Eno in 1974, Part 1: Here Come The Warm Jets
- 1 hour ago
- 16 min read
Enter the Enoverse.
Not quite punk, not quite glam, but here comes the future - and Here Come The Warm Jets. This is Eno in '74.
Brian Eno: vocals, “snake” guitar, “electric larynx,” synths, “treatments”
Robert Fripp, Phil Manzanera, Chris Spedding: guitar
Lloyd Watson: slide guitar
Andy Mackay: saxophone, keys
Bill MacCormick, Busta Cherry Jones, John Wetton, Paul Rudolph, Chris Thomas: bass
Simon King, Marty Simon, Paul Thompson: percussion
Produced by Brian Eno
art by CCS Associates
“Your chance is not the same as my chance, just as your throw of the dice will rarely be the same as mine.” – Marcel Duchamp
For over half a century there’s been this idea that, as best phrased by Lester Bangs, Brian Eno is “some flipped-out technological whiz or art-school dilettante.” Because his methods are abstract, it all seems so high above us, so genius. People are scared to talk about Eno.
I’ll admit, I felt like I was chasing my own ass through the whole writing process! How do you choose what to write about the single most productive musician of the seventies, who put out no less than two albums a year for the whole decade, but sold less than 50,000 copies of each? Or a serious composer who was at one point a pop star? How do you talk about the creative process of an artist who abandoned painting because there was too large a gap between the concept and the finished product, who then talks about spending days in the studio to produce one sound in the same interview? How do you talk about the guy who usurped Eric Clapton as God? And how the fuck do you talk about all of the above when it applies to the same person?
My goal with this two-part review of Eno’s 1974 albums is to examine the creative processes of Brian Eno. I’ll point out where the timelines overlap, where his methods differ, and the core elements of his philosophy.
A quick note: yes, Here Come The Warm Jets was released in 1974. I’ve seen dates ranging from September of 1974 at the latest to 1973 at the earliest. Even texts Eno collaborated on like Richard Mills’s More Dark Than Shark parrot a 1973 date! A Melody Maker interview conducted just after Eno quit Roxy Music gives a date of January 11th, 1974. But it’s never that simple. Warm Jets debuted on the UK charts the week ending March 9th, 1974. It peaked at number 26 that first week, which leads me to believe it sold a lot in preorders from Roxy fans and sales trickled off afterwards. Given albums were (and still are) typically released on Fridays, and considering all of the above context clues, we can safely guess that Here Come The Warm Jets dropped on March 1st.
Brian Eno doesn’t consider himself a "genius." He rather infamously asserted in the seventies that he wasn’t even a musician, “though I do consider myself a professional composer.”
Eno quit Roxy Music in mid-1973 after a disastrous tour in support of For Your Pleasure. Tensions rose behind the scenes. Bryan Ferry didn’t like that public perceived Roxy just as much Brian with an I’s project as Bryan with a Y’s. In interview with Geoff Brown for Melody Maker in November of 1973, Eno asserts Roxy are a great band and he loves their work, but they lacked “one of the most important elements of my musical life, which is insanity. I’m interested in things being absurd…” Roxy went from unsigned oddballs to the next big thing when “glam” entered the mainstream. Given their newfound fame, there was less time and space to experiment. Eno felt pressure to come up with something useable in the studio.
Eno asserted in this interview that there was no bad blood surrounding his departure. He joined Roxy by accident in the first place! Andy Mackay said he knew a guy who worked with synthesizers and that guy was Eno, but Eno had never touched a synthesizer in his life! In the end, Roxy just wasn’t Eno’s end goal the way it was Ferry’s. “I don’t think any of us expected to be successful, for a start. Well, Bryan did, I suppose. But for the rest of us it was still kind of (an) art event type of thing. I don't think anyone would have been surprised or even especially disappointed if after a year it all folded up.”
In no rush to be in another band, he wants to go avant-garde. He was interested in the works of John Cage, especially his text Silent, George Brecht, Morton Feldman, and La Monte Young. To Nick Kent for the NME, Eno stated his plan was “to record as much as possible with as many different people as possible.”
Record as much as possible with as many people as possible he did! After leaving Roxy, Eno did a little work for Robert Wyatt’s new group, Matching Mole. Then he linked up with his new bestie, Robert Fripp.
