Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

Puncture repair nightmare puts me back on the bus, and the journey gets me half way through Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.

I like his pop glam albums best but always go for this one over Before And After Science or Here Come The Warm Jets. It’s the impeccable played but ramshackle quality of the arrangements that I really like. The song titles are fantastic cut up nonsense (My evidence for the prosecution includes Burning Airlines Give You So Much More, Mother Whale Eyeless and Put a Straw Under Baby). The vocal style is sly camp and the lyrics are obviously never going to connect with too many people as they break all the rules of Pop. I mean…where are the love songs?…What can the little girls understand?…Where is the cheatin’ lyin’ and slippin’ around?

It breaks the rules but still sounds warm and involving and indeed you do want to get involved. You want to hear the stories from this other world, even though you’re only catching snippets that maybe you’ll never understand. Back In Judy’s Jungle has treated guitars, rattley drums and a one-note bass with lots of space. It sounds like an Oompah band about to fall over

The guitar playing throughout is fantastic with scratchy, rattley rhythm playing. I’ve a horrible feeling the excellent drumming (It’s not just loose, it’s positively floppy) may be down to Phil Collins. If it is YOU’RE STILL NOT FORGIVEN.

I love the bass playing on Third Uncle. It starts with 1 bass note that gradually gets echoed as the manic scratch rhythm and clattering percussion take over. There’s an 8 note bass run that seems to come out of nowhere and goes straight back there. He only does it twice but to my (bass players) ears it just seems to crank up the song far more than seems possible. And then there’s the one note again …but dropped down lower and flatter. And the only vocal line that stands out is “I thought it was you”

Put A Straw Under Baby has an impossibly woozy feel, with scraped, discordant string arrangements (Vic Chestnutt or even Junco Pardner from Sandanista). In many ways it’s like a nursery rhyme or one very scary lullaby.

Much is made of Eno’s legendary non-musician status and call me sceptical but I bet he’s picked up a few tricks over the years. By the time he recorded this he’d done the first 2 Roxy Music and his own first 2 solo albums. He’d obviously surrounded himself with some top players but the best trick was to (lets use a soul cliché here, and we might as well because I don’t think there’s any musical clichés on the lp) to get it to sound so wrong but feel so right. This albums 30 years old and it still doesn’t sound like anything else. I’ve been going back to it for 22 years now, and it’s my all time favourite warped pop record ever.