Brian Eno turns 70 today. He is still as relevant today as when he stalked the keyboard in his flamboyant precursor to the glam era in his groundbreaking work with Roxy Music way back in 1971.

He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient music and contributions to rock, pop, electronic, and generative music. A self-described “non-musician”, Eno has helped to introduce a variety of unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques into contemporary music, advocating a methodology of “theory over practice” throughout his career. He has been described as one of popular music‘s most influential and innovative figures.

4 of his solo albums in the 70’s/ Here come the warm Jets, Taking Tiger mountain by strategy, Another Green World, Before and after science were predominantly Pop/rock albums. These were commercially successful to varying degrees but it is also his work with his ambient/electronic albums which are just as fondly remembered and influential. Its like he was working in 2 streams at the one time.

Brian-Eno- Here come the warm Jets 1973

Brian Eno Taking Tiger mountain by strategy 1974

Brian Eno Before and after science 1977

Brian Eno Another green world 1975

Eno’s biggest mainstream successes have been as a member of Roxy Music and, more recently, as the producer of U2 and Coldplay, but his most enduring music may well prove to be among his many solo and collaborative recordings. These span glam rock, art rock, avant funk, electronica, ambient, fourth-world and generative music. Eno self-deprecatingly describes them as “little ships floating on a sea of indifference.”

Eno has also produced over 50 albums for other artists, from U2 and Coldplay to Laurie Anderson, Seun Kuti, Devo, Talking heads, Daniel Lanois, Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Grace Jones.

His ambience dovetails his pop work but seems to have had its genesis in Ambient 1 Music for airports

801 Live

David Bowie Low

Apollo w Daniel Lanois

The Pearl w Harold Budd

Ambient ambient ambuen ambience ambien etc etc etc

The 4 pack of Ambient albums….collect the whole set, swap with your friends, compare ambient notes

There are so many more things to say about him. His restless artist energy, his witticisms and quotes [my favorite being …”the problem with success is its own momentum”]. The Oblique strategies set of playing cards for studio use founded on the i-ching principle [its still functioning on website]

I will have an explosion radio show soon on the best of him but for now there is a fantastic selection of 10 of his best albums/collaborations on the web from an English store called the Vinyl Factory…ranked thus

1. Here come the warm jets [Island 1974]
2. Fripp and Eno  No pussyfooting [Island 1973]
3. Another green world [Island 1975]
4. Ambient 1 Music for airports [EG 1978]
5. Brian Eno David Byrne My life in the bush of ghosts [Sire 1981]
6. Harold Budd Brian Eno [Editions EG, 1984]
7. Eno Cale  Wrong way up [Land, 1990)
8. David Byrne Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today [Todo Mundo 2008]
9. Fripp and Eno The equatorial stars (Discipline Global Mobile, 2014)
10. Eno Hyde High life [Warp, 2014]

[Definition Wiktionary]

A person who makes money by passing the hat (soliciting donations) while entertaining the public (often by playing a musical instrument) on the streets or in other public area such as a park or market.

Wow. I feel bad now soliciting donations. Its a funny thing but I look at people who don’t put money in the hat/ or guitar case/ or whatever I happen to have out and get a bit peed off but then I think about what reaction I would make to a busker.  If they are good I will gladly leave money and if they are good they brighten up the area where they radiate music.

I now officially love busking. It frees you up to play a looser style , experimenting with songs and generally having a chilled out time

I can remember the first time I did it down the South coast of N.S.W. at Milton outside Pilgrims vegetarian cafe. A really cool hang for the hipsters and tourists. It was July school holidays and Lizzie and I had our time off from our students [I had nearly 40 at the time and was finding it exhausting] so what do I do….go and play music. I asked them with much trepidation if I could busk, [the cafe that is] and next thing you know I grab the guitar from the car and off we go.

I made a lot of money that day and noticed a trend for people paying if you played lots of Bee Gees, Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles.

