Still challenging himself with admirably ambitious projects at the age of 75, Brian Eno played two extremely rare back-to-back live shows in London on Monday (October 30). Incredibly, despite his prolific half-century track record of solo albums, plus stellar collaborations with the likes of Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay, this short run of European concerts is being billed as the venerable art-rock pioneer's first ever proper tour. Commissioned by the Venice Biennale, which hosted the world premiere last week, it ended in the city Eno has called home for most of his life.
Performing with the 36-piece Baltic Sea Philharmonic and their eccentric Estonian-American conductor Kristjan Järvi, Eno ostensibly played the lead singer role at this show. Perched behind an elevated console set back from the main stage, the silver-bearded elder statesman looked more like a starship captain than a rock star, the Jean-Luc Picard of avant-pop, boldly going where few musical voyagers have gone before.
The first half of this 90-minute set featured a full orchestral makeover of Eno's vocal-heavy 2016 album The Ship, which has just been re-issued in remastered form. The imaginatively mounted performance began with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic filing onstage already playing the album's title track, a 20-minute symphonic shanty of drones and creaks, shivering timbers and softly lapping melodic waves, all lightly sprinkled with Eno's poetically cryptic musings.
A three-part suite with the umbrella title Fickle Sun opened with one of the noisiest tracks ever recorded by the godfather of ambient music, a maximalist avant-classical epic with echoes of Scott Walker's fiercely experimental later works. Reprising his vocal cameo from the original album, actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz intoned the computer-generated, vaguely ominous lyric to The Hour Is Thin. Then Eno's rich baritone croon took centre stage again on his majestic reworking of The Velvet Underground’s I'm Set Free, its sumptuously layered choral treatment highlighting the song's underlying gospel-infused feel to radiant, roof-raising effect.
After completing The Ship, Eno cherry-picked a handful of other archive tracks, mostly warm-blooded electro-orchestral ruminations from his 21st century canon. The sole nostalgic throwback was By This River, a luminous pastoral reverie from his much-feted 1977 solo album Before and After Science. “This song is nearly 50 years old,” Eno smiled wistfully, “I wish I was...”
A long-time critic of the Israeli government, Eno also commented on the current horrors in Gaza. Indeed, he recently added Bone Bomb to this set, a chillingly numb death-wish chant partly inspired by the testimonies of Palestinian suicide bombers. He also introduced the mournfully beautiful Making Gardens out of Silence as “a requiem” for the people of both Palestine and Israel. But overall, the defining mood of this triumphant show was communal joy and euphoric uplift, music as healing balm for the soul.