Eno predicted,
“I shall be seen as a rock-and-roll revivalist in a funny way, because the thing that people miss when they do their rock revival rubbish is the fact that early rock music was, in a lot of cases, the product of incompetence, not competence...There’s a misconception that these people were brilliant musicians and they weren’t. They were brilliant musicians in the spiritual sense. They had terrific ideas and a lot of ball or whatever. They knew what the physical function of music was but they weren’t virtuosi.”
quoted from: Geoff Brown, “Eno’s Where It’s At” Melody Maker, 11/10/1973.
This may seem like one of Eno’s signature interview tangents. And trust me, there are a lot. I’ve never used quite as many ellipses as I have writing this review! If you can cut through his instinct to avoid and obfuscate, these quotes open the door to how Eno thinks of making music.
Besides ambling on his VCS3 and AKS, he didn’t play any instrument. When asked if it was ever inconvenient that he couldn’t read music, he describes “one or two occasions” where he was caught without a tape recorder and an idea slipped away. “...on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, ‘God, if only I could write this down.’ But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway…” Instead of, say, sitting down with a guitar to write, Eno would record himself picking things out on various instruments he couldn’t really play. Then he’d run those bits through his various electronics and tape recorders. (He had 31 tape recorders at one point, he was obsessed with these things and how they worked.) Then he’dbring in guest musicians to flesh things out, all tracks would be overdubbed to hell, and he’d repeat the process until he was satisfied. If you’re familiar with Holger Czukay’s process engineering Tago Mago, this will no doubt ring some bells. As you can imagine, working like this was expensive. Part of why Eno left Roxy was because he felt weird taking so much studio time on the band’s tab to chase one sound. Sometimes it’d take a whole day. Sometimes he wouldn’t get it at all. Best to strike it out on his own to experiment like this.
A certain degree of of Eno’s work is left up to chance. He reinforced this by never writing down what settings he used on any given synth.
“I know myself well enough that if I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones…There are a lot of things I’ve done before that I couldn't even do again if I wanted to.”
quoted from: Lester Bangs, “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville – Part 3 of 4.” Edited by Ben Catching. Perfect Sound Forever, 2003.
He also took a big risk by musicians together who would never work together otherwise! In Eric Tamm’s Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, he explained, “I got them together merely because I want to see what happens when you combine different identities like that and you allow them to compete.” Since he couldn’t notate what he wanted the guys to play, he communicated through adjectives, gestures, and occasionally dance moves. (The latter worked best with the bassists, as there’s a natural bodily rhythm to what they do.) The “lyrics” came last. But it’s worth noting that we’re using the term “lyrics” in the loosest of senses. Like Damo Suzuki’s “lyrics” for CAN, they were more something for the voice to do within the composition. Eno would listen to the backing track, make a chart marking where singing would slot in best. Not unlike John Lennon advising George Harrison to get the song down the song as soon as inspiration struck (“Something in the way she moves/Attracts me like a…” pomegranate?) Eno would sing nonsense syllables, worked into real words later.
Basically, sixteen incompatible personalities were smooshed into Island Studios for twelve days in September of 1973 to cut ten songs with little to no framework! Cast and crew used the friction between personalities and breakdowns of perceived “comfort zones” to make Here Come The Warm Jets.
Among many colorful phrases, Gordon Fletcher for Rolling Stone stated the whole of Warm Jets “may be described as tepid, and the listener must kick himself for blowing five bucks on baloney.” I feel a lot of critics miss the sense of play that makes Eno’s mid-seventies work; like doing a little dance to show his players the feel he wanted their parts to have. Across both Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain, Eno is the ultimate example of the outcome is the project. It’s not about the destination, it’s what happens on the way. It’s like research, right? (I know that sounds clinical, but I swear it’s not!) To come into a study with the conclusion pre-set and bending your findings around to align with your conclusion would be disingenuous, unethical, and a betrayal of the process. You have to be willing to explore. Looking back on Warm Jets, Eno said, “I was just in a mad mood, really, when I did it, and also had this feeling of incredible freedom.” You can feel it. This record is teeming with energy. It’s anything but “tepid,” there’s always something happening here.
