Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Perfect Sound Forever SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004 - by Brian Eno

ROBERT QUINE

Robert Quine was one of my first friends in New York. We met in about 1979, not long after he'd left The Voidoids and not long after I'd had one of my regular losses of faith in much of the work I'd been doing until that point.

Our friendship clicked and resolved itself around the following: a love of wandering round New York and eating in obscure oriental restaurants; a feeling for music that was 'at the edge of music'; a conviction that Nabakov was the greatest writer of the twentieth century, and a shared sense of humour. For, despite Robert's daunting appearance, he was actually very funny and as sweet and good-hearted a person as you could imagine. And paranoid too, I should mention: he lived in a flat on St Mark's Place which had more defences on the door than The Bank of England. But then he did have a huge collection of beautiful electric guitars - a collection which, along with his records and books, left an increasingly narrow path between the Fort Knox door and what he laughingly described as 'the kitchen' - an unused single-plate electric cooker sitting on a table.

I don't think I ever visited Quine without him digging out some obscure doo-wop song or old jazz record and getting me to listen to a genius piece of guitar playing by some long-forgotten craftsman. He was a sort of archaeologist of popular music, deeply knowledgeable and with a phenomenal memory for detail.