Eno interview with Dick Flash of Pork Magazine
A couple of days ago, Brian Eno released a new album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea. I’ve not actually heard it yet, but the three preview tracks available on his website are excellent and the reviews I’ve read have been very favourable indeed. I’ve got pretty much everything he’s released, including the various mail-order-only stuff, and he’s never really disappointed. So when people start talking about this being his “best album in years”, it’s obviously quite exciting.
To coincide with the album’s release, Eno agreed to an interview with Dick Flash of ‘Pork’ magazine. It’s well worth a watch…
Amazing limp…
I enjoyed the interview but found the interviewer to be extremely rude & annoying. I don’t know who this ‘Dick Flash’ is, but he’s got a lot to learn if he hopes to make it in the broadcasting industry. Brian Eno has been around since the 1930’s making many people happy with his popular music & deserves more respect – it’s obvious from his music that he cares about the planet. And he didn’t get where he is today by being rude. That child in the hospital was a little shit.
November 5th, 2010 | 2:09pm
by L.Byron
L. Byron … watch the video again … and ask yourself whether the interviewer looks a little, uh, familiar in some odd way …
November 8th, 2010 | 9:11pm
by Sid Barrett
I’m sure ‘Dick Flash’ & ‘Pork Magazine’ are all very recognizable to the 15 year olds of today but no, i’ve never seen him before. And the 15-year-olds of today think Noel Edmonds & child pornography are funny, so what have I got to learn from them? Where will ‘Dick Flash’ be in 30 years? Will he have played accordian with Phil Collins & Tommy Steele? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I’ve not heard ‘Milk Pot On a Small Tray’ yet but I bet it’s got more catchy songs on it than all the Jay-Z’s & Annie Lennoxes out there put together. Proper songs, with guitars, & tunes you can hum. Brian Eno is a megastar, & mums & dads will still be singing along with ‘Music For Airports’ & dancing around to ‘Thursday Afternoon’ long after Marky Mark & His Funky Bunch have had their day. I’ve always said: for a good night out, for simple entertainment & sheer professionalism, you can’t beat a bit of Brian Eno.
I bet he’s got more money than Dick Flash, too. He’s been at it a long time, you can’t knock it.
November 9th, 2010 | 10:59am
by L.Byron
What a frightfully wasted opportunity this interview was. Brian Eno is one of the liveliest humorists around and yet he barely got a word in ‘Edge’ways (that joke’s one of Brian’s own, because he has made records with U2, and just shows what a true professional he is).
What is the point of an interview where the subject doesn’t get to expound and amuse us? Imagine if Eno’s album with Tommy Steele had only had Steele’s singing and been released without Eno’s trademark comic sound effects. Just taking away the quacking sound on The Ugly Duckling would have made it half the album it is. Which means they would have had to issue it on 6 inch vinyl, and who ever heard of that? It would have been lost in the racks and nobody would have bought it. Which would have been fair if it didn’t have Eno’s work on it.
This Flash character needs to take his ego down a peg or two and show Eno the reverence that his decades of mirth-making demand of us, his public. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and so Flash is trying to make us repeat a time before Eno’s music when all there was were people playing harps and lutes and stuff. Then how stupid would he look? But it would be too late, because I’m sure that once a civilisation has snubbed a talent as mighty as Eno’s he wouldn’t give us a second chance. It’s happened before.
Eno has been making us all smile for so long, like Status Quo he’s a real trouper who just keeps on giving, and Pork magazine should really have respected that.
November 15th, 2010 | 12:03pm
by Merrick
I am so embarrassed! I said that the Steele/Eno album Tommy’s Magic Box Of Bunkum, would have been half the album without Eno and so need to be on 6 inch vinyl.
Having a diameter of 12 inches, an album has an area of 113 square inches. A 6 inch album would only have 28 square inches.
To have half the surface area of an album, 56.5 square inches, it would actually be an 8.5 inch album.
This is bigger than a 7 inch single, so they’d have to put it in with the albums, but being three and a half inches smaller it would get lost in the racks and not be bought by anyone. Which, without Eno’s parping noises, would be fair.
