condition (record/cover):  NM (small bubbles on labels) / EX- (minimal wear)

Brian Eno's solo debut, recorded in September 1973 at Majestic Studios in London with a cast that reads like a Who's Who of British rock at its weirdest. Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay from Roxy Music, Robert Fripp from King Crimson, Paul Rudolph from the Pink Fairies, Chris Spedding, Simon King from Hawkwind, John Wetton, Bill MacCormick. Eno called these people in two and three at a time, gave them deliberately oblique studio instructions (the year before he and Peter Schmidt codified the practice as Oblique Strategies), and stitched the resulting takes together through extensive editing. The album appeared in early 1974 on Island (ILPS 9268 in the UK). This is the European Polydor pressing on 2310 574, the version that circulated across continental Europe through EG.

The songs are art-glam pop with the ratios scrambled. "Needles In The Camel's Eye" turns a Manzanera riff into a vibrating wall. "Baby's On Fire" pivots around a Fripp solo that is itself one of the most cited guitar moments in the rock canon, two minutes of single-note menace. "Driving Me Backwards" is half-mocking, half-genuine glam menace; "Cindy Tells Me" is a small piano-led miracle; "Some Of Them Are Old" gives the album its only moment of pure pastoral. The title track closes the record on a tide of treated guitar layers that sounds like ambient music being invented in real time.

The original vintage European Polydor pressing of Eno's debut: the record that detonated his post-Roxy career and made every later move possible.