In this week’s Low Culture Podcast, Luke Turner is once more joined by Jude Rogers for a chat about Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Released 50 years ago next month, this is the sound of Eno working out who he was as an artist in a gloriously tricksy, strange album that blends songwriting and his rich, distinctive voice with the more textual, proto-ambient music for which he’d become synonymous. Best approached by reciprocating the sense of wonder with which it is imbued, Another Green World is a thoughtful, melancholy, fragile record, arguably one of Eno’s most emotionally resonant moments. Recorded with a bewildering array of musicians including John Cale and Phil Collins, initial sessions didn’t go well – Eno remembered the studio time as a horrible experience that left him in tears, but then the mysterious power of his Oblique Strategies cards helped liberate the musicians, who joined the core flow of his creativity with their distinctive contributions. Water is a recurring motif in Eno’s lyrical imagery, so Luke and Jude have a chat about the inspiration of the natural world on the album, and then throughout his work.
Jude reveals that she was taught violin by the same man who taught John Cale, and the duo conclude by discussing how Another Green World connects with religious music as well as a childlike imagination, but then how from it we hear signposts to anything from his Bowie productions, to post punk artists like Wire and OMD, to ambient music, or tQ favourites like William Doyle and Grumbling Fur.
Most of all though there’s that combination of songs and texture that makes the record so tactile, especially combined with Eno’s beautiful lyrical imagery, just on the right side of the absurd. It’s a record, says Jude, that helps you keep in touch with an innocent inner child that is really, never lost.
Oh, and more prosaically, if you’ve got or have ever had a baby or small child, we guarantee that the line “I’ll come running to tie your shoes” will quickly get stuck in your head as “I’ll come running to wipe your poos”. Hopefully Eno, the most playful of artists, won’t mind.
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