Another Green World by Brian Eno is one of those albums that feels like it’s been a best friend all my life. We don’t have to spend every day together but when we are, the relationship is rekindled in an instant and the memories come flooding back.
I first found it via a teenage obsession with the pop group Japan. I was a little late to Japan’s party and only started to take notice of them as they split in late 1982. Once I did take notice, they seemed the epitome of everything I thought a pop group should be and I couldn’t understand why I’d not paid more attention in the past. I think it was their aesthetic as much as their music that attracted me. I was just awakening to the seductive qualities of “moody” black and white photography and long overcoats. Saturday afternoons over the next couple of years found me trawling through crates of vinyl and old copies of music magazines at Manchester’s second hand records shops and at many a record fair searching for “Japan-shaped” treasure for my collection. I had dreams of becoming a completeist, but that’s just silly!
While rooting through a pile of the more “serious” music papers, NME, Melody Maker or Sounds (I was more of a Smash Hits kind of lad) I happened upon a pretty mundane Q and A piece where David Sylvian (the enigmatic frontman of aforementioned group Japan), was asked some pretty mundane questions and responded with some pretty mundane answers. As a bit of an obsessive, I lapped up every detail. They asked where he gets haircut, what his favourite was drink is (white wine or Sake I seem to remember if you’re interested) and a number of other minutiae I have since forgotten. One question I do remember them asking though, was “What is your favourite album?” to which he replied “Another Green world by Brian Eno”.
At the time, I had never heard of either album or artist but, unlike seeking out the taste of Sake I was determined to hear this record and to love it, as much as Mr Sylvian did.
It wasn’t particularly hard to find, even in those pre-streaming, non-YouTube days. I was armed with all the information I needed and on my next weekend trip to town, I found it nestling in the rack under E for Eno (where else?). The cover was “cool” and enigmatic but not that spectacular in my opinion. It featured a red, green and black stylised painting of abstract figures against a white background and looked more “science fiction” than rock or pop.
How excited was I?! I was SO excited. So excited that I didn’t buy it!
As a cash-strapped teen and I wasn’t prepared to part with all my cash for something I might not even like. So that day, I opted for something a little more mainstream (though still I’d like to think, “alternative”, obviously!), something that I knew I wanted to listen to and I went home happy with my purchase. I was still however sort of desperate to hear what this green world sounded like.
I came across it again shortly afterwards in the local library. It was on cassette. This time, I didn’t hesitate to part with my cash and borrowed it for 2 weeks for princely sum of 20p. This seemed a far more sensible investment than paying the full amount to buy something I didn’t know I liked… however enigmatic and alluring the notion this was Mr Sylvian’s favourite album.
I got it home and popped it into the tape player in the centre of my dad’s faux teak Fidelity music centre. The sounds that filled the room were most definitely some of the strangest sounds to have come out of the speakers to date. The album was like nothing I had heard before. It sounded like neither sci-fi or rock, or pop. Some of the tracks were so teeny tiny that, lasting barely a minute and a half, that they finished before they had begun. They felt like feint sketches by a master artist, rough but perfect. I wanted them to go on forever. It was all strangely exotic and sumptuous, angular and discordant and threatening and savage… all at the same time. In my ears it felt like a painting by Henri Rousseau, filled with exotica and mystic, sage-like travelogues, chirruping soundscapes that were full of sounds from places where wild things live; places I had never been and that I could barely even imagine. I could see why it made such an impression on Mr Sylvian. It was beginning to do so on me too.
The album quickly became part of the soundtrack to my A-levels and I listened over and over and over again. And then, suddenly, I stopped. I had not listened to it for over 30 years.
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Earlier this year I was in Berlin with my partner Tim for a long weekend. It turned out to be a rather blustery springtime weekend; all March winds AND April showers mixed up together.
