Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Even next to David Bowie, with his alien regalia and mutating persona, it was Brian Eno who always seemed like the supreme spaceman of the pop-music universe.
In 1972, when he first came onto the scene as the 24-year-old synthesizer wizard of Roxy Music, he sported a look that was pure glam, except that he somehow appeared even more baroque than the gender-bending rock stars of the time (the New York Dolls, Bowie, Lou Reed), because they were Dionysian pansexual strutters, whereas Eno was his own unique thing: a delicate sci-fi gamine, a geek in thrift-shop drag.
He wore light blue eye shadow and pinkish lipstick and jackets with huge shoulder pads that sprouted shiny black feathers, but his hair was thinning on top and long and wispy on the sides, and his pout gave him the look of a passionflower extraterrestrial.
As Eno began to create his solo albums of “ambient music” (a form he more or less invented, though it’s now so pervasive it’s almost hard to hear how out of the box it was then), he held onto his image as pop’s surreal harlequin eccentric.
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