Brian Eno

Brian Eno – Burning Airlines Give You So Much More

(1974 – included on the album “Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy”, EG, 1974)

March 3, 1974. Turkish Airlines Flight 981, bound from Istanbul to London with a stopover at Orly, crashes into a forest in a village in Picardy due to a technical fault. Hundreds of victims: one of the worst air disasters in living memory. It's the lyrical pretext for “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More” by Brian Eno, the extraordinary opening track of one of his first post-Roxy Music classics, “Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy” (1974). Despite its exceptional gravity, in Eno's hands this event becomes non-sense of impassive singability, a singability devoid of the slightest drama, which even turns into a jovial melody. In other words, Eno chose this delicate textual material as an extreme, timeless harmonic experiment.

This is only the first and most obvious aspect of the quiet, impersonal revolution triggered precisely by this symbol-song, a revolution that has to do with Dadaism and pop art (and certainly with the very essence of rock music itself). With uncommon foresight, Eno proclaims the advent of the non-musician, that is, the extreme democratization of technological means that virtually allows anyone to create a good piece of music, even without academic or technical training. Even the manifesto of this movement, “Oblique Strategies” (1975), co-written and realized with his mentor Peter Schmidt, is itself — in its very medium — already an “oblique” message: a collection of maxims and commandments printed on laminated cards that the non-musician is meant to follow.

Some of the most germinal and inspiring oblique strategies read: “Don't be afraid of clichés” and “Imagine the piece as a set of disconnected events.” “Burning Airlines” is, in fact, one of the earliest and most striking applications of these postulates. Its structure is the very essence of the simplest classic popular music form:

intro – verse/chorus x2 – bridge (identical to the intro) – verse/chorus x2 – coda (again based on the intro).

Even the harmonic scansion follows the classic tonic–dominant–subdominant pattern, but its sequencing gives rise to curious juxtapositions and even curiouser dynamics. The most disorienting contrast concerns the intro, the bridge, and the coda (the latter featuring the only real melodic variation), all passages that within the song's economy function as a brilliant overture, interlude and finale, yet are actually built on a phrase of wide, abrupt tonal leaps that seems lifted straight out of a serial avant-garde piece.

The harmonic construction deserves separate discussion: a brilliant architecture that articulates a perfect, deliberately engineered song structure, with an effective magnetic pull toward the chorus. Eno's robotic, android-like vocal tone paints a perfectly symmetrical melody in the verse, while the chorus line is just slightly shifted in its final accent — a chorus that is never identical to itself and varies lyrically (making it closer to the singer-songwriter tradition than to pop). Eno thus keeps the basic variables under tight control, deliberately keeping their values to a minimum.

If the underlying soul of the song is therefore standard, its outer casing (the arrangement) is instead alien. “Fill every beat with something,” reads another of his oblique maxims, and indeed the rhythm line is packed with ideas. A disorienting cha-cha underpins the intro, then the tempo settles into a marked four-four beat, with a hammering, ambiguously syncopated gait. Beat after beat, it brings to mind old doo-wop songs, for the way it insinuates itself so easily into memory — but, here's another twist, the atmosphere is, at the same time, too cold and relentless to settle for something as amiably harmonious as a 1950s oldie.

Harmonically, the whole framework is built, for the verse, on a disorienting Hawaiian-style strumming in the upper register, and for the chorus on a further layer of guitar arpeggios. It's a meticulous, professional studio cut-and-paste job, one that proves “tape recording is the new music.” It's a maxim that would prove prophetic in the years to come (much like the now-iconic “use fewer notes”), first and foremost for Eno's own subsequent evolution.

One of the most concrete "oblique" diktats remains, in any case, "turn a melodic idea into a rhythmic idea". The chorus, with its polyphonic backing vocals, does indeed add, as it unfolds, a kind of marker along the timeline, but above all, in the bridge, the guitar (played by the former colleague from the great early Roxy days, Phil Manzanera) catches fire and ramps up the tension, almost becoming a second contrapuntal voice, reaching a point of overlap, a transfiguration between hammering drive and pure atmosphere. Even the coda holds a small surprise: that "left them in Japan" sung an octave above the rest (thanks to the piercing falsetto of Robert Wyatt behind the scenes), repeated ad libitum before the final fade out - this, perhaps, is finally the song's true singable refrain.

But, setting aside all the analysis one could make of it, Eno's song remains a gem that draws its strength from its own cleanliness ("remove ambiguities"). You can take it apart piece by piece trying to grasp the non-musician's real secret, but in the end you can simply enjoy it for what it is: a catchy, engaging little tragicomic tale full of enigmatic humour, about a supposed "Queen" with some unspecified mission to carry out in the land of the rising sun. "Honor thy error as a hidden intention."

When I got back home

Left them in Japan

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09/03/2026