Music Arcades: Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets

It just occurred to me I must have had the illustrated book of lyrics of Here Come the Warm Jets a year or two before I got the album itself. I lapped up the ideas in the book — indeterminacy, cybernetics, Marcel Duchamp, Laurence Sterne, autopoiesis, Schwitters — but didn't like Russell Mills' illustrations all that much. It's not that the folly of doing them was wrong. How could I not like that? It's that the images seemed literal and pedantic, and, even though they were knowingly literal, they still seemed off somehow. How could I… oh, oh shit; yes, obviously you're right.

Anyway, the way I remember it, it wasn't the book that led me to the album. It was a bloke called Anil from my MSc course who'd said that he really liked the early Eno albums of songs. I'd ignored them, because I was too in thrall to the ambient pieces — them and the video sculptures in Place #11 at Riverside Studios (still Eno's only solo art show in the UK in the last 30 years?).

When I got this back from Record Collector in Broomhill (£11.99, not to be too pedantic), I got that same rush of astonishment and exhilaration that came when I finally, finally heard the first Roxy Music album. Every time I listened to it, new details would emerge. But mostly it was the boldness that grabbed me, like the simple but very effective fade at the end of On Some Faraway Beach that leaves the halting piano line exposed like the groynes at Wittering when the tide goes out. And quite, quite beautiful despite/because of its amateurism. (Eno repeated the trick less effectively much later on a U2 album, but that's another story.) Or the gorgeous slide guitar break (it is slide guitar, isn't it?) on Some of Them Are Old, preceded by those lines that now jump out at me in a way they couldn't in 1988: