On Some Faraway Beach, By David Sheppard

This is a peculiar book about an interesting man. Over the decades, Brian Eno has switched from effete rock star to restless artist, pundit and pop intellectual, but this bulky account scarcely moves with him.

Though Sheppard covers the Roxy years in great detail, we get little sense of the intellectual curiosity of a man who could "develop a theory of how the brain worked" in the instant before he was hit by a taxi.

Marred by opaque phrases ("Eno and Schmidt had discussed their shared interest in circumventing default artistic gestures") and odd judgements, Sheppard's account only reaches 1994 by page 407.