Here Come the Warm Jets (1973)

Here Come the Warm Jets is the debut solo studio album by the English musician Brian Eno (credited as "Eno"), released on Island Records on 8 February 1974. It was recorded and produced by Eno following his departure from Roxy Music, and blends glam and pop stylings with avant-garde approaches. The album features numerous guests, including several of Eno's former Roxy Music bandmates along with members of Hawkwind, Matching Mole, Pink Fairies, Sharks, Sweetfeed, and King Crimson. Eno employed unusual directions and production methods to coax unexpected results from the musicians.

Here Come the Warm Jets peaked at number 26 on the United Kingdom album charts and number 151 on the US Billboard charts, receiving mostly positive reviews. It was re-issued on compact disc in 1990 on Island Records and remastered in 2004 on Virgin Records, and continued to elicit praise.

Production

Here Come the Warm Jets was recorded in twelve days at Majestic Studios in London during September 1973 by recording engineer Derek Chandler. It was mixed at Air and Olympic Studios by Eno and engineer Chris Thomas. The album's title was long thought to be a slang term for urination, but in a 1996 interview with Mojo magazine, Eno said it came from a description he wrote for the treated guitar on the title track; he called it "'warm jet guitar' ... because the guitar sounded like a tuned jet."

Eno enlisted sixteen guest musicians to play on the album, who were invited on the basis that Eno thought they were musically incompatible with each other. He said he "got them together merely because I wanted to see what happens when you combine different identities like that and allow them to compete ... [The situation] is organized with the knowledge that there might be accidents, accidents which will be more interesting than what I had intended".

Eno directed the musicians by using body language and dancing, as well as through verbal suggestion, to influence their playing and the sounds they would emit. He felt at the time that this was a good way to communicate with musicians. The album credits Eno with instruments such as "snake guitar", "simplistic piano" and "electric larynx". These terms were used to describe the sound's character or the means of production used to treat the instruments. After recording the individual tracks, Eno condensed and mixed the instrumentation deeply, resulting in some of the tracks bearing little resemblance to what the musicians recorded during the session.

Eno's girlfriend at the time, potter Carol McNicoll, supervised the design of the cover for the album, which features one of her teapots. The back also has a picture of what appears to be a "naughty" playing card showing a woman urinating outdoors, thus lending support to the original interpretation of the album title.

Music and lyrics

The songs on Here Come the Warm Jets reference various musical styles from the past and present. The overall style of the album has been described as "glammed-up art-pop", showcasing glam rock's simple yet theatrical crunchy guitar rock and art pop's sonic texture and avant-garde influences. The album has been also described as art rock. Music critic Jim DeRogatis described the sound as "a golden shower of smart psychedelic pop."

On some tracks, Eno's vocals emulate singer Bryan Ferry, of Eno's former band Roxy Music. On other songs they were described as "more nasal and slightly snotty vocals". Musically, the album borrows from popular styles of the music of the 1950s such as the tinkling pianos and falsetto backing vocals on "Cindy Tells Me", and the drum rhythm of "Blank Frank", taken from Bo Diddley's song "Who Do You Love?" Critic Robert Christgau noted that "minimally differentiated variations on the same melody recur and recur," adding that "chances are he meant it that way, as a statement."

To create the lyrics, Eno would later play these backing tracks singing nonsense syllables to himself, then take them and form them into actual words, phrases and meaning. This lyric-writing method was used for all his more vocal-based recordings of the 1970s. The lyrics on Here Come the Warm Jets are macabre with an underlying sense of humour. They are mostly free-associative and have no particular meaning. Exceptions include "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch", about the historical A. W. Underwood of Paw Paw, Michigan, with the purported ability to set items ablaze with his breath; according to Eno, the song "celebrates the possibility of a love affair with the man." Eno has attempted to dissuade fans from reading too much into his words; he claims that the song "Needles in the Camel's Eye" was "written in less time than it takes to sing ... I regard [the song] as an instrumental with singing on it".