Pilgrims Milton 2014

w Ben Fowler in Berry 2015

w Josh Gow and Fig Jam Mudgee Markets 2014

That was back in 2014 and now I think I’ve racked up over 50 busking gigs…with or without Honey. At one stage I was helping raise funds for the Gulgong Folk Festival by busking every Friday morning outside 3 different locations in Mudgee. It was freezing and temperatures were around 3 degrees Celsius which is really hard on your fingers

It is an instant gig and Honey sometimes did Flash mob gigs or Pop up gigs promoted on Facebook but still they are basically busking

I love it and now down the coast I am planning where and when. I would love to busk at least once a week to keep my chops up and earn a little side cash and just get out there, get amongst it and have fun

in Berry July 2015 w Ben Fowler form Benji and Saltwater Soundsystem

Mudgee 2016

Mudgee Markets 2015

Summer morning Mudgee 2016

Dubbo with some actor friends

w Honey at a Pop up gig Market Street Cafe 2016

Abit lost and cold

Hyper Hyper Coffee in Nowra July 2015

A beach somewhere 2011

I think I must have set a new record for performances in 1 day. At the Gulgong Folk Festival in 2015 I played in 7 bands over the course of 1 day but this was intense…4 bands in 4 hours. First a background brief on what Council was trying to do on the day

An exciting FREE live music event will transform Mudgee’s retail outlets and eateries into temporary live music venues on Saturday 17 March.
From 4pm to 8pm musicians will perform in unconventional music venues as part of Live and Local on Church Street.
Grant funded through the Live Music Office, the program promotes live music in local communities and creates opportunities for employment and cultural development.
Eight businesses and 17 musicians will participate in this free event to coincide with the Mudgee Food and Drink Trail.

I approached council about the curators job at a few peoples insistence stemming from My festival directorship background but I didn’t get the gig. I did though secure performances for 4 of the acts I perform with including a solo spot

First was my solo spot at Simply Fresh at 4 pm. I had a little cheer squad and all went well…Then onto the Juice bar for Lizzie’s African drumming outfit ‘Bella Djemballa’. They are highly rehearsed and very intricate only playing hand drums , Djembes, Dun duns. It was 32 degrees already and the heat was on….then straight onto ‘Kings of Congo Congo 2 doors down the street at Subway.

It was really hot now and I was feeling it. We were playing in direct sun with the heat from the bitumen shining straight up at us. By now it was about 7.00pm and we had to hightail it down to the Mudgee Brewery for our last performance of the night to a packed house as Honey

What a great initiative and day. The crowds were plentiful and the atmosphere fantastic. I hope they do it next year

https://www.mrporter.com/daily/five-things-were-looking-forward-to-at-cannes-2016/799

Long before the word was invented, public stagediving took place during the first Dutch concert by The Rolling Stones at the Kurhaus of Scheveningen on August 8, 1964. There had been riots with such acts as Elvis Presley, PJ Proby and of course Beatlemania and Easyfever. What sets this apart is the band members are now joining in. There is footage of the Pretty Things actively causing a riot in you guessed it the Netherlands not long after the Rolling Stones incident

Many musicians have made stage diving a part of their stage act. Jim Morrison was an early performer known for having jumped into the crowd at several concerts. Iggy Pop is often credited with popularizing stage diving in popular rock music. Initially seen as confrontational and extreme, stage diving has become common at hardcore punk and thrash metal performances.

CHECK OUT IGGY HERE AT 3.46 IN COMMAND OF THE AUDIENCE

Iggy Pop may have invented crowd surfing at 1970’s Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival (Midsummer Rock Festival). Bruce Springsteen appears in the first documented video of crowd surfing in his 1980 Rock concert at Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona during his live performance of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”. In early 1980 Peter Gabriel was reported to have crowd surfed during performances of ‘ Games Without Frontiers’ by falling into his audience “crucifix style” and then being passed around.^[2] [3] During a later tour in 1982 Gabriel also crowd surfed during performances of ‘Lay Your Hands on Me‘. The rear sleeve of his 1983 album Plays Live,recorded in during Gabriel’s 1982 tour, features a photograph of him crowd surfing, although the image has been rotated 90 degrees so Gabriel appears to be standing.

“Iggy Pop had jumped into an audience prior to me,” Gabriel explained to Mark Blake, “but he hadn’t done that thing of lying on the hands and being carried around by the audience. I had the idea from a game you did with a therapy group where you had to fall backwards. and trust the person behind to catch you. I was always interested in closing the gap between the performer and the audience. At an open-air show in Chicago I was passed around and returned to the stage minus every piece of clothing except my underpants. There was an edge to doing it and part of you was praying you’d get back to the stage in one piece.”

