A taste of sampling: ‘The Jezebel Spirit’ by Eno & Byrne (1981)

Where would we be today without the mobile phone?  It is such an intrinsic part of our daily life that it’s almost impossible to imagine a time before mobiles, a time when phones were firmly earth bound, tethered to the hall table.  It is entirely probable that anyone born in this millennium would believe that Alexander Graham Bell’s first words spoken over the telephone in 1876 were ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.  I’ve got to show you this brilliant meme’.

In much the same way, sampling is such an intrinsic feature of modern music that it seems always to have been there.  While musicians took influences and ‘borrowed’ melodies from each other prior to the 1980s, it is only in the last 30 years that this has become the norm.  Contemporary artists sample liberally, to the point where many ‘new’ songs lift their music track wholesale from an earlier song, while many modern listeners have no idea that what they are hearing is not wholly original.

The explosion of sampling over the last 30 years stands as an example of how technology unlocks creativity.  As sound recording, storage and transfer became simpler and more accessible, so it became easier to import material into your music that had originated elsewhere.  The first examples of sampling in the late 1970s were crude by today’s standards, with artists live scratching vinyl to add their favourite riffs into their own creations.  This extended through the development of hip hop in the 80s, which sampled liberally from its funk inheritance.  However, I would suggest that the world’s eyes were opened to the broader possibilities of sampling by the groundbreaking 1981 album, ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’.  A collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne, this is another of those records that stunned on first listening, simply because it sounded like nothing we had ever heard before.  Rather than plunder the treasures of other musicians, Eno and Byrne principally sampled the spoken word and wove it into the fabric of songs that also drew heavily on ethnic influences.  A pair of eccentric eclectics, Eno and Byrne shared an interest in diverse art forms from a range of sources and their sampling was the musical equivalent of the use of ‘objets trouvé’ in fine art.

They may be unknown to younger audiences, but Byrne and, particularly, Eno, are major figures in the history of contemporary music.  David Byrne was leader of the American ‘New Wave’ band Talking Heads (the name is the slang phrase for TV presenters of whom you only see a head and shoulders view), which released a number of excellent albums in the late 70s and early 80s before its members split to pursue their own projects.  Byrne expanded his interest in ethnic music by recording with Third World musicians and setting up a ‘World Music’ label, usually working collaboratively to produce music that has rarely been less than interesting and has often been very danceable.  Eno is one of the most important musicians and producers of the modern age.  A member of the original Roxy Music before his flamboyant individuality became too much for Geordie miner’s son Bryan Ferry to stomach, Eno went on to have an incredible career as a recording artist and producer.  Few will be aware of the extent to which he has shaped the sound of some of the world’s most famous artists, as the producer of hugely successful albums by Bowie, U2 and, more recently, Coldplay.  His low profile belies his enormous influence.

Like so many great musicians of the modern era, Eno is a product of an art school education, but this background has been more evident in his work than in that of most of his peers.  He has always shown a great interest in conceptual art, as both proponent and exponent, and has pushed the boundaries of contemporary ‘rock’ music.  His own music varies in its accessibility: the spikey art rock of his early solo albums,  ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’, ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ and ‘Another Green World’, is an acquired taste.  So is the ‘ambient music’ of ‘Music for Airports’ and ‘Music for Films’, although evidence for the success of these albums lies in how much they have been imitated and how they live an active life today – you will, ironically enough, often hear tracks from the 30 year old ‘Music for Films’ used in contemporary TV programmes.  At the same time, Eno could create more ‘conventional’ music, such as the poignant and beautiful songs on his later album ‘Before and After Science’.

However, it is as a collaborator that Eno’s influence has been most marked.  He was a critical component in the creative mix that gave birth to Bowie’s ‘Low’ in 1977 and which matured through the follow up, ‘Heroes’. When he produced Taking Heads’ third album, ‘Fear of Music’ he was accused by some of creative sabotage, much as he had been with ‘Low’, since it represented a change of direction into a more challenging musical style.  It was after this that David Byrne and Eno went on to create ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’.  The African rhythms and disco beats present in ‘Fear of Music’ reappear in the songs of this album, combined with Eno’s electronic noodling and the radical sounds of sampled voices, ranging from newscasters to Baptist Preachers.  ‘The Jezebel Spirit’* is a prime example of this brilliant synthesis: an incessant rhythm track grabs your hips and the initially upbeat tone slowly changes into something much more disconcerting, as the music evolves in harmony with a distinctly spooky voice sample taken from an exorcism.

Sampling like this is no easy trick: the voices have to work with the rhythm, pace and mood of the track, and the sections of speech must be sequenced to create a sense of narrative, chorus and crescendo.  It would have been easy to do badly: the brilliance with which it was done by Eno and Bryne is evidenced by how sampling took off after the album’s release.  Hip Hop artists started to use the technique more adventurously and it is now a central part of much of modern music.  I defy you to listen to ‘Help Me Somebody’ from ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ and then the brilliant ‘Drop the Hate’ by Fatboy Slim, which came out 30 years later, and tell me they are not related.

In the world of music, Bran Eno is exactly the kind of Renaissance Man I love: someone whose interests and abilities transcend the boundaries of different musical genres and art forms; an artist who never stops learning and experimenting and who ploughs his own furrow regardless of the fashions of the age; a man whose enormous talent and big brain provoke and entertain in equal measure and who generously brings out the best in the people with whom he works; and a person who achieves all this with modesty, wisdom and humour.  As such, he perhaps embodies the qualities I admire in people more generally… and is an inspiration to Baldies everywhere!

* IMPORTANT NOTE: if you want to listen to any of the songs that are hyperlinked in this and other blogs, they are stored in a DropBox folder that you can only access if you have DropBox account.  Getting one couldn’t be easier.  Just go to https://www.dropbox.com/ and download the software.  It costs nothing and you get 2GB of online storage for free.