Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets

Written By: Moti Kupfer

Release date - 08.02.1974

“I agree with you that the past is a source of melancholy but I like melancholy and have never found it to be the same thing as moroseness or sadness. I’ve always enjoyed being melancholy, perhaps because that mood is very much a feature of the environment where I grew up. It’s a very bleak place and most visitors find it quite miserable. I don’t think it’s miserable but it’s definitely a sort of lost place in a lost time — nothing has changed in this part of England for many hundreds of years.”

Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in May 1948 in the town of Melton, Suffolk, England. His full name is unquestionably a tongue-twister, so we will simply refer to him as Brian Eno.

He would later become best known as the inventor of the “ambient music” genre and as a visionary producer behind landmark albums such as “Remain in Light”, “The Joshua Tree”, and David Bowie’s so-called “Berlin Trilogy”. But even before he emerged as a groundbreaking producer, Eno was already creating the music of tomorrow, here and now.

Eno took the rules of music and stretched them to their human limits. He took fundamentally pop-based songs and dismantled them in order to explore unusual and unconventional sounds on his debut solo album “Here Come the Warm Jets”, released on February 8, 1974. This happened shortly after he left the band Roxy Music, with whom he recorded two albums.

As a young man, Eno attended the Catholic grammar school in Ipswich, where he began listening to records by African-American R&B artists, blues, and doo-wop performers. He drew particular inspiration from "the Lafayettes", the New York duo Don and Juan, "the Shirelles", and Little Richard, all of whom he regarded as key American musical figures.

He was also inspired by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whom he first encountered while staying at the home of his uncle, Carl Otto Eno, who owned an art collection. By 1964, after studying art and mathematics, Eno developed a strong interest in both art and music and lost any desire for conventional employment.

In 1966, Eno enrolled at Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1969. While at Winchester, he attended a lecture by Pete Townshend, guitarist of “The Who”, which he later described as the moment he realized that one could create music without formal training. During his studies, Eno began using a tape recorder as a musical instrument.

Toward the end of 1967, Eno co-founded the “Merchant Taylor’s Simultaneous Cabinet”, an avant-garde music and performance trio formed with two fellow Winchester graduates. This was followed by short stints in several experimental bands, some of which featured Eno as a theatrical frontman while also playing guitar.

In 1969, following his separation from his wife, Eno moved to London, where his musical career began to accelerate. He became involved with the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. At one point, he was forced to earn money working as a paste-up assistant in the advertising section of a local newspaper.

Two years later, in 1971, Eno joined “Roxy Music” alongside Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay. Reflecting on the role of chance in his career, Eno later said:

“I had the opportunity to meet saxophonist Andy Mackay at a railway station, which led to my joining the band. If I’d walked ten yards further on the platform or missed that train or been on the next one, I would probably be an art teacher now.”

Eno, who had known Mackay since their university days, shared with him a mutual fascination with the avant-garde and electronic music. After the “For Your Pleasure” tour ended in mid-1973, Eno left the band following creative disagreements with Bryan Ferry, which limited his ability to fully integrate his ideas.

After leaving “Roxy Music”, Eno collaborated with Robert Fripp, guitarist and founder of “King Crimson”. The album they worked on took more than a year to complete and made extensive use of a pioneering system later known as “Frippertronics”. The result is widely regarded as a breakthrough that paved the way for future developments in experimental and ambient music.

In 1973, filmmaker Alfie Singer directed and produced “Eno”, a 24-minute British documentary centered on the recording sessions for Eno’s first studio album, “Here Come the Warm Jets”. At the time, Eno was an avant-garde keyboardist and composer who had just left “Roxy Music” to become a solo artist. As the film demonstrates, the abstract electronics, space-age atmosphere, and layered vocal textures he created were still relatively new to rock music in the early 1970s.

The EMS VCS 3 synthesizer that Eno used during his time with “Roxy Music” also played a central role on his debut solo album. The instrument featured a built-in joystick for sound effects and allowed external keyboards and other instruments to be connected for signal processing. Alongside the VCS 3, Eno used electronic keyboards, vocal-altering electronics, and tape loops to create immersive textures and droning effects.

Despite appearances, science-fiction sounds do not dominate the album. At the core of each song lies a glam-rock sensibility. Eno’s use of electronics serves primarily as coloration and texture, shifting emotional states by introducing menace into an upbeat song or hysteria into a piece rooted in rock and roll.

“Here Come the Warm Jets” revolves around contrasts and constant movement between rock’s past and its future.

The album was recorded in just twelve days and brought together a diverse group of musicians, including Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay from “Roxy Music”, Robert Fripp in return for their earlier collaboration, Simon King of “Hawkwind”, bassist John Wetton, and bassist Busta Jones, known for his work with Albert King, “Talking Heads”, and “Gang of Four”.

“One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage… When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically.”

The album’s artistic coherence emerged from Eno’s judgment, his selection of sounds, and their integration with traditional instruments. In the documentary, Eno described himself artistically as “decadent”, meaning that his music existed “half from one culture that is dying and half from another culture that is just being born”.

Most of the songs on the album are open to interpretation, with the exception of “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch”, which tells the story of William Underwood, a young African-American man from Paw Paw, Michigan, who claimed to possess pyrokinesis, briefly becoming a local celebrity in 1882.

Following the album’s release, Eno was interviewed by a young NME journalist named Chrissie Hynde, who asked him about “On Some Faraway Beach”, the song that famously layered 27 piano parts and was inspired by a dream.

Eno replied:

“You mean ‘On Some Faraway Beach’. It wasn’t only inspired - all the words to that occurred in the dream. I quite often wake up and write my dreams down because I find them so mysterious.”

“I find the dreams are always much more brilliant in their construction than anything I consciously think of. On that particular one, I just woke up with all these words in my head and I wrote them straight down in the dark. When writing from dreams, you don’t feel any responsibility for what you do, which is important to me.”

For some time, the album title was suspected to have a reference to urination. However, in a 1996 interview with Mojo magazine, Eno explained that it originated from a description he wrote for the treated guitar on the title track: "The title Warm Jets came from the guitar sound on the track of that name, which I described on the track sheet as ‘warm jet guitar’, because the guitar sounded like a tuned jet".

For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music

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