Sheppard — On Some Faraway Beach

Author: David Sheppard
Title: On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno
Year: 2008
Type: Book (Orion; US edition Chicago Review Press, 2009; revised edition White Rabbit, 2024)

On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno is a biography of Brian Eno by the music writer and musician David Sheppard, published by Orion in 2008, in the United States by Chicago Review Press in 2009, and in a revised edition in 2024. It follows Eno from his childhood in Suffolk through art school, Roxy Music, the ambient records and his career as a producer. Sheppard wrote it with Eno’s cooperation and with interviews with his collaborators, among them Bryan Ferry, John Cale, Robert Wyatt and David Byrne. Most of its pages go to Eno’s first forty years, and of the decade before the book appeared, Sheppard writes that Eno kept recording though little of it matched his 1970s solo albums. British reviewers praised it, and Kirkus, reviewing the American edition, faulted its length, its gaps and its prose.

Sheppard has written about music and culture since 1995, is a regular contributor to MOJO, and has played in the instrumental groups State River Widening and Ellis Island Sound and as Snow Palms.¹ Orion published the book in 2008, and Chicago Review Press published the American edition on May 1, 2009, in 480 pages.^{1, 2} White Rabbit published a revised edition on July 4, 2024, updated “to cover Eno’s life and creative output since,” with “a new introduction by” the novelist Alan Warner.³

Sheppard thanks Eno in the acknowledgments “for his co-operation” and thanks “everyone else who agreed to the grand inquisition,” a list that includes Gavin Bryars, Harold Budd, Byrne, Cale and Ferry.⁴ White Rabbit’s description adds interviews with collaborators “from Bryan Ferry to David Byrne and Robert Wyatt.”³ Kirkus put the balance of the book at “nearly 400 pages” for Eno’s first forty years, from a boyhood in postwar Suffolk, and “a mere 50 pages” for the two decades after.² Of that last stretch Sheppard writes that the previous decade “has found Eno almost constantly recording,” though it “has offered little to truly match the luminous originality of his benchmark 1970s solo albums.”⁴

In Wilson Neate’s reading in the Quietus, the book follows Eno “from solitary, fossil-collecting, hymn-loving child” through Roxy Music, the Oblique Strategies, ambient music and his work as a producer, and finds a single thread running through it, “Eno’s valorisation of process over product.”⁵ In Neate’s summary, the book traces the thread to the Ipswich art school, where the tutors Roy Ascott and Tom Phillips introduced Eno to generative systems and the ideas of John Cage; Neate saw the approach “encapsulated in the Cageian mantra, ‘Define parameters, set it off, see what happens.‘”⁵

British reviewers praised the book; Kirkus did not. White Rabbit’s page, a publisher’s selection, quotes the Sunday Times calling it an “honourable, authorised attempt to do justice to a mind-bogglingly restless and prolific subject,” Uncut an “exceptionally well-written biography,” the Independent a “meticulously researched biography,” and the Big Issue in Scotland “all over the place but fascinating just the same.”³ Neate found it “meticulously researched and hugely readable,” strongest on Talking Heads, the solo albums and the work with David Bowie, Cluster and Robert Fripp, though he disputed the book’s picture of Eno as a Renaissance man, arguing that Eno has no expertise in any one field and has made a virtue of that.⁵ Kirkus called it an “overstuffed yet incomplete biography,” best on the 1970s solo albums and attentive to his work with Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo, and found the whole “ultimately wearisome and unrewarding,” weighed down by Sheppard’s “grandstanding polysyllabic style.”²

Key contributions

• An authorized life of Eno, written with his cooperation and with interviews with his collaborators.
• A biography weighted toward the 1970s, from Roxy Music through the solo albums and the first ambient records.
• An account of Eno’s art-school formation in systems and process.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — David Toop’s 1995 history of ambient and listening music
• A Year with Swollen Appendices — Eno’s 1996 diary of 1995 and his essays
• Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off — Victor Szabo’s 2022 history of ambient music