Baby's on Fire

Brian Eno left Roxy Music in 1973 and immediately made one of the more extraordinary debuts in British rock. Here Come the Warm Jets (1973) was glam rock filtered through an intelligence that found the music's possibilities more interesting than its poses.

Baby's on Fire features Robert Fripp's guitar in one of its most celebrated performances — a solo of building intensity that generates its own logic, technically ferocious and emotionally overwhelming. Eno's voice delivers the lyric with the detachment of someone reporting rather than experiencing.

Eno's subsequent turn toward ambient music, production, and theory — working with Talking Heads, David Bowie, U2, Coldplay — is one of the most consequential careers in modern music. Here Come the Warm Jets is where it started.