato piano of Beatles songs like “Penny Lane” and “Getting Better” and slows it down to a trudge and makes it dissonant and spooky. Eno’s vocals too, though recorded normally, affect a strange backwards sucking effect. The result, though still catchy enough, is tortured and dreamlike, more like “I Am the Walrus” crossed with an especially eccentric Roger Waters Pink Floyd song than Roxy Music. In fact, the song sequence “Cindy Tells Me” – “Driving Me Backwards” – “On Some Faraway Beach” is a testament to just how creative and unusual it’s possible to be while essentially working within a conventional pop song format.

Percussive and heavy, Eno’s collaboration with Robert Fripp, “Blank Frank” takes a Bo Diddley beat and adorns it with threateningly bleaty vocals and a range of barely recognizable and abrasive guitar sounds. Eno’s nasal tones vie for domination with Fripp’s choppy guitar, making noises rarely heard again until early Sonic Youth a decade later. But though in one way “Blank Frank” is heavy, especially with Bill MacCormick’s zonking bass and the pummeling beat, the song’s texture is all over the place, with feedback, ghostly squeals and chirpy organ tones. And yet it all hangs together. The pulsing, silly-sinister “Baby’s on Fire” does the same thing but though it starts very strongly, it’s one of the few tracks on the album to outstay its welcome, though it does also feature some outstanding – and surprisingly standard rock-toned – Fripp guitar playing.

The album’s perfect synthesis of conventional and weird comes with its closing, title track. Largely an instrumental that puts tone, texture and atmosphere above all else, its main focus is a weird, mostly unidentifiable humming noise that sounds as much like a treated, amplified kazoo as anything. There are more conventional elements, a bass pulse played by Paul Rudolph, and Simon King’s very Hawkwind-like drum track, which fades in after the first minute or so, but the track never feels like a song in the usual sense. The melody never changes and there’s no verse/chorus structure, but around the half way point Eno’s half-audible vocals come in, singing lyrics that feel both evocative and flatly final, the refrains being “Nowhere to be … Nothing to be … Nothing these days … Nothing to say.” Although lyrically it’s poignantly negative, the sound of the song is an important indicator of Eno’s future direction, as essentially it feels like a symphony of strange noises, sculpted into a simple, very catchy melody which embodies its own mood, rather than relying on lyrics to deliver its meaning.

Here Come the Warm Jets is an important album, because it established that, whatever his lack of musical credentials as a player of instruments, Brian Eno was entirely capable of writing songs that fit into the forms accepted by the music industry. But equally, it established that he wasn’t satisfied to let that talent define or limit the kind of music he made. But more than being important, it’s good – an album that recreates for its listeners an idea of just how wild and exotic pop music sounds when you’ve never heard it before. And as well as representing a break from Brian Eno’s pop star past, it’s a continuation of it; witty, clever, memorable, as satisfying as pop music but never as predictable.