The lyrics of Warm Jets are a whole lot of nothing. But “a whole lot of nothing” doesn’t necessarily equate to an empty void. As Richard Mills described in More Dark Than Shark,
“Eno’s lyrics intrigued me as they did not, on the whole, fall into any of the usual categories of popular music, but reflected his diverse interests, such as spontaneous human combustion, dream notation, random associations, and phenomena in general. His lyrics are not the normal throwaway lines...their randomness, nonsense and contradictory feel are the appealing thing that never fails to excite, incite, amuse and confuse me.”
quoted from: Brian Eno and Richard Mills, More Dark Than Shark (1986.)
Eno feels the same. Needles In The Camel’s Eye was “written in less time than it takes to sing,” and even he admitted he “never really understood” it. The title came from the guitar tone, which he likened to a cloud of needles.
I don’t care if it would defeat the purpose of the record, “Camel’s Eye” should’ve been a hit. This was tailor-made for radio waves ruled by T. Rex and Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie. It wastes no time setting the tone for Warm Jets; Eno’s production style tangles up its layers. Eno’s vocals get a thick application of reverb, there are slightly out-of-sync drum tracks across the left and right channels. And no, we can’t ignore that thin, sharp, winding riff. It all churns together around Eno’s voice; sounding vaguely anthemic, like any good seventies rocker. If you can make out what he’s saying with everything else going on, it feels like the opening theme for a coming-of-age film about a lonely outcast teen. The kind that reads Creem and buys Brian Eno records!
He asks, “Birds of prey with too much to say/Oh what could be my destiny/Another rainy day?” Best to not pore over the pages and just roll with the punches. “Why ask why/For the by and by and by/All mysteries are just more/Needles in the camel’s eye.”
“Camel’s Eye” presents the thesis statement of Warm Jets: you don’t need “sensible” “lyrics” to make great pop music. You don’t even need complex music. Though the production is dense, the solo is just the major scale!
The Paw Paw Negro Blow Torch came from the story of A.W. Underwood from Paw Paw, Michigan, who could apparently breathe fire. Eno writes from the point of view of his lover. How can you get close to a man who’d literally set you on fire?
The plot thickens: his lover has a lover! Eno sings, “My my my” like a nagging girlfriend, complaining that “we’re treating each other like strangers.” One love has gone cold, “her loving just a fable that we try with passion to recall,” and the other literally too hot to handle! Send for an ambulance or an accident investigator, he’s breathing like a furnace!
Eno peacocks all over the swaggering “Blow Torch;” with lots of vibrato, falsetto, and talk-singing. The churning riff and hip-swaying rhythm section are so close to being standard-issue, but then Eno drops in what I can only describe as shitposting on the synths. It’s like someone spilled their coffee on R2D2!
Whirring synths segue into the next song. Clearly we’re meeting Eno at a very pyromaniac time in his life. Baby’s On Fire, better throw her in the water. Warm Jets is the catchiest album I’ve reviewed since since Badfinger. “Baby’s on fire, better throw her in the water” is an insane hook. It’s just that much more memorable thanks to the bratty, nasally affect Eno adopts. I was walking around my house last week putting dishes away and the like, just singing “Baby’s on fiy-aaaaaaar, bet-ter throw her in the wa-terrrrrrrr.”
To Melody Maker, Eno described the song’s appeal:
“‘Baby’s On Fire’ was written around two notes and that's interesting to me. It’s very economical and that interests me at the moment when song structures are so complex in general, that one can write what I think are interesting songs without that kind of complexity...I don’t have to rely on the complexity of the structure for the interest of the songs.”
quoted from: Allan Jones, “Eno: On Top of Tiger Mountain.” Melody Maker, 10/26/1974.
I completely agree with the artist’s assessment. “Baby’s On Fire”’s bottomless depth comes from its simplicity; anxious bass, cymbal-focused drums, shrill droning synth in the back, and all of two chords. The tension never resolves, and Fripp only raises the temperature with his solo. Consider Fripp’s playing style at this time; the shrill feedback-laced stuff on Larks’ Tongues in Aspic and the agonizing suspense of the one-note solo on “Starless.” Before I looked at the album credits, I had no idea this was him on “Baby’s On Fire!” Double-tracking over soaring flourishes is so unlike him in 1973! This solo is bossy, muscular, entirely befitting to the unrelenting tension, and damn near perfectly structured. It predates his playing style on “Heroes.”
Cindy Tells Me is the only Warm Jets song I’d comfortably apply the “rock-and-roll revivalist” label to. It’s a Shangri-La’s song in hot pink satin and latex instead of black leather and capris; with feathery “ooo”s and plinking piano, turned on its side by hefty phasing on the guitar. It’s retro-futuristic, like something the Jetsons might hear on the flying car radio.
