As time, funnily enough, goes on, as we slip self-consciously from one century to another, from vinyl to CD to MP3, from our younger days to our older days, patterns start to emerge. We can see more clearly where we have been, and what kind of history we are leaving behind us. We can see what is important, what will last, what we will carry with us into the future to remind us of where we were before time, oddly enough, moved us somewhere else, before it moves us once and for all out of the way.

It is interesting to watch as a kind of rock canon is created, a list of albums that seem to have some kind of worth, that were influenced in such a way that they themselves then became influential. A list of a few hundred albums that we might describe as great, or the greatest, can easily be rattled off, and as the 1900’s drift behind us, and the vinyl age remorselessly trickles backwards to antique status, we often find ourselves in a position where we want to compile such a list. Gradually, a kind of truth starts to emerge, about what these great albums are, about how will ultimately survive what is, after all, truly the test of time. There are some albums that quickly come to mind when it comes to considering some of the favourites to make that journey, albums that seem to have altered the course of rock music, or been very visible on the map as the changes occurred that turned one kind of music in the middle of the century into many others kinds of music by the end of the century. Many other kinds of music, but music that ultimately, however strange, intense, experimental, unexpected, wild or eclectic can be safely said to be the type of music that can be, if it’s possible here to use an old vinyl age expression, filed under pop.

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS has elements that are wild, unexpected, strange, intense, experimental and it is definitely, definitively eclectic, but it is absolutely a record that can be filed under pop. Whatever else is going on inside the music, however far some of the sounds have travelled to take their place within the music, however obscure or distant the world was where some of the sounds began their life before they were imported into this bush, however intellectual some of the decisions that were taken about what sound fitted where and with what and for what purpose, if any, other than the basically pleasurable, the essential atmosphere of the record is pop. It is broken up into certain sizes, it is pieced together from pieces as if there is a chorus and a verse, it is repetitive and ever changing. It lasts a certain amount of time, about the length of a pop record, and it organises and manufactures rhythms that instantly familiarise the listener into believing all is well with the world even as other noises and voices imply that something a little fishy, if not downright sinister, is going on.

You file it under pop even if as such it was not a popular success. You file it under pop because, even as agitated and harrowing as it can get, even as potentially middle eastern and African as it can become through the finding, borrowing and stealing that’s going on, the singing and the chanting, it sounds like there is a world, maybe one close to us, or one that’s getting closer all the time, where you can imagine music like this being in the charts. You file it under pop because even though at the time it’s combination of studio invention, avant-garde instinct, rhythmical ingenuity and conceptual smartness seemed to place it a long way from the everyday world of pop, since it’s release, music very much like it, and produced in ways that resemble the techniques of cutting, pasting, taping and layering in operation in the bush, often finds a place in the pop charts. Juxtaposition like this is now nothing new — it wasn’t as such when Eno and Byrne broadcast flat out American craziness from the thundering depths of a make believe African jungle, but it was a lot newer than it is now, and there weren’t many who had the wit, imagination and technical capability to conjure up a world where the Middle East was at the centre of civilisation and the West was a strange freak show in the eerie, fading distance.

The music produced by Eno and Byrne with their like-minded collaborators has become more and more familiar to mainstream ears since they first decided to relieve certain creative urges they were having by dreaming up a new kind of hybrid. They followed the path that others had made - Can with their Ethnological Forgery Series, Jon Hassell with his imaginary electro-acoustic landscapes, and the Residents with their extravagantly detailed Eskimo fantasy - they were beating from the underground into the undergrowth, chasing phantoms, clearing the way so that Eno and Byrne could begin to see a way forward. They wondered what it would be like if pop music had not been so American, or so European, or so disconnected from the rhythms and textures that first inspired the music that first inspired pop. They imagined a future, or even a present, where pop music might sound like this — might in fact sound like it was music that was the pop music of an imaginary society. Their imagining of an imaginary society that was familiar with music like this has helped actually create that world — it’s one of those things that makes certain records have lasting stature, that, by taking forward the ideas and thoughts of others, and shaping them into a new identity and image, they actually do make a difference to the sound, and often the appearance, of the world. The Bush music has drummed its way into the centre of the city. It’s moved in from out there, into the centre, and then into history, which is where the component parts actually began, the loop feeding back on itself, looping from John Cage to Sly Stone, from Sun Ra to the Bush Tetras, from an invisible world to a mass market.

