14
I used to sing, too, I was always singing a lot, Buddy Holly, Elvis.
This was American music, African music, in the middle of the English
countryside ... I think the echo on Elvis's "Hearbreak Hotel" is better
than the song itself, by far. Nobody could tell me what that was, in my
family. They didn't know what to make of that sound. It turns the stu-
dio into a cave ... When I was young, the most overpowering sense of
wonder was inspired in me by music.
3
Eno, like many other English rock-musicians-to-be of his generation, has been harshly critical
of his own country's popular music of that period. "English music at that time was really bor-
ing. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele and ... just a lot of very poor imitations of the larger
American stars."
4
On another occasion, Eno used the phrase "Martian music" to describe the
alien, other quality of the 1950s doo-wop he heard emanating from the G.I. culture of the air
bases.
5
In 1981, he was to philosophize on the question of exactly why such music would
have seemed so full of mystery to him, and on the lessons such experiences held for his own
creative work:
I suppose people here [in the U.S.] might think it's strange to regard
doo-wop as magical music, but I did, because in England we had no
tradition of it whatsoever ... It could have been from another galaxy for
all I knew. I was absolutely entranced by it, from the age of seven or
eight, when I first heard those early songs like "Get A Job" [The Sil-
houettes, 1958]. I thought, "This is just beautiful." I had never heard
music like this, and one of the reasons it was beautiful was because it
came without a context. It plopped from outer space, in a sense. Now,
in later life I realized that this removal of context was an important
point in the magic of music. One of the things I've been concerned
with quite a lot is to deliberately dismantle or shift contexts around so
that something comes from an area where you didn't expect it, or
something appears and it has a certain mysteriousness to it.
6
Eno's imagination was galvanized by early rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll, and he would
play certain records incessantly on his parents' auto-repeat record player: "I used to leave it on
all day, every day."
7
Eno was also exposed to big-band jazz:
And then another [group] I heard was, funnily enough, the Ray Con-
niff Singers. Because I had an uncle who had to leave the place he was
living, and he parked his record collection with my parents for a while.
3
Mark Howell, "From a Strangers Evening with Brian Eno," Another Room (June/July 1981),
n.p.
4
Loder, "Eno," 26.
5
George Rush, "Brian Eno: Rock's Svengali Pursues Silence," Esquire 98 (Dec. 1982), 130.
6
Jim Aikin, "Brian Eno," Keyboard 7 (July 1981), 62. In another interview Eno cited Don
and Juan's "Chicken Necks" as another example of what he called "mystery music." Loder,
"Eno," 26.
7
Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83
(Sept. 1985), 67.