There aren't many people in music who can boast a career of such impressive creative longevity and diversity as Brian Eno. Originally finding fame as the synthesizer player in Roxy Music, Eno left the successful Glam/art-rock band in 1973 to realise his own musical aspirations.
During the mid to late 70s 'Eno' the moniker he often used embarked on an impressive solo career as well as working with David Bowie on the ground-breaking "Berlin Trilogy" of Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and The Lodger (1979) while producing and performing on albums for the likes of the Talking Heads. Eno would also go on to release the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), a collaboration with Talking Heads front man David Byrne that arguably kick-started the concept of extensive sampling within pop music.
As well as being a virtuoso behind the mixing desk, Eno has been a pioneer in the field of ambient music making several records with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp embracing the creation of a technique called "Frippotronics" (essentially a stereo tape delay effect inspired by minimalist composer Terry Riley).
In 1994 Eno was approached by Microsoft to compose the Startup theme for their seminal home computing operating system Windows 95. The launch for Windows 95 was preceded by an intense marketing campaign which also used the Rolling Stones' 1981 hit 'Start Me Up' - a reference to the computer's new Start button.
Eno told Chicago Chronicle's pop music critic Joe Selvin in 1996: "The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, Here's a specific problem - solve it.
"The thing from the agency said, We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, dah-dah-dah, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional, this whole list of adjectives and then at the bottom it said and it must be three-and-a-half seconds long.
"I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
"In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time."
In the end Eno's theme clocked in at around six seconds. Rather interestingly, in an interview on BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity, Eno confessed: "I wrote [the Startup theme] on a mac. I've never used a PC in my life, I don't like them."