It’s a pop record. It is also one of those albums that come to mind when you consider great rock albums, albums that fit naturally onto greatest lists, because of the story they tell, and the way they tell it. If I was thinking of say 30 albums from between 1950 and 2000 that I would like to transfer forward in time as the best examples of the incredible changes that took place in sound and recording at the end of the 20th century, as the world of sound literally collapsed into grooves, melted down into sonic signals of greater and greater sensualised complexity, as information about ourselves got filtered through the pop song in more and more ingenious ways, then My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts would certainly be one them. Actually, six or seven of the other examples would also feature the involvement of Brian Eno, sometimes when he was part of a double act with a fidgety, thinking city spirit like Byrne — often when he was forging a partnership as if he was trying to find a replacement for Bryan Ferry, his first real straight man. Unless it was Eno that was keeping a straight face. For a while he was his own other half, making solo records with himself that were half sensible, half insensible, and which were the act of a composer making new maps that could join one sort of music with another sort of music and bring experimental dislocation into pop discipline.

Imagine, then, that after the first two Roxy Music albums, the other records Eno was part of, including My Life in The Bush of Ghosts, were still Roxy albums — a continuation of the exploration of sensation begun when the double act was Eno and Ferry.

It is also a Talking Heads album, in the way that the group, whoever it really was, and certainly Bryne and Eno were quickly learning their lines as new double act, had been fascinated with the spirit of African rhythms, and deviant funk, and folding that fascination inside a more conventionally Western — New York - idea of multi-media playfulness.

So it is a Talking Heads album, and it is a Roxy Music album, but nothing of the sort, and it is an album produced by Brian Eno and David Byrne, and it certainly sounds exactly like you would imagine a combination of those things to sound like, in that with Eno’s pop, and his ambience, and with Byrne’s funk, and his hipster paranoia, they’d been creeping, and seeping, and banging, and dreaming towards this kind of destination, this devilish hallucination of Africa, this fretful vision of an ancient history yet to happen catapulted through a fuzzy post-modern filter, for, between them, literally years and years. It may, though, only sound in hindsight exactly like an album the pair of them would make. It may only sound exactly like the album they would make because this is the album they ended up making and it’s not pushing the boat too far out into the bush to say that at times it does sound like Roxy Music meets Talking Heads as fed through the imagination of an Eno and a Byrne wearing hats that they found whilst cruising down the Nile working out just how close they wanted to get to the heart of darkness before stopping off for an iced drink.

So it is the third part of a Talking Heads trilogy — Fear of Music, Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

It is the third part of a Roxy Music trilogy — Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, My Life in The Bush of Ghosts, and although the leap from Pleasure to Bush seems longer and loonier than the Byrne trip from one thing to another, it’s not if you see, say, the philosophical Devo potboilers, the Jon Hassell Possible Musics and the moving still life ambient records that Eno had made or help make as stepping stones. Everything Eno has made, leading up to when he led Byrne onto his garden path, and then up it, has seemed not altogether completely Western, even when it was staggeringly white, or profoundly unAfrican, or mildly European, or particularly academic, or delicately English, or faintly neurotic. There was a lot of the world, and indeed other worlds, in Eno’s music long before Bush, so it’s not a total surprise that he takes this interest in this particular what if, the what if there was a world where ancient folklore and religious realities simultaneously existed with Western Christian and scientific realties and you put a rhythm to that, what if American was just a small, bizarre part of Africa, an electric jungle cut off from civilisation, what if ghosts, sorcerers and magic continued their existence in the modern world of clocks, televisions and telephones.

