Brian Eno's Most Surprising Music Gear Choices

.Photo of Brian Eno by Michael Ochs, Archives/Getty Images

In the mid ‘80s I worked at a minor retail empire of shops that bought and sold used records, musical instruments, and books in Notting Hill Gate, London. We had our share of rock star customers. Mick Jones (The Clash) and Tom Verlaine (Television) were regulars at the bookshop. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison were sighted in the record shops. And Brian Eno frequented the musical instruments shop.

Eno was allowed to rummage through items not yet priced-up for sale. Or, more likely, items deemed not worthy of selling. Eno didn’t seem interested in the steady supply of Fenders and Gibsons that kept the shop in business. Or the three-year-old synths and drum machines that people traded in so they could upgrade to newer models.

Instead, Eno went for the oddities—maybe a malfunctioning tape recorder or an obscure effects unit. “I think he always had an eye for a bargain,” says author and musician David Sheppard, whose definitive Eno biography, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life And Times Of Brian Eno, has just been published by White Rabbit in an expanded and updated edition.

According to David, the roots of this arcane collector’s mentality go deep. “His grandfather was a repairer of church organs and player pianos and apparently could never throw anything away,” David tells me. “His father was a postman and part-time watch repairer. His uncle Carl, who was a huge influence on the young Brian, had been a globetrotter in his youth and had amassed a treasure trove of exotic ephemera on his travels. Brian described his house as being like a museum: ‘The smallest museum in the world.’ So, the habit of collecting curiosities and fixing up faulty but characterful devices was par for the course in the Eno world.”


Brian Eno Getty Images
Photo of Brian Eno by Michael Ochs, Archives/Getty Images

As a student, Eno acquired more than 20 tape recorders, only one of which—a Ferrograph—worked properly. A little later, he had a sideline buying and selling used musical equipment. This included purchasing a job lot of PA speakers from a cinema company at the turn of the ‘70s.

This attraction to obscure, unusual, and sometimes just cheap instruments and gadgets continued once Eno’s musical career got properly under way. The Ferrograph tape recorder captured the first Roxy Music demos, and years later Eno was buying budget copy guitars when—presumably—he could have well afforded the most high-end alternatives. I talked to David about some choice examples: the expected classic synths, a primitive British fuzz box, those cheap copy guitars, and more.

The EMS VCS-3 was a pioneering, if eccentric, British instrument. It was controlled not with a keyboard but a joystick, with pins in a plugboard instead of the patch cords favored by Moog and other early synth manufacturers, and it introduced affordable electronic synthesis to the UK market in late 1969.

Andy Mackay, who later played sax and oboe in Roxy Music, acquired an early VCS-3 but couldn’t make it work. In 1970, he lent it to Eno, who took it along to Bryan Ferry’s flat to use on the first demos by the then unnamed Roxy Music. A self-described non-musician, Eno went on to use the VCS-3 on the first two Roxy Music albums (Roxy Music in 1972 and For Your Pleasure in ’73), not only to treat Phil Manzanera’s guitar and Mackay’s sax and oboe, but also to provide his own textured layers of sound.


Roxy Music performing “Ladytron” . Brian Eno can be seen using the EMS VCS-3

The portable EMS Synthi AKS , launched in 1972, packed much of the VCS-3’s technology into a small suitcase, along with a keyboard and a sequencer. David explains how Eno made much use of the instrument on his Discreet Music album (1975), feeding synth sounds into a loop created using two synchronized, modified Revox A77 tape recorders.

Teisco was a Japanese musical instrument company that in its original iteration traded from 1948 to 1967, when it was bought by Kawai. Its electric guitars, which often featured spectacular arrays of switches and controls, were widely imported to the USA and UK through the ‘60s. The Starway was a relatively subdued instrument by Teisco standards, with two pickups, two switches, and four control knobs. Pete Shelley from Buzzcocks played one. And so did Eno. His Starway was his first musical instrument, bought in Portsmouth in 1968.

David writes: “It cost him nine pounds and fifteen shillings and would stay with him for many years and several albums. Its strings were never changed and it was habitually fed through a WEM Project fuzzbox to ameliorate its—and Eno’s—technical deficiencies, creating saturated wedges of sound closer to that of an aero engine than a guitar. The numerous credits for ‘Snake guitar’ on Eno’s 1970s albums generally referred to the faithful Starway and fuzzbox set-up.”