The first official video release to depict Gabriel crowd surfing was POV, a concert video released in 1990 and produced by Martin Scorsese. When Billy Joel crowdsurfed in a concert during his 1987 concert tour of the Soviet Union, bandmate Kevin Dukes described it as the “Peter Gabriel flop”.^[7]

Jim Morrison famously would jump into the crowd and writhe onstage when he went into one of his shamanistic trances. There is very funny video footage of an escorting police officer onstage wondering what the hell was going on whilst watching Jim writhing in seeming agony at his feet. There is also the infamous Miami University gig when he joined the audience for a dance around the auditorium before allegedly flashing his penis onstage. Here is the original Rolling Stone account of the incident

https://us-u.openx.net/w/1.0/pd?plm=6&ph=bbb82fae-1d27-4d90-bb10-e24164ecd7bc

“While Collier was rapping, Morrison was in action, pushing people around the stage, bellowing, and acting as if he were masturbating, Collier recounts; but Collier did not see Morrison liberate his penis, he stresses. Other observers told Collier that Morrison had exposed himself, but Collier himself missed it. Between shoving matches, Morrison would grab the mike and shout out more about revolution. But the rest of the band, organist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Rob Krieger and drummer John Densmore, were playing at such ear-bending volume and intensity that little could be heard of the rap.There was some more tug-of-war with the microphone, then Morrison went one way, shoving more people around, and Collier went the other, ripping out amplifier cords (“the lead guitar was mesmerizing the audience”) and kicking in drumheads to silence the music. Morrison managed to push Collier’s brother off the stage into the audience, according to Collier. Then the vinyltrousered singer made the mistake of hitting on a colleague of Collier’s named Larry Pizzi who holds a black belt in karate. As soon as Pizzi felt the rock-singer grab at him from behind, he grabbed Morrison by the arms and flipped him head over heels in a perfect are off the front edge of the stage into the audience, who scrambled out of the path of the falling star.”

Some stage diving and crowd surfing went awry. Kurt Cobain would often not end up in the crowd but on Dave Grohls drums. I personally ended up in hospital in 1991 in Brisbane when the crowd didn’t catch me and I ended up almost breaking my collarbone. Jimmy Barnes broke his front teeth at Newcastle Workers when the crowd parted just before he landed. The front cover of the Lime Spiders Live at the Esplanade 2007 release features a stage diver at the the Espy

There have been serious injuries and death as well and it is a touchy subject with a lot of authorities. Personally in the Lime Spiders we saw some horrendously stupid stage diving. Laughable but terrifying at the same time

On 20 August 2010, Charles Haddon, the lead singer of English synthpop band Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, died after a performance at Pukkelpop, Belgium. He committed suicide by jumping from a telecommunications mast in the backstage artists’ parking area. Haddon was reported to have been distressed after he feared he had seriously injured a young girl earlier after a stagedive.

In 2012, singer Randy Blythe of American heavy metal band Lamb of God was indicted on (and later acquitted of) charges of manslaughter relating to the death of a fan in the Czech Republic after the fan was injured after being pushed off the stage.

In February 2014, federal judge Jan E. DuBois ruled that Fishbone had to pay $1.4 million to a woman who broke her skull and collarbone during a 2010 concert in Philadelphia when Angelo Moore stage-dove and landed on top of her.

Another fatal stage diving incident occurred in May 2014 in New York City during a performance of the metalcore band Miss May I. Although the fan was able to walk away after falling from the stage, the concert was cut short after he fainted. He later died in the hospital

The link between Vivaldi, coffee and Emperor Charles VI is maybe a tenuous one but the 3 are intertwined through Venetian culture and history. Venice in the 16th Century was truly a hub of commerce and culture placed impeccably on the trade route to the east and Africa. It was here that all the fabulous gifts of the Orient from Hash to coffee to syphilis came into Europe and tragically also the Black Plague. Imagine a world filled by one of the worlds first coffee houses or ‘Cafes’ and the music of Vivaldi in his prime with the arrival into Venice of the most powerful ruler In Europe…read on

At the height of his career, Vivaldi received commissions from European nobility and royalty. The serenata (cantata) Gloria e Imeneo (RV 687) was commissioned in 1725 by the French ambassador to Venice in celebration of the marriage of Louis XV. The following year, another serenata, La Sena festeggiante (RV 694), was written for and premiered at the French embassy as well, celebrating the birth of the French royal princesses, Henriette and Louise Élisabeth. Vivaldi’s Opus 9, La cetra, was dedicated to Emperor Charles VI. In 1728, Vivaldi met the emperor while the emperor was visiting Trieste to oversee the construction of a new port. Charles admired the music of the Red Priest so much that he is said to have spoken more with the composer during their meetings which lasted for 2 weeks than he spoke to his ministers in over two years. He gave Vivaldi the title of knight, a gold medal and an invitation to Vienna. Vivaldi gave Charles a manuscript copy of La cetra, a set of concerti almost completely different from the set of the same title published as Opus 9. The printing was probably delayed, forcing Vivaldi to gather an improvised collection for the emperor.

