Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

heard American rock ’n’ roll music, developing an
affinity for early doo-wop. His working-class father, a
postman, took advantage of a government grant to
send Eno to art school. Questioning and precocious
with a healthy disrespect for authority, he incurred
the wrath of his teachers with his inquiries and would
be expelled from one school and censured at
another before he was through. Like Bowie, Eno
was a compulsive scribbler, keeping a series of
diaries (some have been published) in small black
notebooks.
In 1967, while at art school (his second) in
Winchester, Eno bought the first Velvet Underground
album. He thinks he may have been the first person
in Britain to own it (although the fact that Bowie had
a promotional advance copy trumps this claim). Eno
is certainly responsible for the most famous quote
about it: “Only a few thousand people bought that
record, but all of them formed a band of their own.”
A father when he was barely out of his teens
himself, Eno’s prospects seemed bleak: genius or
postman. He formed a band called the Maxwell
Demon (the name of the Eno–Brian Ferry–Marc
Bolan pastiche character in Velvet Goldmine),
named after James Clark Maxwell, the scientist who
first separated hot and cold molecules. Rather than a
guitar or bass, Eno played an electronics testing
device. It would emit noise to signal that hardware
was functioning. Eno discovered it after taking a job
in a retail outlet. Onstage, he would wear feather
boas, makeup and velvet corsets, a sartorial choice