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Fact #159476

When:

Short story:

Having been delayed for nine months by legal problems, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne (of Talking Heads), enters the UK album chart, where it will peak at No29.

Full article:

Brian Eno : There was a legal reason that actually disguised an artistic reason. The former was an objection from the estate of the late evangelist and faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman to the use of her voice on one of the album tracks.

The whole thing was ready. We knew that if we tried to release it there would be an injunction stopping its sale, so we just had to rework that track. This came up after we'd done Remain in Light, and doing that record gave us quite a lot of new ideas about how we could approach ours as well. The two records really helped each other along; the Talking Heads’ record was influenced by early My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, and then, having done Talking Heads, we learned a few things about how we could do our own record better. This Kathryn Kuhlman episode was really the perfect cause to take the record apart and do some things again.

David Byrne : It wasn't that planned out, really. We had these mutual interests, and we talked about various things we'd like to do. It wasn't real formulated; we just started working.

Brian Eno : Initially I was going to make a record of my own. I was thinking of doing my next solo album, so I started recording with David and other musicians. The first piece I did was Mea Culpa, which started off with just synthesizer and a voice off radio. I thought that worked very well, and I was very excited with carrying on with that idea.

Neither of us were interested in writing ordinary songs anymore. We hadn't yet evolved any new formats that excited us for writing songs. This seemed to be a very good solution for that problem.

David Byrne : If you want to get into that, it means an awful lot. You can probably talk for a long time about what that implies. The most obvious thing, for me anyway - it's obvious on some of the tracks - is that the vocal can be quite moving without literally meaning anything. That alone implies a lot: the phonetics and texture of a vocal have their own meaning. I'm sure no one would disagree with that, but most people tend to think that lyrics are most important.

Brian Eno : Rock critics always analyze words in a song; they regard that as the apex of meaning. There's all this other stuff underneath but the meaning is supposedly invested in words.

David Byrne : A lot of people don't realize, that the sound of a voice, phrasing or phonetic structures are affecting them at least as much as the words. Usually lyrics that are a little bit mysterious, that don't quite come out and say what they mean, are the more powerful. They deal with things in a metaphysical way.

Brian Eno : It wasn't a conscious decision when we started doing the album, but we nearly always found that the vocals that sounded the best came from spiritual or religious sources. It's one of the only obvious places on radio where people are passionate. On radio, people train themselves to be cool, monotonous - to be in control. The only voices you hear that aren't like that are voices in a passion about something, and on radio that nearly always means religion. Those were the most interesting voices on radio. Gradually, we started to notice that the album was shaping up to have that identity, so it became a conscious decision to work on it that way, with that spirit running through the album. Interestingly enough, the title - which I think is pretty spiritual - was chosen ages ago, almost before we'd recorded anything.

Brian Eno : Just as we were attracted to African music because it has a very strong emphasis on rhythm, we were attracted to [Middle Eastern] music because it has an
incredibly strong emphasis on melody. They've taken melody as far away from our sense of it as the Africans have taken rhythm, so it's like going to two extremes.

On a lot of these tracks we tried many vocals before we got the one we finally used. That some of these vocals fit so perfectly is a testament to the fact that we worked quite hard on it.

David Byrne : The relationships aren't well-defined and clear-cut. They always change and they're always a little bit confusing to people who aren't involved in the process. They're confusing to us if, in retrospect, we try to figure out what everyone did. We don't sit at home and bang out a song on the piano...

Brian Eno : For each song you'll find the roles shifting. One person might be dominant on one song and almost unimportant on another. The songs are written - 'arise' is a better word - by all sorts of techniques. One of those techniques is to constantly change the roles of people within the group.

David Byrne : Often Brian and I might have a very strong feeling about the way a piece should go, or the sensibility behind a piece, but we may not play much on it - or we may play on it and then erase our parts.

Brian Eno : That often happened in the making of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. We would start with four or five instruments playing a fundamental basis, and work on top of that. As we added things they made certain other things obsolete, so those would get erased. They were invisible ladders to what we ended up with. Some of those tracks went through incredible transformations; you wouldn't recognize them as they started out.
(Source : not known)
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MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS - REVIEW BY JOHNNY BLACK

ARTISTS : Brian Eno And David Byrne
LABEL : EG Records
RELEASE DATE : February 1981
Chart Position : UK 29

. A brace of egghead musos trigger the sampling landslide that will terraform rock’s sonic landscape.

Delayed by a lawsuit from a faith healer furious at having her voice sampled, and censored after complaints from Islamic clerics who objected to the use of verses from the Qu’ran, it’s a wonder this mash-up milestone ever saw daylight. Borrowing its name from a kaleidoscopically fantastical 1954 novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, My Life found ambient guru Eno and Talking Heads’ leader Byrne swerving into territory bizarre even by their own recherché standards. The rockin’ domeheads morphed vocal samples, including ritual exorcism texts, fire and brimstone evangelists and Egyptian disco divas, into tribal drum loops, minimalist funk guitars and quirky synth textures to create tracks that were by turns startling, dream-like or just flat-out freaky. Talking Heads’ Remain In Light was its immediate chart-busting offspring but it’s My Life that subsequently legitimised sampling for the wider rock fraternity as everyone from Goldie to 808 State and Moby will testify.

Also check out : John Hassell and Brian Eno’s Fourth World Vol 1 – Possible Musics (Editions EG, 1980)