A Stepford wife-like character is disenchanted by modern womanhood. Some are homemakers, some join the workforce. “That’s what they want and that’s what they choose.” Some are dissatisfied with being single girls, confused by their new freedoms. Others stew on their wasted potential. “Some of them lose and some of them lose.” Michael Bellis writing for The Quietus alleges “Cindy” is John Cale’s wife, Cindy Wells (AKA Miss Cynderella of the GTOs.) The connection is tenuous at best. This is Eno’s examination of upper-middle-class pseudo-feminists; what social media today has dubbed “white woman feminism.” Or worse, being performative!
We’ve gone from offensive simplicity of “Baby’s On Fire” to oppressive simplicity. There’s only three chords to Driving Me Backwards, each separated by just one note. “Driving Me Backwards” is paranoid to the nth degree, it makes the listener’s skin crawl. It’s the point in the mob movie where the car door locks behind the lackey and he realizes he’s not just going for “a little drive.” Or the penultimate twist in the psychological thriller – the protagonist was the serial killer all along! It might predict one of the most famous Oblique Strategies cards: “Repetition is a form of change.” The see-sawing motion grinds away for five minutes, rising in volume until the space between your ears rattles. This is wild on my surround sound. Eno gives a belabored performance, like a man at the end of his tether.
I have to say I prefer “Driving Me Backwards” on June 1, 1974. At least two people on that stage hated each other’s guts and were this close to beating the shit out of each other right then and there (more on that in part two) while the German lady stood in back and played her creepy harmonium. It’s barely held together.
On an album with so many off-beat, intentionally ugly moments and indecipherable lyrics, On Some Faraway Beach is simply gorgeous. Eno plucks out a simple line on piano. You swear you’ve heard it somewhere before. The warm buzz of the high-flying, planar guitar solo envelops the listener. It could be vaguely anthemic like “Camel’s Eye,” but I feel a sense of relief.
“Some Faraway Beach” is what we all want in the end: to go out wrapped in the comfort, warmth, and love we felt in childhood. Adulthood is harsh. Maybe you haven’t felt the love of the universe since then. Eno lays out the best-case scenario.
“Given the chance, I’ll die like a baby
On some faraway beach
When the season's over."
His soul returns to nature.
“Unlikely I’ll be remembered
As the tide brushes sand in my eyes
I’ll drift away...”
For an album loaded with intentionally disjointed, detached lyrics, this is tender. The lush, swirling arrangement and backing vocals wash away with the tide. We’re left with the countermelody on piano. Just beautiful.
Blank Frank sticks the Rolling Stones’ recording of “Not Fade Away” in front of a fun house mirror. Eno takes the white-boy blues craze that swept Britain in his art school years and twists it into a pretzel. “Blank Frank,” with a memory as cold as an iceberg who speaks only in proverbs, twists his face into a yellowed, foul-breathed smile. While yes, I know Eno is the single most influential figure in modern music history post-1970, I’m no less blown away by this guitar solo. It sounds like something Sonic Youth might’ve screwed into their music in the late eighties!
The title of Dead Finks Don’t Talk is an Eno-ist twist on William Burroughs’s Dead Fingers Talk. He said in More Dark Than Shark that this was about “being ambitious and smarmy at the same time.” This is interesting when you consider all the Roxys save Bryan Ferry appear on Warm Jets, “Finks” is the only track to feature Paul Thompson, and Eno allegedly imitates Bryan on the line, “As you peck your way up there.” (Gary Parsons thought so at least. It sounds more like my impression of Nick Cave!) “Oh cheeky cheeky/Oh naughty sneaky/You’re so perceptive.” Eno talk-sings, “Oh you headless chicken, can those poor teeth take so much kicking?” Maybe the breakup wasn’t as amicable as he asserted!
Like “Faraway Beach,” Some Of Them Are Old is a wistful, oddly sensitive moment on an irreverent, zany album. They make each other make sense. Lloyd Watson and Andy Mackay are fabulous on slide guitar and sax respectively.
I’m sure this song is about some other thing with some bizarro Eno story attached. Looking at these lyrics, I feel it’s another song about death. We all hope to simply wash away to whatever lies beyond the mortal plane, feeling no anxieties about what fate waits for us on the other side. “Some Of Them Are Old” is the reality of dying. It’s human nature to be scared, especially of being forgotten by those we once loved.
