On Some Faraway Beach

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 9/03/2009

Sheppard (Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen) aims to "reclaim Eno from the Eno nerds" who've turned the musician/producer into a cultish figure, and though respectful of his subject's legacy, he rarely succumbs to outright worship. A large chunk of the biography recounts Eno's British art school roots and his first major music gig, as the synthesizer player for Roxy Music, where his flamboyance quickly made him even more prominent than lead singer Brian Ferry. Sheppard writes smartly about Eno's subsequent solo work and his forays into producing albums for artists like David Bowie and Talking Heads and extensive interviews and research bring out captivating backstories: it's worth noting that almost nobody, including Eno himself, thought he'd be a good fit to work with U2, until The Joshua Tree became one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time. Sometimes, Eno's interesting projects from the last two decades seem to go by in a blur, compared to the in-depth treatment of the first half of his career, and his theoretical pronouncements might bear a little more critical scrutiny. On the whole, though, this is a valuable document of one of late-20th-century pop music's key influencers.