Needles in the camel's eye (Eno ) (LP 2476)

Brian Eno  Here Come The Warm Jets (CD, Virgin Records, 1974) ****  

Genre: Pop rock 

Places I remember: Fopp

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Here Come The Warm Jets

Gear costume: Needles In A Camel's Eye 

Active compensatory factors: I don't know what to make of Eno. I hear echoes of Roxy Music on Here Come The Warm jets, his debut solo album, but it's fleeting. Is he a musician even? He has described himself as a non-musician but he played keyboards for Roxy Music. He strikes me more as an ideas man, a presence, an enabler and a serial collaborator. And yet he pops out solo albums in a bunch of genres.

Mostly this is experimental pop, with a lot of avant-garde touches and a lot of guest musicians. It certainly sounds like many of New Zealand's Dunedin bands were paying attention. Many of the songs remind me of sounds made by Toy Love/ Tall Dwarfs/ Chris Knox, especially. Needles In A Camel's Eye sounds so much like a long lost Toy Love song!

I played this album continually for days trying to get a fix on it for this review and it kept slipping through my fingers. It's an album to appreciate, rather than enjoy, in my case.

Where do they all belong? Apart from Roxy Music and some ambient stylings - that's it for solo Eno in my collection.

Qu'est-ce que c'est fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far (Talking Heads) #396 - 397

Talking Heads Take Me To The River (edit)/ Thank You For Sending me An Angel (version) (Sire, SRE 1013, 1978)
Talking Heads Psycho Killer/ Psycho Killer (accoustic version sic) (Sire, SRE 1013, 1979 sic)

A few weird things going on here - Psycho Killer appeared on the album 77, which was released in 1977, so why it took NZ two years to release it, I don't know; the B side can't spell acoustic; and Take Me To The River chops a minute and a half off the album version...why?? 

Bizarre. An apt word for this smarty pants brigade. Smarty pants in a good way though!

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, Talking Heads were the band du jour for all us white middle class hipsters attending our first year at Auckland University in 1977. I am normally suspicious of the hip new thing so it actually took a weekend live in course on American poetry run by my friend Roger Horrocks to win me over. Someone brought the record along and it was played during that weekend. Sorted.

77 is full of spiky tension, jerky rhythm and nervousness (David Byrne's voice is utterly distinctive). Psycho Killer is all of that and more. Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire!

Take Me To The River is the opposite of all that - it's all about the groove (Al Green - the song's co-creator, is the master of groove). Needless to say it was a big hit in NZ in 1978. Clearly the band wanted to send a signal! Say one thing once - why say it again?

Hidden gems: The acoustic version of Psycho Killer (NOT to be confused with the Stop Making Sense version below) is okay but it escapes me why they put this on the B side - there must be a reason...Thank You etc is not that exciting and the reason I never actually bought the difficult second album (More Songs About Buildings And Food) in the first place.