There were many other what ifs as part of this novel mix of race and mix. What if we made an album and eventually people say we paved the way for ambience, sampling, electronica, world beat, trip hop, trance ? What if we spliced together our interest in movement through suspended movement with our very white, but what can we do about that, interest in how and why the body moves in response to music? What if the percussion seems to flicker between the spirit and the physical world? What if we achieve some kind of fevered, foaming sound that is somehow the opposite of the banalisation of the exotic?

What if we made something completely authentic based on a totally fake premise? What if we got very technical about something very primitive? What if we pretended to make an acoustical landscape painting of a world that doesn’t exist and never could and it ends up more lifelike — a reality that actually hints at reality — than we ever imagined it would ? What if we include a possibly blasphemous recording of Muslims chanting the Koran and that actually causes real controversy, and what if legal problems cause the delay of an album that was recorded in time to see off the 70s and in the end appears in time to usher in the 80s?

What if we want to make a funny, funky hybrid of international pop and serious music and we never actually get to the punch line?
What if it actually starts with the punch line?
What if the punch line is Steve Reich?
What if the punch line is Public Enemy, DJ Shadow, Moby, Bjork and being sampled by Goldie and 808State?

What if we sample whatever we want from all over the world, edit it all together so that it sounds as if there was a very specific plan to place this with that and drag it through there, what if we add the kind of rhythms people will spend decades trying to think of words for and will make up words using poly, ethnic, tribal, world, beat, multi, what if we feed random American religious white noise into a seething pulse of trance motion, what if we make a documentary about what it would be like to piece together sound and words from around the world into something of an event that is all at the same time coherent, and incoherent, trivialising, and celebratory, apprehensive and liberated, .

What if Miles Davis had joined Talking Heads?
What if Miles Davis had joined Roxy Music?
What if Miles Davis had covered Music for Airports?
What if Stockhausen had been African?

What if it meant we were eventually asked questions like;
“How do you feel about the criticism that all this taking black music and adding white-boy quasi-intellectual lyrical concepts to it is imperialist, that is, the critics’ implication is that you’re saying the music isn’t intelligent enough until you improve on it, and therefore that what you do is patronising to black culture “

What if we answered like this:
“It’s the kind of criticism that always happens if you transgress any of those boundaries . . . The critics really think that white people ought to play white music and black people ought to play with blacks. In my case it’s not any kind of intellectual decision, it’s a feeling in my own music that I’m moving in a certain direction and realising that here’s a group of people who have moved much further and deciding I’ll learn from them, consciously use some of their devices. It arrives from a kind of humility rather than a kind of arrogance. I regard myself as a student. I’m very humble about my understanding of African music, it’s a vastly more complicated and rich area than I had dreamed of. I’d say that anything I’m doing is simply my misunderstanding of black music.”

What if in 1954 a Nigerian author named Amos Tutuola wrote a serial folktale about a bush so dense civilisation couldn’t penetrate it, filled with different towns filled with different ghosts ? A young boy, abandoned by his family during a slave raid, dives through a little hole in a hedge and finds he’s entered an unmapped world filled with strange spirits. He wanders lost for 24 years. He is so sad that he loses music altogether, except for one scene where a ghost gets him blunted. “I forgot all my sorrows and started to sing the earthly songs which sorrow prevented me from singing since I entered the bush.”

What if this underworld odyssey was called My Life in The Bush of Ghosts. What if Eno and Byrne started making the record before they had even read the book, so that the record wasn’t intended to illustrate it, and in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with it at all, except that in a sense it is a series of unrelated wanderings, and the music on the album called My Life in The Bush of Ghosts leaves behind certain music traditions in order to explore strange new worlds filled with unusual sounds, the voices of spirits that move through the air and appear through speakers, and repetitive rummaging that emerges out of nowhere and takes on the intoxicating power of rhythm.

What if Eno and Byrne dived through a little hole in a hedge.

What if My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was one of those albums that as soon as you hear it’s title you think, that’s the kind of music I love to see filed under pop, that’s one of those albums that has taken it’s proper place as a key part of the story of how rock music ended up taking huge parts of the 20th century with it into the 21st.

By Paul Morley July 2005