November 15th, 2010 | 12:09pm
by Merrick
I didn’t actually know Eno produced Alma Cogan before but, sure enough, when I went back to the full length version of “Just Couldn’t Resist Her With Her Pocket Transistor” [b-side of the 78] there is an unmistakably Eno-ish 17-minute ambient section featuring only Robert Fripp on tuba.
More intriguingly, I am very keen to hear some of his work with Petula Clark, though the only mention I have of it is a passage in Phil Collins’ autobiography “Look At All My Cash: Diaries 1962-1986”, where he notes an early uncredited session [he was still at school at the time] recording Clark’s classic ‘Downtown’:
“Bloody Eno comes in again with his bloody cape & his bloody Oblique Strategies cards – ‘Take a card. Any card. Go on, you’ll love this’ he says, over & over again, nudging me in the ribs. He keeps insisting we all swop instruments, starting with Petula, who he sees playing bass. That leaves us without a singer so he points the microphone out the window at a chaffinch. We’re never going to get out of here tonight at this rate. I’d really love a pie right now.”
Collins is maddeningly unclear as to whether or not that was the take finally used for the single but does mention Petula surprising them all with a run-through of ‘Old Man River’ in blackface. Eno, once again, at the piano. Does anyone know if there are any outtakes from these sessions?
November 15th, 2010 | 10:55pm
by hoop
Hoop, this very question occurred to me last year so I visited Clark Ark, a meticulously arranged collection of Petula’s papers. Access isn’t easy to get, you need to know the doorcode based on the chassis numbering system of the Chrysler Sunbeam, and if you get it wrong the keypad blasts you with the fermented outflow from Clark’s latest incontinence pads.
It turns out that Eno did not play on Downtown, but Clark did draw the Oblique Strategies card that said ‘redo the main vocal in German’ (Bowie later drew the same one during the sessions for Heroes, to equally stunning effect.)
Collins’ anger in ‘Look’ should not be taken as objective criticism, it seems it was largely due to his being sidelined in the instrument swap when he was forced to blow into a pile of mushy peas with a drinking straw making flupflup noises (it’s thought the pie reference is an in-joke nod to this). Collins felt demeaned and patronised whereas it was actually Eno just being keen on the comedy sound effects he’d so deftly deployed with Tommy Steele and Dick Emery.
But it was in the sessions for the B-side of Downtown, Mama Get Me a Girdle, that things got really interesting. It was while Eno was using flanging effects to treat a swanee whistle as backing to a drum kit filled with those same mushy peas that he discovered the gated reverb sound that Collins made his trademark.
Clark’s stylist and organ donor Lenny Guiffang’s unpublished memoir is in Clark Ark (it is still under embargo due to libel issues and possible contagion) but there is a passage detailing Collins storming out of the session after declaring that ‘I’ve got the peas now, I don’t fackin need you no more you feather-clad cock-end’.
November 17th, 2010 | 12:14pm
by Merrick
I wasn’t sure at first, Merrick, whether or not you were simply having a joke at my expense about the recording of ‘Downtown’ but, sure enough, both ClarkArk™ & the exhaustive fan site http://www.Petulalalulalalula.com [been having trouble with the link, it might have stopped working] have photos of not only Collins but all the other members of Genesis blowing into the peas. Mike Rutherford is even snorting them.
It’s interesting you brought up Dick Emery – he’s quite a forgotten chapter in the Eno story. Apparently Emery had for some time wanted a change of direction & to try connect to a younger audience. After accidentally dropping acid in Orkney in 1972 he had attempted a Tolkien-inspired album with members of Emerson Lake & Palmer & Jimmy Page on hurdygurdy. The sessions ground to a halt after just a few days & produced only the single “Ooh Gandalf, You Are Awful”, released on Decca – or ‘Dicca’ records, as the one-off label was billed. It sold practically nil, & was quickly withdrawn. In a television interview with Michael Parkinson a few years later Emery glossed over it as a failed experiment, simply saying “too many 18-minute keyboard solos… Thank god for punk, that’s all I can say”.
Five years later, in 1977, he made a second attempt, this time choosing for production duties Brian Eno [replacing Roger Waters, who was sacked finally, after much heated discussion about the direction the album was taking, for refusing to ‘drag up’ in the studio].
