(Credits: Far Out / Cecily Eno)
Sat 18 October 2025 5:00, UK
Brian Eno once tried to divide musicians into two different groups.
“If you broadly divide musicians up, you have the kind who are so into a style that’s what they do—nothing wrong with that, they’re great players,” he mused to Uncut in 2017. “[Robert] Fripp, by contrast, is someone who sits outside music and thinks, ‘You could do it differently. You could have a kind of music that goes like this…’ So he invents so new strange and very hard for most other people to play music style.”
Describing the musical genius of Eno himself is nearly impossible. Some try to label him an experimentalist. This no doubt feels closer than any other label, but there’s still something about that that feels somewhat pigeonholed, especially when you take into account the fact that he quite literally sees the world from a musical perspective.
With Eno, it’s not necessarily about which technologies are used to make things sound or feel greater. It’s often about applying meticulous amounts of psychology to understand why something is the way it is. Take space, for example. It’s something musicians, especially the more innovative ones, like David Bowie, were absolutely obsessed with. As a concept and aesthetic, it makes sense as to why we still gravitate towards it.
But when Eno tried to put it into words, he explained it in relation to the physical idea of space, and why, as a canvas, it’s sometimes the most beautiful thing to use as a muse. “We’ve become used to translating our feelings and understandings about space into metaphors, mental playgrounds where we’re allowed to imagine how it could be,” he said. “Making music about space, then, is sheer fantasy, or perhaps sheer metaphor.”
When you break down everything that interests Eno, or equally, what made him the musician he is, most of it comes down to things that challenge the confines of the mind. Anyone who’s ambitious and enough of a risk-taker to actually try out new things that test boundaries, to Eno, is an innovator. And it’s no surprise, therefore, that some of his favourite songs and records are the ones that did just that.
During the counterculture movement, The Velvet Underground came across as this darkened force, one that didn’t mince its words when it came to the more authentic parts of life in the industry. This immediately drew Eno in, as while he observed everybody else playing it safe, The Velvet Underground did the exact opposite. “They were very, very contrary,” Eno said during Desert Island Disks.
He went on, discussing his appreciation for ‘Sunday Morning in particular: “This was a time when everyone was singing about flowers in their hair and The Velvet Underground came out with songs about ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting for The Man’. They were very tough. Urban. And I thought with some very good songs.”
Though different to some of the more expansive favourites in Eno’s repertoire, The Velvet Underground stood out because they weren’t trying to fit the zeitgeist. They didn’t care for false pretences or sugarcoating what any of them were going through. With Nico, especially, they felt otherworldly. And as we’ve seen, this proves their position among the latter category of musicians as defined by Eno: the ones who “sit outside music and think, ‘You could do it differently…’”
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