Music Arcades: Brian Eno: Dali's Car

It was sometime around 1981 that I heard Eno and the Winkies' 1974 Peel Session, when it was repeated "out of the Archives" on the Friday Rock Show. It was the performance of Fever that struck me most. Thinking about it, that was almost certainly the first time I'd heard any of Brian Eno's solo material, and quite probably the first version of Fever I heard (Peggy Lee wasn't big in our house).

About a decade and a half later I came across this CD, evidently a bootleg, in (I think) HMV on Oxford Street, and snapped it up on the strength of that song alone.

Even as a bootleg, it's an odd release. For a start, the pictures of Eno on the cover are more or less contemporary to the music, which is often a no-no for bootlegs (see 1, 2). Then it has details of the sources of the recordings. The first two tracks are said to come from a Peel Session on 19th February 1974, but there is no record of a session on that date on Peel website. Just conceivably, the band might have had one go at the BBC one week, and if it didn't work out, they might perhaps have come back a week later for the session that was broadcast. But that theory is undermined by the fact that two of three songs on the CD that are claimed to originate from the 26th February 1974 session are clearly not from there — they don't appear on the BBC tracklisting, and they sound like dodgy audience recordings of live shows that the BBC would have rejected as less than broadcast quality.

Finally, there's the claim on the back of the CD that, "Brian Eno gab freundlicherweise seine Erlaubnis zu diesen hervorragenden Mitschnitten" (Brian Eno kindly gave his permission for these excellent recordings). Which firstly seems unlikely, and, secondly, permission may not have been wholly within his gift (there being other rights involved). I'm sure some more scholarly bod has unpicked these mysteries somewhere else on the net, long before me. But it kind of spoils the fun to look up the answers in the back of the book.

Anyway, the first two tracks, The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch and Fever, sound like they do come from the Peel session, whenever it was recorded, and they're worth the price of the CD for me. The playing has more going on below the waist than Eno's other pop/rock solo recordings of that era. More soul, less attitude.

Somewhere along the line I misremembered Eno's version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight being part of that Peel session. Evidently I was wrong, but here it is anyway.