Brian Eno karaoke - The True Wheel

In 1974, Brian Eno took an inspirational trip to the USA, which would include a spot of oneiric songwriting. Having left Roxy Music the previous year and released his surprisingly tuneful solo LP Here Come the Warm Jets in January, the 26-year-old singer and “non-musician” had already begun thinking about the follow-up album. Wandering around San Francisco, he spotted some striking colour postcards in the window of a shop in the city’s Chinatown district, depicting a performance of a Maoist revolutionary opera called Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. He bought the cards and started carrying them around with him, having fallen head over heels in love with that title. For one thing, the S-word was right up his mountain pass. “Strategy interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems,” he later explained, “which is what my interest in music is, really, and not so much the interaction of sounds.” The postcards, with their idealised images of victorious Chinese revolutionary soldiers in stunning landscapes (see below), eventually set him thinking obliquely about a new approach to song lyrics: it might be a nice idea to use the first-person plural, writing about “we” and “us” instead of the much more common “I” and “me”.

Visiting New York that sweltering summer, Eno stayed with a girl called Randi at the Drake Hotel in the Midtown district of Manhattan. Built in the 1920s, this imposing hotel (now demolished) had long been a favourite haunt of musicians: stars like Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix and the members of Led Zeppelin and Slade had spent the night here.

Eno had a surreal dream about a bunch of girls serenading some sailors who had just come into port.

In his hotel room, as the air conditioning hummed and yellow cabs rolled by below on 56th Street, Eno nodded off after taking some mescaline. This hallucinogenic alkaloid drug has long been popular with creative types looking for interesting experiences – among them writers as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Hunter S Thompson and Jean-Paul Sartre. And it didn’t disappoint Brian, who had a surreal dream about a bunch of girls, which included his friend Randi, serenading some sailors who had just come into port. The men weren’t exactly regular sailors: “They were sort of astronauts,” he clarified later, “but with all the psychological aspects of sailors.”

The girls in the dream were singing: “We are the 801 / We are the central shaft.” When he returned to the real world, Eno jotted the phrases down and realised he had something interesting (to use one of his favourite words). It sounded meaningful, though he didn’t understand it, and it used the first-person plural. “I woke up absolutely jubilant, because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.”

In addition to the 801 quotation, there are other traces of Eno’s New York mescaline dream in ‘The True Wheel’. Some of the lyrics are sung by a female chorus, credited on the record as “Randi + the Pyramids”. And the “sailors” are alluded to in the lines “And thus throughout two years we’ve crossed the ocean / In our little craft” (to which Randi and her mysterious Pyramids append the charming “row, row, row”) and in the reference to “the captain’s table”. But Eno appears to have dashed off the rest of the lyrics in his usual fashion, throwing in euphonious phrases with little conscious regard for their sense.

And it doesn’t mean the lyrics of ‘A True Wheel’ aren’t meaningful or interesting. There is some humor in there as well, characteristic of Eno’s earlier “song” albums: the idea that something as insubstantial as “a certain ratio” might have been left underneath a carpet is funny.

The earliest usage of “a certain ratio” that I can find appears in translations of the work of St Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Catholic theologian and philosopher – a source that would surely be well known to Eno, a voracious reader with Catholic origins. Aquinas used the phrase (or rather the Latin equivalent of it) while writing about Aristotle’s ideas on human senses. Towards the end of the song, Eno brings in tinkers, tailors and candlesticks, dredging up material from two other centuries-old sources: the rhyme ‘Tinker Tailor’, used by superstitious types when counting their cherry or olive stones after a meal, and the nursery rhyme ‘Rub-a-Dub-Dub’, which mentions “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker”.

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