The Eno/Emery collaboration apparently featured covers of ‘My Way’, ‘Mrs Robinson’ [a duet with Marc Bolan], ‘Theme From The Benny Hill Show’, & the earliest known version of the Eno/Bowie classic ‘Warszawa’, later to appear on Bowie’s ‘Low’, although Emery’s singing on it is substantially different & markedly lighter in tone lyrically.
This album – provisionally titled “Hel-lo Honky-Tonkin’!” – though completed, never saw the light of day. An interesting postscript, though – one of the songs, a version of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ turned up a few years back on the soundtrack of Jim Carrey’s harrowing ‘120 Days Of Sodom’, though there it is billed as ‘Love Theme’.
What a treasure trove of information this post has turned out to be! Thanks to Jim for being generous enough to host it!
November 18th, 2010 | 12:55am
by hoop
Hoop, that’s fascinating about the Emery Dicca single. I only knew his early 70s work with Eno. I especially love Eno’s spooky creaking doors and clanking chains as Emery does that eerie ‘woooooo!’ vocal on My Life In The House Of Ghosts.
I’ve been trying to find where Emery is buried so I can reanimate his corpse and get Eno to record with him again; that’d truly be a haunted house album! (That’s a joke).
It was while staying with Emery at his chateau in Dolphin’s Barn (Eno brought his own dolphins for the week) that Brian met U2 (then a glam metal outfit called the Larry Mullet Band) which led to his seminal work on the 93 minute ambient soundscape The Forgettable Fire. Paul McGuinness (ex of McGuinness Flint) hated the ambient direction and had it remixed by Vic Maile (heir to Royal Mail) into the slightly retitled album that was eventually released. A segment of the ethereal original work is used in the slo-mo abattoir scene in Emery’s movie ‘Ooh You Are Awful‘
The track MLK was originally titled M-LK, as Emery was at the time part of a fundamentalist Hindu sect who revered cows so deeply that they regarded spelling the name of dairy products as blasphemy. Bono (heir to Bonio) was moved to describe the recording of that track as ‘like being snowballed by your granny’. It’s not clear if he was referring to the journalist’s specific granny or an archetype of grannies. Rumour has it he was staring at a picture of Emery in drag at the time, so who knows what the real story is.
November 19th, 2010 | 3:31am
by Merrick
Oh ha ha ha.. What a bunch of bloody comedians. I didn’t understand a word of any of it.
The world of comedy may be just a joke to you lot but for some of us old enough to remember national service & the threat of Liberace, the thought of Frank Spencer or Hattie Jacques – or even AND Hattie Jacques – was about the only respite we had from the grim socialist winters of the early nineteen-seventies.
Dick Emery is a legend of light entertainment and his work with Brian Eno, another trooper from the days of the music hall, has enriched the lives of more people with learning disabilities than all the episodes of Mr Bean put together.
These men were entertainers, in the true sense of the word. They did what had to be done, whatever that might turn out to be be. Neither of them was afraid to throw on a feather boa if the job required it. Or to mince around like a bit of a homosexual, if that’s what was called for. Their work together has meant almost as much to me as that of Larry Grayson. If only Eno & Grayson could have done more work together than just that one single.
These artists work – apart but especially together – have soundtracked my youth, my old age, my work with young offenders and my wedding night. Forgive me if i fail to see just what is so funny about that.
I just want to say thanks once again to Jim, for hosting this debate, & i’m sorry you had to see that just then.
A word from the editor: apologies to L.Byron, but a couple of image links have been removed from his comment as I tend not to allow direct links to porn sites from this blog. Nowt to do with prudery, it’s just the kind of thing that can get a site blacklisted by parental control software, repressive regimes and even some search engines. It can also create very serious problems for people who innocently click on links and then find themselves in trouble at work as a result (even to the extent of getting fired).
November 19th, 2010 | 6:25pm
by L.Byron
This is just the kind of draconian curtailing of individual liberties & personal expression I have come to expect from this site. Hear hear! More of this kind of thing! If only more websites would follow its lead in the return to the traditional cyberspace values of the early nineteen nineties! I don’t pay my internet license fee for nothing!
November 20th, 2010 | 3:49pm
by L.Byron