Eno tuned his Starway to open E major—with only five strings, as the top E broke in 1971 and he never replaced it. Because it hurt his fingers.

Eno’s WEM fuzzbox was a Project V, a model produced by the British company in the late ‘60s. Paul Rudolph, of The Deviants and The Pink Fairies, also used one. In Eno’s hands, the combination of the Starway guitar and WEM fuzz box produced a buzzing, synth-like tone that he deployed on several of his early solo albums, including Here Come The Warm Jets (1973).

In the mid ‘70s, Eno acquired another cheap guitar—most likely from, or more accurately outside, the shop I worked in a decade later. This time it was a fretless bass, an Antoria that Eno described once as a Gibson copy. David confirms Eno was still using this bass well into the ‘80s, including on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1981).

In On Some Faraway Beach, David reports Eno’s description of the typically idiosyncratic bass purchase. “I went into a music store one day in Shepherd’s Bush [in west London] and said I was looking for a fretless bass, and the guy said: ‘Oh, well … sorry we haven’t got any.’ … Anyway, another guy who was in the store said: ‘Oh, I’ve got one in the back of my car!’ [Eno laughs] He was just a customer, so I went out to this car and there was this bass guitar, which I bought on the spot for £35.”

The semi-modular ARP 2600 synth was originally produced from 1971 to 1980, then resurrected in 2020 by Korg, which had acquired the brand. It’s featured on some of pop’s classic hits, providing the basslines on Madonna’s “Borderline” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Stevie Wonder, Pete Townshend, and Herbie Hancock were early adopters. Eno used a 2600 installed in Conny Plank’s Cologne studio on Music For Airports (1978).

David highlights an interview in Mojo in 1998, where Eno said: “The second piece on the second side of Music For Airports was done with an ARP 2600. It’s a beautiful sound, I think, and one that I couldn’t have got from any other synthesizer that I know of. The thing that makes it so luscious is that it’s slowed down, and it has three kinds of echo on it.”


Brian Eno “Fractal Zoom” off his album Nerve Net

The Yamaha DX7, one of the bestselling synths of all time, was the sound of the ‘80s—and Eno, for once, was on trend. Speaking to Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music in 1984, he confirmed he was already using a DX7, introduced a year earlier, though he didn’t own one. “I’ve got my own programs stored on two RAM cartridges—the studio has the keyboard so I just turn up with my little RAM.”

By the mid ‘90s, the DX7 was long out of production, a cheap, obsolete instrument not yet elevated to retro-classic status. By that time, it was the centerpiece of Eno’s home studio. He told Future Music in 1995: “I think it’s just as good as anything else. Sticking with this is choosing rapport over options. I know that there are theoretically better synths, but I don’t know how to use them. I know how to use this. I have a relationship with it.”

You can hear Eno playing his DX7 on Nerve Net (1992). That same album featured the New York guitarist Robert Quine, best known for his work with Lou Reed. David says that in the previous decade, Quine had steered Eno toward a Fernandes Stratocaster copy. Eno enthused about the Fernandes in the 1984 Electronic Soundmaker interview.

“It’s a brilliant instrument, beautiful guitar,” Eno said. “A Fernandes copy costs the same as a brand new Stratocaster, but they are perfect copies of, perfect copies—like they do a ’53, a ’57, and a ’61, and I have the ’57. It’s an absolutely identical copy—you can’t get a ’57 Strat now that sounds good for less than 1,500 dollars. My one’s a beautiful, beautiful instrument.”

There have been many more exhibits in Eno’s cabinet of curiosities over the years. A Suzuki Omnichord . A Sequential Circuits Pro-One. A Casiotone 202. If any pattern emerges in On Some Faraway Beach, it’s that his selection of instruments does not follow fashion or the market. He seems unimpressed by the pursuit of technical sophistication or fine craftsmanship. It’s about the sound, not the pedigree of the instrument. As Eno himself said in ’84: “I’m not all that interested in equipment... If I find a couple of things that I like, I am very happy with them, and I’ll just work with them.”


About the Author: Mark Brend is an author and a musician. His books The Sound Of Tomorrow (Bloomsbury 2012) and Strange Sounds (Backbeat 2005) explore early electronic music and musical instruments. He lives in Devon, England. For more information visit minutebook.co.uk.

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