KEY POINTS:
The list of 1970s rock stars still in meaningful work is short - names like Bowie, Jagger, Reed and Ferry from early-decade; Byrne and Bono from late. And most are recycling past glories rather than blazing new trails.
For a brief period, 1972-73, Brian Eno's star burned as brightly as any of the above-named before the electronic whiz behind Roxy Music worked out that the band had room for only one super-ego: Mr Ferry. But since turning his back on Roxy and, within a couple of years, live performance, it is unarguably Eno who has had the greater influence on the direction of popular music - even as music became only one string to an ever-expanding repertoire.
There are tracks on his 1970s solo albums which could have been made yesterday. They were contemporary classics, yet years ahead of their time. As producer, he became the "alchemical conjurer of sonic worlds" for the likes of Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and, latterly, Coldplay. He pioneered ambient music, pointing the way to electronica and downbeat. He was sampling, looping and mashing - using pre-digital technology - before the DJs who now name-check him were born.
It was Eno who developed the idea of the studio for changing music rather than faithfully recording the sound, even if he sometimes resorted to Oblique Strategies (his set of cards with random instructions) for inspiration. And all from a professed non- musician whose first love was painting, with a curious side-interest in perfumes.
More than anyone, Eno has strode the divide between rock music and art. These days, we're as likely to find him in galleries (or department stores) unveiling audio-visual installations, giving lectures, firing off emails in support of the British Liberal Democrats or railing against the War on Terror as working on new music - though he's kept his hand in there with a collaboration with David Byrne just released.
Capturing Eno's ever-broadening spectrum is some task, which may explain why Sheppard's is the first major biography of one of popular music's most important figures.
Sheppard has done so in a 440-page tome which, if anything, is too short - the last two wildly-diverting decades are squeezed into just 40 pages. That aside, this is a far more fulfilling read than your standard rock biography. Most fascinating are the formative years.
Growing up in a small East Anglian town, the son of a taciturn postman and Belgian mother had two major influences - his eccentric Uncle Carl Otto, who introduced him to Mondrian paintings, and reverb-drenched do-wop music courtesy of the airmen at a nearby American base.
At art school, his outlook was shaped by unorthodox teachers and experimental musicians and artists including John Cage, Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew and Peter Schmidt. Soon he was more interested in treating sound - using sequenced reel-to-reel tape machines and a basic synthesiser - and creating "sound-based events" than attending tutorials on colour theory.
Sex, of course, was at the root of it all. At school, Eno cultivated "certain eccentricities" to get girls because he thought himself terribly ugly. It worked a treat - he once bedded six young women in 36 hours, an old band mate claims. He extended this intellectual mystique to the music press. As one old colleague puts it, Eno was a born salesman, with a talent for "retrospective plausibility".
As Sheppard posits, Eno is full of paradoxes: "the 1970s rock lust object with a predilection for logarithm tables, the technophile who never learned to drive ... the non-musician with a sublime gift for melody ..." Sheppard is a rock journalist and musician who writes for the Observer, Mojo and Q magazines, and his erudite style is well suited to his subject.
While an unabashed Eno fan, he is not quite an Enophile and manages something of a warts-and-all-portrait. He records recurring disputes over credits and royalties and the ructions within Talking Heads when Eno, with Byrne as disciple, rather took over the band.
Most disconcerting (if amusing) is John Cale's account of staying at Eno's home-cum-studio, The Wilderness, in 1991 while making Wrong Way Up.
Tensions grew until, in the midst of a recording argument, "I turned around and Brian was coming at me with a pair of chopsticks ..." Then again, claims an Eno acquaintance, Cale's judgment may have been impaired. Where the book errs is in being primarily a chronicle. It details virtually every record Eno had a hand in, but sheds little light on what he was thinking, the rationale for his exploratory switches and his private life.
Still, we learn much. In his introduction, Sheppard inadvertently defines his task: "to trace the arc of Eno's creative career is to follow the 40-year parabola of Western cultural evolution itself". He's near as damn succeeded.
On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno
By David Sheppard (Orion $70)
* Geoff Cumming is a Herald feature writer.
