Brian Eno

The sum of all human knowledge can be reduced to 2 unshakeable facts. Rod Stewart likes blondes and the first 2 Roxy Music albums are miles better than anything else they've done since. Scientists and divorce lawyers may have been researching the Rod question for years but I think the Roxy conundrum is simply due to the presence (and then absence) of Brian Eno.

The first Roxy Music lp is a very strange affair, with a song about Casablanca (2HB as in To Humperty Bograt) and Chance Meeting, which has the guitar sound from hell, which was always used on sitcom Butterflies to announce the fact that a teenage bedroom door had opened. Here was a band that thought (quite correctly, but also uniquely) that the oboe was an instrument of RAWK. The band looked the part too, part Glam Rock, part crooner, part futuristic Teddy Boy, not to mention Phil Manzanera's star shaped spangle specs and then this straggly haired, egg headed man-lizard Brain Eno making wibbly noises with keyboards and oscillators the size of a telephone exchange.

The second lp For Your Pleasure doesn't cross as many musical styles as the first one, but it does have Do The Strand (and you cannot beat songs about dance crazes…especially if they're imaginary dance crazes) and In Every Dream Home A Heartache. You also can't beat a song about isolation, luxury ("Bungalow Ranch Style") and a blow up doll. "I blew up your body, but you blew my mind."

After leaving Roxy Music, Eno made 4 bonkers pop albums. Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, Another Green World and Before And After Science.

Here Come The Warm Jets has got song titles like The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch and Needle In The Camels Eye to confuse and confound the pop pickers. It's also got Baby's On Fire, which Eno sings in an exaggerated, vowel torturing style, supposedly in bitter tribute to Bryan Ferry's vocal attributes. When Mark Riley acrimoniously left The Fall he used to cover Baby's On Fire with possibly similar snidey motives. Mark E Smith used to repay the favour though with a Bo Diddley style song called Hey Mark Riley (which went something along the lines of "Saw Mark Riley by the window sill, listen to your words it's A New Face In Hell"). I once saw Mark Riley and The Creepers try to play this as their own impromptu encore. I still treasure the look of horror on the bass player's face as he tried to play a Bo Diddley beat, obviously for the first time and obviously without having even heard it before in his life.

My favourite Eno album is Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. It's the impeccably 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. The songs break all the rules. of Pop, but still sound 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 player's) 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."….And then Bauhaus went and covered it.

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

The Before And After Science album has Kings Lead Hat (yes it's an anagram of Talking Heads and yes he produced More Songs About Buildings And Food, Fear Of Music and Remain In Light). He was involved with Bowies three Berlin era albums Low Heroes and Lodger. The instrumentals on the second side of Low in particular show Eno's stamp.

He created space around U2 after Steve Lillywhite's big messy rock sounding second lp (and I do like to leave a lot of space around U2.) and he rescued James who were floundering after the power and seat of the pants feel of their live shows failed to make it onto vinyl. They turned into something different though….but that different thing was still interesting because of Eno. The ambient albums like Music for Airports and Music For Films shone a light on the work of people like Harold Budd and the collaboration with David Byrne on 1981's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is arguably the first album where the vocals are completely based on samples.

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. Fortunately he just keeps cropping up, a kind of Zelig figure who makes the people around him more interesting