Music Arcades: Fripp and Eno: (No Pussyfooting)

It was true, what I said three days ago about The Plateaux of Mirror being among the first ambient albums I bought. But if (No Pussyfooting) counts as an ambient album — this review calls it proto-ambient, aha! wheels within wheels… — then this was the first one that I listened to at all closely.

At school Richard Smith had told me about this Eno fellow, and the music he made "where nothing really happens." Dick and his dope-smoking friends used it as an alternative to reggae, to soundtrack their sessions. I never smoked that dope (I wasn't invited) or heard that music at the time, but the name and the description lodged in my memory. Then a year or two later, John Neale, the Joy Division evangelist, pushed (No Pussyfooting) at me. "No idea why it's called (No Pussyfooting)," he explained, "Nor why one track is called The Heavenly Music Corporation and the other Swastika Girls." So far, not so informative. "But it's great." At his prompting, I taped it, and the tape lived with me for a few decades. It still does.

Last year DGM Live brought out this 2-CD version, which, alongside remastered versions of the two side-long tracks, includes the whole album played backwards, and one of the tracks played at half-speed (making it last a full 40 minutes). There's a brief explanation of how these two alternative versions came about on the CD cover, but a longer, more personal account — possibly the one that inspired their inclusion on these CDs — can be found on Sid Smith's blog.

Intrigued by this doubling of the ambient premise (what is the sound of music where nothing really happens and then this nothing is slowed down or reversed?), I decided it was time for me to get a legitimate copy after all these years. The only further point I'd add is that Eno's ability to identify that John Peel was playing the track backwards suggests there must be something else going on, besides nothing. I can tell that the versions are subtly different, but not that one is going in the opposite direction to the other.