“Here Come the Warm Jets” is the sound of Art Pop kicking into life. Its predecessors are sparse and easy to trace: the Velvet Underground’s first two albums were the first to mine a rich seam of druggy, droney bohemianism, while the abrasive clang and off-kilter boogie of Captain Beefheart’s 1969 album “Trout Mask Replica” happily chucked out the whole rulebook. Meanwhile, over in Germany, early 1970s bands such as Faust and Can were exploring the possibilities of the recording studio with none of the ponderousness of their UK Prog counterparts, favouring instead an anarchic spirit which predicted Punk.
These trends coalesced in Brian Eno’s debut solo album, a landmark release which smashed pop into a thousand pieces and stuck them back together in bizarre new shapes – a post-modern approach which was to prove massively influential on a whole generation of art-rockers.
But that was to come later. In late 1973 the man who would go on to collaborate with David Bowie on the star’s seminal “Berlin trilogy” of albums, invent ambient music and become a mentor figure in New York’s New Wave and No Wave scenes, had recently been booted out of the massively successful Roxy Music for distracting attention away from lead man Bryan Ferry.
As hard as it may be to believe now, since he has assumed the role and look of the ultimate Art-Rock boffin, when he first appeared with Roxy, Eno was viewed as having a role similar to the one Bez would later inhabit in the Happy Mondays. Sure, he fiddled around with cutting-edge tech in the studio, but on stage and in the band’s television appearances he appeared to be little more than an other-worldly, glittering fashion plate embodying the band’s retro-futurist ethos. To the untrained eye, he just didn’t appear to do anything.
In fact, first and foremost, Eno was a conceptualist and thinker. Approaching pop music with a postmodernist’s grasp of irony and re-appropriation, Eno and Roxy Music had contrived to splice cosy genres such as torch songs and Country and Western with glam stomp and psychedelic rock, all shot through with thrillingly new synth sounds. It was this vast, muddled sonic palette which Eno would take to its furthest limits on “… Warm Jets”.
Astonishingly, the album was recorded in just 12 days at Majestic Studios in London during September 1973. Eno seems to have approached the sessions with a pocket full of pranks. Having picked musicians he thought would have trouble working well together, including Prog axe hero Robert Fripp and his former band-mates in Roxy, he attempted to demonstrate the sounds he wanted by dancing for them. Rather than engaging in any conventional song-writing, Eno sung gibberish over the songs the musicians developed, later developing lyrics which were surreal, cryptic and stream-of-consciousness. Many, including Blank Frank and Dead Finks Don’t Talk, seem to suggest Eno inhabited a bad head-space at the time. Perhaps influenced by the friction Eno deliberately cultivated during the sessions, many lyrics hover between implied threat and suppressed punch line, as on Dead Finks Don’t Talk: “Oh, you headless chicken/ Can those poor teeth take so much kicking?”
On many songs, Eno seems to be merely an observer, by turns amused and alarmed by the scenarios he describes. On “Baby’s On Fire”, a classic Glam stomper gone strange on bad acid, Eno seems to be watching the ascendance of some hot new celebrity – perhaps a young glamour puss come to claim the limelight from 1973’s Glam lords Bowie, Ferry and Marc Bolan. However, Eno seems less than impressed with the new pop product and the machinations happening backstage to create the star: “Baby's on fire/ better throw her in the water,” he whines in a sourly camp voice surely modelled on Bowie, “Look at her laughing/ Like a heifer to the slaughter”. Meanwhile, on the nightmarish “Blank Frank”, Eno sounds on the verge of snapping altogether as he describes the eponymous anti-hero whose “particular skill is leaving bombs in people’s driveways”. Perhaps, though, Eno enjoys an in-joke when he reveals of Frank: “the only time he speaks is in incomprehensible proverbs.”
Elsewhere on the album, Eno employs a more relaxed croon reminiscent of his erstwhile band mate Bryan Ferry. The 50s doo-wop flavoured “Cindy Tells Me” appears to take a wry look at the Feminist movement, as Eno, once again voyeur, marvels at stories of women who are “selling up their maisonettes/ Left their hotpionts to rust in their kitchenettes”, and are now “saving their labour for insane reading”. On the knock-kneed “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch”, Eno sings in the first person about the disintegration of a relationship, delivering this zinging couplet: “By this time I got to looking for a kind of substitute/ I can’t tell you, my love, except that it rhymes with ‘dissolute’”.
But Eno removes his tongue from his cheek for the penultimate song, the achingly mournful “Some of Them are Old”. Over plangent slide guitar and droning organ, he sings from the point of view of a lonely, half-forgotten soul whose contact with the outside world has slowed to the occasional trickle of visitors and half-remembered friends. It’s the album’s most intriguing lyric and its emotional heart. Is this isolated character someone whose mind has been irreparably damaged artistic vision, or the over-indulgence and excess which fame offers? It certainly seems to predict the sorry state of mental and physical deterioration Eno’s future collaborator Bowie had sunk into by the middle of the 1970s. “Lucy, please be still/ And hide your madness in a jar,” he warns, perhaps to the eager star of “Baby’s on Fire”, “But do beware/ It will follow you”.
Perhaps Eno took his own advice. Following “… Warm Jets”, his music shed its Glam trappings, moving into dense, complex Art Rock territory on 1974’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”. As his music edged its way towards a more ambient, purely instrumental form, so Eno the flamboyant pop star was replaced by Eno the studio master, a shadowy figure whose sonic alchemy was, and remains, much in demand from bands a diverse as Talking Heads, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, U2, Devo and Coldplay. It suits him.
But for anyone who’s ever thrilled to the lineage of post-modern wit and madcap musical flair which ties together Sparks, the B-52s, Pulp and, more recently, Franz Ferdinand, “Here Come the Warm Jets” must stand as a sacred text.
Posted In Classic Albums, Jan 06 2009.
Words - Richard