Does anyone remember Monty Python leaving out the bit about Jesus Christ in the comedy team’s benchmark movie ‘The Life Of Brian’? No, thought not. Then what possesses legendary studio maverick , Brian Eno to leave out ‘Qur’an’ after complaints from certain quarters of the Muslim far-right that it features soundbites from the Koran? The last time I heard a Muslim taking the moral high ground he was scoffing a bacon butty and looking forward to expressing his joy and happiness at the end of Ramadan with a day at Doncaster Races. And whilst this is in no way an indictment of all muslims, it does suggest that nothing should ever be taken at face value. Art should be granted its own sweet asylum. As Captain Birdseye once said, ‘it’s man’s only reliable anchor in a devilish sea of uncertainty’. But what is a sad day for art is a great day for music – a big, bright, re-packaged and re-mastered version of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ is released with a batch of bonus material and spanking new cover art.
Recorded in 1980 and released in 1981 on EG records the new version has been completely remastered by Greg Calbi (Interpol, Kings Of Leon) and features seven previously unreleased bonus tracks collated from outtakes and ideas from the original album sessions and all segueing perfectly into the smooth, flowing rag-bag of sounds, rhythms and musical devices Byrne and Eno were experimenting with at the time. No, there’s no songs exactly, but whilst this was a bit of a bummer back in the 1980s when only old hippies and Dads listened to instrumental music, the ambient, lounge-loving, techno talking, laptop-living dance enthusiast of today is unlikely to blink an eye, choc full as it is with samples, dope beats and weird-electronic shit.
At this stage, Eno and Byrne were experimenting with ‘Found Sounds’ – a term more commonly found in the art world when describing art that uses objects not normally considered art because they had a mundane or practical function. At the time it was outrageous and only a handful of artists were able to profit sufficiently from it (John Cage being amongst them). In David Bowie’s hands it became the ‘cut up’ – a random way of assembling text for lyrics. In the later 1980s it became sampling, and the rest we know is history. What you have here is a kind of zero point, the place were it all began.
So here it is; the big bang, the face of god, as perceived not by the Hubble Telescope, but by those kindly folks at Virgin/EMI and sounding as fresh as a daisy.