Oh yeah, there's definitely a Roxy influence in there, alongside other stuff. Brian Eno is credited as a co-producer on Ultravox!, but according to Warren Cann from a lengthy and very detailed interview he did in the '90s...
We produced the record, gave Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno credit as co-producers, and all they ever say is "produced by Eno." It makes me angry because it is no more accurate than it is true. The record company had a "name" involved with the record, so that's what they pushed in order to boost its interest and sales.Brian Eno was a very interesting gentleman and a great character. Our experience of working with him was quite enlightening and a pleasurable experiment. I do not regret it and I'm sure the others would agree. But it was absolutely not what we had actually envisaged. We had been under the impression, due to Brian's image from Roxy, that he was a real "technical-type" who had all sorts of tricks up his sleeve regarding the studio and in the realm of production technique. We were hungry to learn how to push the boundaries of the studio environment and we thought that he would be just the man to show us how to go beyond the conventional guitar/piano/bass/drums approach that was so prevalent at the time. We wanted to pick his brains. What we discovered was that Brian was - at that time - actually quite naive in the area of technical expertise. It was not his forte. In the first days in the studio together (Brian came in after we'd already recorded the bulk of the material), I remember looking at his Mini-Moog synthesizer. It was the first one I'd ever gotten my hands on and he had all these little pieces of tape stuck by the keys with the names of the notes written on them, plus little pictures stuck on adjacent to some of the control knobs. I pointed to a cute picture of a sheep and asked, "What's that mean?" He replied, "Well, I don't know what that knob does but, when I turn it, it makes the sound 'wooly,' so the picture of the sheep (sheep...wool...get it?) reminds me..." I was quite taken aback. I didn't know what to say to that! I think I just nodded and said, "Umm... good idea!"
From that moment on, I had a very strong suspicion that Brian was not the technical master we'd had in mind!
Eno was far more of a conceptualist - an ideas man. He was quite bold about not giving a damn about what the final result sounded like. He was only interested in the process (which is great for learning, and fine if your musical future doesn't hinge on public, rather than private, reaction to the "final result"). While we immediately acknowledged the importance of "the journey" as opposed to "the destination," in our case we were more pragmatic - the "final result," which would be released for people's listening pleasure, mattered very much to us! We agreed that it was very cool to do all sorts of unusual things via the recording process, but it still had to end up sounding good. There wouldn't be a second album for us to make if the first one was less than we were capable of, and all we might say was, "But it was a gas to make!"
We had our most productive and interesting times together when the tape wasn't rolling, when we would just sit round in the control room and talk about music and art. We appeared to be very much on a similar wave-length as each other, but he was far more articulate in his expression of the turmoil of emotions an artist has to contend with. He seemed to have thought matters through much further than us, whereas we were still trying to pull all the pieces together. We loved listening to him and I believe that it was, overall, a very good idea. He only worked on three or four songs at the most, and we didn't use any of his mixes (we thought it polite not to mention it).
To be fair, his name did help bring about some attention that might not otherwise have been paid to us concerning that first album, but it had never been our intention to do that. It's just very irritating when critics later stated, regarding particular songs, "The hand of Eno is stamped all over this track, blah-blah-blah...." When, in fact, the song was written and performed with no participation by Brian at all. Lazy journalism strikes again.
― Welcome To (Turrican), Friday, 7 November 2014 22:34 (nine years ago) link