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Today you can no longer imagine Phil Collins and John Cale playing on an album together. In 1975 the world was different. And there are actually two records where they do that.
Cale had recorded “Slow Dazzle” in the spring, the album with the chilling version of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” with Brian Eno on the synthesizer. In the summer of ’75, Cale was in London, where he was a guest of John Peel and worked with Eno on his sixth solo album “Helen Of Troy”, which would ultimately lead to a break between the former singer, composer and viola player of the New York cult band Velvet Underground and his label Island Records.
But first Cale needed a drummer – Eno referred Collins, whom he knew from “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”, the epochal double album by the prog rock band Genesis and the last with singer Peter Gabriel, to whose recordings Eno had contributed a few synthesizer parts and electronic effects.
So Collins drums on the controversial Cale album, whose morbid climax, “Leaving It Up To You”, was removed from the album by the record company without Cale’s consent – because it talked about Sharon Tate, Nazis and tanks. And because Collins still had some time left before he moved from the drum stool to the vocal mic at Genesis, he joined Eno and Cale in the studio again in late summer to help record Eno’s third regular solo album after the split from Roxy Music.
Robert Fripp was inspired by a generator
This is about this strange moment, the meeting of three very different musicians who later never got together again. The resulting record was released 40 years ago at the end of September as “Another Green World”. A turning point for Eno, a finger exercise for the other two.
The album opens with the sawing instrumental “Sky Saw,” which features Percy Jones playing a nice growling fretless bass and Cale playing viola. You can hear Phil Collins playing in the background – and clearly trained in jazz rock. In the second track, “Over Fire Island,” Collins keeps a swinging beat over which the bass and Eno’s warm synth waves bounce.
Robert Fripp, Eno’s old friend and King Crimson guitarist, joins them later, with whom he will continue immediately after these recordings – the resulting album is called “Evening Star”. On “Another Green World,” Fripp’s “wimshurst guitar” sounds particularly majestic and high-pitched; Eno had wanted a sound that imitated alternating current, whatever that sounded like, Fripp translated the wish into his nimble fidgeting, which he called “wimshurst,” based on the name of a generator that was standing around in the studio.
Eno, not a great singer, but with a strangely clear, almost sober voice, only sings on four of the 13 pieces (most beautifully on “I’ll Come Running”). Many of the tracks are small sketches, lovely electronic miniatures, ghostly cavalry etudes and instrumentals that use scurrying percussions, ancient Hammond organs, Cale’s viola and various “unnatural sounds”.
It has nothing at all to do with Roxy Music’s megalomaniacal glam rock, it doesn’t have much to do with rock at all. Eno also emancipates himself from his own history, from his first two solo albums. He prepares for “Another Green World” what he will present pure and limitless for the first time a year later on “Discreet Music”: the constantly wavering, only minimally moving ambient sound, of which Eno is considered to be the inventor. He also included David Bowie – in January 1977, “Low” was released, the first album from Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, on the second side of which you can only hear instrumentals strongly influenced by Eno.
Critics had mixed feelings about “Another Green World” 50 years ago. Charley Walters wrote in ROLLING STONE of a “great triumph”, Lester Bangs in the “Village Voice” of “lulling music” and the “conceptual burden” that dominates the album.
From ambient music to David Bowie to U2
Today, 50 years later, “Another Green World” stands as a hinge between the exalted, expressive, rock-influenced Eno and the esoteric, sound-focused, minimalist Eno. In the following years, Eno became an incredibly successful producer (Ultravox, Talking Heads, David Bowie, U2) and designer of sophisticated background music (“Music For Films”, “Music For Airports”, etc.). He was never again as delicate, fragile and inclined towards pop as on “Another Green World”. And the unlikely meeting of musicians Brian Eno, John Cale and Phil Collins only lasted one summer.