Another Green World - Geeta Dayal

 ANOTHER GREEN WORLD - GEETA DAYAL

The thing about the Brian Eno solo albums from the 1970s, as in Here Comes The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, and Another Green World is that they all demand repeat listens. Their complexity and peculiarity make them impossible to immediately take in, soak up and understand. Every new listen is almost a fresh listen as if you're hearing them for the first time or at least for the first time from a different angle. There are seemingly constant new things to be heard in them and it's this that makes them of constant interest.

Another Green World was recorded in 1975 and from its very feel it's obvious that it's a studio album, as in having been concocted entirely within the confines of a recording studio as opposed to being incubated over a period of time from notebooks and ruminations in the bedroom. The recording studio being used as a musical instrument in its own right.

Geeta Dayal's treatise on the album, entitled - what else? - Another Green World, is from the series of booklets published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. The word 'academic' rather gives the game away as to its seriousness of intent, forwarding the notion that these books are of an academic nature rather than fan-boy stuff.

In the preface, Dayal informs us that this short work of just 105 pages has been written and re-written over and over again, draft upon draft and unfortunately, it shows. The clumsiness of some of the sentences is at times almost jarring as are some of the geographical details about England. It's a casebook example of something being over-written, where you end up not being able to see the wood for the trees. On top of this, it comes as no surprise to see the author is based in San Francisco, which explains the geographical misconceptions in regard to the English cities and Universities that are mentioned.

Writing about music is like dancing to architecture, as they say. Writing to a deadline induces panic, and Dayal's book comes across as an example of that.

At the end of the day it's always down to personal choice of course, but Another Green World isn't actually Eno's best solo album though that's not to deny its classic status. The collaboration between the different musicians on the album such as Robert Fripp, John Cale and even a young Phil Collins make it an interesting proposition from the start though it's the inclusion of the track I'll Come Running that tips the whole thing into the realm of beauty.

I'll Come Running first appeared the year previously in 1974 on a John Peel session during the time when Eno after having left Roxy Music was playing with a band called The Winkies. The Peel session version had been called Totalled and was an upbeat, almost proto pop punk song. The version on Another Green World, however, is a lament. A contemplative daydream juxtaposing both resignation and enthusiasm. A perfect balance, a perfect moment, capturing the first tiny speck of light from the sun rising alongside the final, fading last glow from the sun setting. As a pure, fully-realised song it stands proudly, bursting with life yet possessed with sadness. A genuine work of beauty.

Of the fourteen tracks on the album only five of them actually have lyrics, the rest of them being instrumentals. As Geeta Dayat correctly points out, the album is the link to Eno's future. It's the bridge between Eno of old and new Eno, between rock'n'roll and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer. It's near-equivalent is David Bowie's Low album, though where on Low one side of the album is composed of songs with lyrics and the other side is sprawling ambient pieces, the tracks on Another Green World are more evenly distributed, the ones with lyrics acting almost as segues.

Because of this 'crossover' status, Dayal is able to explore some of Eno's influences which led to the creation of Another Green World and it's here that the book proves to be most interesting. Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Harold Budd, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album are all given mention, acting as a sort of road map to a musical education that if paid proper attention to is actually life-enhancing.

Nowadays when you think of Eno, you associate him with being a superb record producer and the perpetrator of, if not the well from which Ambient music sprang. You visualise him as either the alien person in feathers and leopard-print, twiddling away on an analog synth in Roxy Music times, or as the balding University lecturer polymath applying an intelligence to music and the arts whenever he pops up on YouTube. In Roxy Music days, however, Eno was apparently a veritable shag monster, cutting a picaresque swathe through the heartland of student virginity whenever out on tour. It's a sobering thought, betraying his past-life 'alien' persona and his subsequent studied yet relaxed seriousness, and revealing him to be as human as the rest of us. Though with added genius.

John Serpico