Like America, Roxy Music began with a deep division in its heart. On one hand was Bryan Ferry, songwriter, classically trained, the handsome frontman. On the other was the keyboardist, avant-garde and awkward Brian Eno, his aesthetic at once artsy and camp. The two wanted very different things from the band, and it was that dichotomy that made the first two Roxy Music records such a delight. It also ensured that the band could never last with such a schism at its heart. After the tour for the band’s second record, For Your Pleasure, Eno had enough and quit the band. The band moved on without him; it’s the 50th anniversary of their best album later this year too. Eno wasn’t exactly left in their dust, though. He did his own thing as well, and that own thing just happens to be mutated glam rock, a glittering and dented psychedelic trip of an album that oozes pop art melodies, weirdly angular arrangements, and a bizarre array of instrument voices. Eno developed his Oblique Strategies cards around this time, and one of them is “Abandon normal instruments.” He clearly developed this card during the work on Here Come The Warm Jets. Using non-musical things as instruments, recording instruments in abnormal ways. Eno is a wizard with tape decks and recording machinery, and his debut was the first real introduction to just how good he was with them. Also of note are the warm jets themselves, the life-changing guitar work, especially on “Baby’s On Fire”, “Driving Me Backwards” and “Blank Frank”, courtesy of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.

Eno would keep this up, releasing three more albums before meeting David Bowie backstage in 1976 and kicking off the Berlin Trilogy era (which would also in part feature Robert Fripp). Eventually he would get bored of that and invent ambient music. Here Come The Warm Jets is as separate from Ambient 1: Music For Airports as the sun is from the moon: that is, you can tell one in the other from the reflection, but that’s about it. This is Eno still extricating himself from Roxy Music, tied to pop forms, even if he showed an uncommon desire to squiggle across the borders of those forms. This is probably an understatement: Eno worked subconsciously, building synthesizer setups and not writing down the settings for those. His idea – and it’s one I’ve tried to emulate at various times in the past – is that replication is less important than seat-of-your-pants soundscaping. What sounds good at the time is often what is good at the time. This is an art, not a science, and Eno was arguably the finest artist of the era.