We had arranged to meet one of Tim’s former students who was on a study trip in Berlin, attending language school and working on his PhD. After we had a sausage and beer shaped lunch at the Deutsches Historisches Museum we began walking along Unter Den Linden. We browsed the books and postcards on offer at the stalls outside the University and marvelled at how the general chaos of the roadworks and building works around the Museums Insel of recent years had suddenly disappeared, the works were, finally, complete.
The clouds parted as we walked towards the Brandenburg Gate and the spring sunshine took over the shift from the bluster and grey drizzle of the morning. We were heading for Dussmann (das Kulturkaufhaus). To explore its five storeys packed to the rafters with books, maps, stationery, music, films, souvenirs and anything else you can think of that should be housed in a shop dedicated to “culture” of all kinds.
We paused in the atrium to take stock and decided to go for coffee before more shopping and headed through to the back of the building and down the stairs to the cafe.
The basement cafe is called Ursprung, a German word which means “origin” or “source”. It occupies an area partly underground at the back of the building. Half of the space is below a mezzanine floor by the stairwell, the other half is open to the full height of the building.
While that’s a truthful description of the cafe, it’s a bit prosaic. It makes the place sound rather drear and grey when in actual fact, it is anything but. It is really quite spectacular! The open tread glass and metal stairs lead down to a broad, three tiered circular wooden structure which makes up the final three steps of the staircase into the basement. The topmost of these three tiers is inlaid with the cafe’s logo in brass in the centre. It is a simple seriffed capital U, that in context resembles a tumbler or vase, while from the left of the letter is an explosion of curling fronds and leaf shapes that seem to pour out across the floor.
The facing wall is open to the full height of the building, eight storeys I think, and is split vertically by narrow columns into three sections. Each of these sections boasts a living wall densely planted with the rich reds and greens of elegant ferns, mosses and other exotic plants. At the base of the wall there is a deep, slate-grey stone trough that runs the whole length of the room. There is another which sits beneath the stairs and mirrors the shape above. It is filled to the brim with water. Both pools are topped with a rim of lustred glass mosaic tiles in moss greens and gold; the colour of lizards, and with shoals of tiny bright fish flicker, dart or hang motionless beneath and between the stems and leaves of aquatic plants
As we sat and drank our coffee by the pool in this seductive, pseudo rainforest glade, and I couldn’t help but think of those beguiling sounds I had heard all those years ago.
Tim and Chris headed off upstairs to the History section and I stayed on the ground floor looking at the black and white postcards of Weimar excess, and the beautiful Japanese papers.
I ended up in the music department. I always end up in the music department so it wasn’t really a surprise. Mostly I just browse; usually through the racks of bands and albums that I already own (which is a bit pointless I suppose) but today, that underground oasis had set a seed which was already sprouting and growing with intent in my head.
I started my search under “Rock and Pop”. I found the E section but there was no Eno. He definitely wouldn’t be under “Metal” or “Hip Hop” or “RnB” for that matter. He was found, eventually in “Alternative and Indie”, and the CD box of the album I was looking for had a sticker on it.
One of the security guards in a record shop I used to work in would often comment that the stock in the sale was always the same stock as in the “3 for 2” promotion or in the “4 for £20” offer. There was a particular phrase he’d use that has stuck with me to this day and always comes to mind whenever I see a record shop sale. “Same sh*t, different sticker”. Funny and true at the same time but today’s sticker was something special. It was bright pink, about the size of a £2 coin with a silhouette in bright green of a head wearing headphones and it meant was that I could listen to this CD right now, instore.
I plugged myself in, and closed my eyes as I pressed play. Now those recently remembered sounds filled my head and were as beguiling and mysterious as they were to my teenage ears in 1985.
I don’t always buy something when I go into a record shop. I have an irritating habit of talking myself out of buying things and then regretting not buying them immediately and for a disproportionate length of time. I think it’s the thriftiness in me that means I leave empty handed even if I have seen something really, really like or something that I really, really “need”. Today though, I couldn’t resist the force of this unexpected call of the wild from Another Green World from within a different green world.
I left the shop happy and am still very happy to be reunited with my old friend.
References for the uninitiated:
Club 30-80 