“People come and go
And forget to close the door,
And they leave their stains and cigarette butts trampled on the floor.
And when they do,
Remember me, remember me.”
Life is short. You can’t control what or who happens to you, or when you leave your dear Lucy or Polly Jean or whatever her name is. You can only control how you react to it.
“Some of them are old, some of them are new,
Some of them will turn up when you least expect them to.
And when they do,
Remember me,
Remember me.”
Nick Kent likened the title track to “Telstar,” I just don’t hear it. It’s a yearning end to the 42-minute surrealist film that is Warm Jets. Note the drum tracks and fuzzy guitar that start in sync and slowly wander astray, barely meeting again in the end. They recall the screwy drums of “Camel’s Eye.” Pay attention to the bells. Eno and Here Come The Warm Jets seem to cast their gaze to the future. He knew how to start a record, and he knew how to finish one.
It’s interesting to note that a lot of the same musicians that showed up for this album also lent themselves to Phil Manzanera’s Diamond Head. The two albums sound nothing alike! Warm Jets doesn’t quite anticipate punk, though I do hear Television’s DNA. He anticipates post-punk, Eno’s own ambient turn in the mid- to late seventies, and the broader kitschy rock-and-roll revival moving into the eighties. Here Come The Warm Jets predicts so much it boggles the mind, and yet it can be placed in and around the music of 1974 in a way not many other Eno albums can.
The Warm Jets tour with the Winkies (crazy name) abruptly ended when Eno suffered a spontaneous pneumothorax. After recovering, it was right on to the next project…
Personal favorites: “Needles In The Camel’s Eye,” “Baby’s On Fire,” “Driving Me Backwards,” “On Some Faraway Beach,” “Some Of Them Are Old”
– AD ☆
End of Part One
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Bangs, Lester. “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville - Part 1 of 4.” Edited by Ben Catching. Perfect Sound Forever, 2003. https://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno.html
Bangs, Lester. “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville - Part 2 of 4.” Edited by Ben Catching. Perfect Sound Forever, 2003. https://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno2.html
Bangs, Lester. “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville - Part 3 of 4.” Edited by Ben Catching. Perfect Sound Forever, 2003. https://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno3.html
Bangs, Lester. “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville - Part 4 of 4.” Edited by Ben Catching. Perfect Sound Forever, 2003. https://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno4.html
Bangs, Lester. “Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets.” Creem, 10/1974. https://www.creem.com/archive/article/1974/10/01/dont-bogart-that-catnip
Bangs, Lester. “Eno Sings With The Fishes.” The Village Voice, 4/3/1978. Reproduced in Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Edited by John Morthland. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Bliss, Abi. “Print World: The World’s Worst: A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia.” The Wire issue 438, 8/2020. https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/88911/page/74
Brown, Geoff. “Eno’s Where It’s At.” Melody Maker, 11/10/1973. Reproduced in Uncut: The History of Rock: 1973. Edited by John Robinson, 2025.
Cale, John, with Victor Bockris. What’s Welsh For Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale. New York: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Eno, Brian, with Russell Mills. More Dark Than Shark. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
Fletcher, Gordon. “Here Come The Warm Jets.” Rolling Stone, 10/24/1974. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/here-come-the-warm-jets-203410/
Jones, Allan. “Eno: On Top of Tiger Mountain.” Melody Maker, 10/26/1974. https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_mm-oct74.html
Kent, Nick. “Happiness Is A Warm Jet.” NME, 10/13/1973. https://carellaross.com/blogs/rantings-ravings/posts/6063938/happiness-is-a-warm-jet-nme-brian-eno-article-by-nick-kent
Kent, Nick. “Of Launderettes and Lizard Girls.” NME, 7/28/1973. https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_nme-jul73.html
Parsons, Gary. Decades: Brian Eno in the 1970s. Kindle Edition. Sonicbond Publishing, 2026.
Tamm, Eric. Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989. https://archive.org/details/brianenohismusic0000tamm_b5v1/page/102/mode/1up?q=warm+jets
“John Cale/Nico/Eno in Rainbow Concert.” Hit Parader, 11/1974. https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_hitparader-nov74.html
Ooooh, been WAITING for Eno to be given a deep dive....today is a great day !