This is what the emperor first heard….. No. 1 in C major

Coffee has a long history in Italy. Venice was one of the first European ports to import coffee beans in the 16th century, and in the 19th century, men in bowler hats met in Turin’s coffee shops to plan for the country’s unification.

When it comes to historical Italian coffee, you can not help but talk of Venice. It is in this lagoon city that the tradition of coffee was born, that due to its position and its trade relations with the Arab world, which then spread to the rest of Italy.

The first “botega da caffè“ in Piazza San Marco existed already at the end of the seventeenth century; and even the master of the Venetian theater, Carlo Goldoni, dedicated one of his works the coffee shop. But the real explosion of the phenomenon took place in 1700, with the emergence of numerous cafes and bars. Among these, one of the best known and oldest is undoubtedly the Florian, even now the symbol of the city.

The Caffè Florian was founded in 1720 and opened under the name “Alla Venezia Trionfante – InVenice Triumphant.” From then on, this elegant building has been characterized by its exclusive products and guests: here, noblemen, politicians, intellectuals and womanizers would meet, protagonists of their own time, such as Carlo Goldoni and Casanova, Vivaldi, Albinoni or, more recently, Gabriele d’Annunzio.

Accompanied by his father, Vivaldi traveled to Vienna and Prague in 1730, where his opera Farnace (RV 711) was presented;it garnered six revivals.Some of his later operas were created in collaboration with two of Italy’s major writers of the time. L’Olimpiade and Catone in Utica were written by Pietro Metastasio, the major representative of the Arcadianmovement and court poet in Vienna. La Griselda was rewritten by the young Carlo Goldoni from an earlier libretto by Apostolo Zeno.

Like many composers of the time, Vivaldi faced financial difficulties in his later years. His compositions were no longer held in such high esteem as they once had been in Venice; changing musical tastes quickly made them outmoded. In response, Vivaldi chose to sell off sizeable numbers of his manuscripts at paltry prices to finance his migration to Vienna. The reasons for Vivaldi’s departure from Venice are unclear, but it seems likely that, after the success of his meeting with Emperor Charles VI, he wished to take up the position of a composer in the imperial court. On his way to Vienna, Vivaldi may have stopped in Graz to see Anna Girò.

It is also likely that Vivaldi went to Vienna to stage operas, especially as he took up residence near the Kärntnertortheater. Shortly after his arrival in Vienna, Charles VI died, which left the composer without any royal protection or a steady source of income. Soon afterwards, Vivaldi became impoverished and died during the night of 27/28 July 1741, aged 63, of “internal infection“, in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddlemaker. On 28 July, Vivaldi was buried in a simple grave in a burial ground that was owned by the public hospital fund. His funeral took place at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Contrary to popular legend, the young Joseph Haydn had nothing to do with his burial, since no music was performed on that occasion. The cost of his funeral with a ‘Kleingeläut’ was 19 Gulden 45 Kreuzer which was rather expensive for the lowest class of peal of bells.

Vivaldis music went into obscurity which was only lifted in the 20th century with the discovery of manuscripts in 1903 and 1937

I have been on the Roxy Music trail for a few days now since making this playlist. No hits on this list just extremely enticing and perplexing tracks from one of my favourite bands. Almost everything from the majestic Roxy Music 1, For your pleasure I found the title track to be the most perplexing and least obvious. I love Serenade from Stranded and most of if not all of Siren…remember; no hits

Now I find out that Bryan Ferry has contributed 13 songs to the new blockbuster German period drama ‘Babylon Berlin’ on Netflix. Just tonight on episode 8 I heard ‘Bitters End’ from the first Roxy album but treated in an authentic 1920s jazz way.

We are up to episode 9 out of 12 and it is fantastic viewing. lizzi is loving the little historical insights I’m giving her to the time in 1929 Germany and the Weimar Republic