“We need him much more than he needs us. Prog as a genre owes him a huge debt of gratitude”: The lasting impact of Brian Eno, the glorious anomaly who’s a genre unto himself

In 2019 Simon Godfrey (Tinyfish, Shineback, Valdez) told Prog about his admiration for Brian Eno, listing some of the ex Roxy Music man’s achievements over the years, and saluting the attitude behind them.

“Without the works of Brian Eno, I absolutely wouldn’t be making music today. That might sound a little dramatic, but over the years I have come to realise that all that I hold of interest in the creation and arrangement of sound has its roots in the tools and techniques which were pioneered by this unassuming art student from Suffolk, England.

His first four solo albums after he left Roxy Music completely changed my notion of what progressive music could do. He replaced bombast with erudition, and repopulated the musical landscape with an entirely new menu of exotic sonic entrées for our delectation and delight.

One of the central tenets that excites me most about Eno’s work is his endless quest to confound his own expectations. From his debut record Here Come The Warm Jets, through to his contemporary generative music apps, Eno eagerly invites his creations to take him in unexpected directions.

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That was never more apparent than in his 70s masterpiece Another Green World, where he collaborated with the singular talents of artists such as Phil Collins, Percy Jones and Robert Fripp, and ended up using their jams to form an otherworldly melancholy which sounds as fresh and inventive today as it was groundbreaking back then.

With a music production and collaborative portfolio that reads like a Who’s Who of some of the most obscure (Cluster) and famous (U2) bands out there, you get the sense that his thirst for discovering new and interesting things at all levels of music continues unabated to this day.

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In short, Eno is a glorious musical anomaly. For me, his curiosity and outlook on the creation of sound place him in a select group of artists who are effectively a genre all to themselves.

We need Brian Eno much more than he needs us. His pioneering studio techniques and sonic interventions have touched everyone from Genesis to Bowie. Prog as a genre owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and possibly several pints of his preferred tipple of choice at pubs up and down the UK.”

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Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.