"He knows very little about an awful lot, but it’s how he applies that knowledge - and it’s down to confidence, too": How Brian Eno became music's ultimate renaissance man

Eno.

The phrase ‘hard to pin down’ was, very possibly, invented for Brian Eno. Never has a person involved in the production of music (and by our definition, so many worlds beyond that) had so many pigeonholes built for him and then abandoned. 

He’s a synth whizz, having been the flamboyant VCS3 man for ’70s art rockers Roxy Music’s first couple of albums, then taking his electronic knowledge to Berlin to help sculpt ‘the big three’ albums for Bowie in the city, most famously on the single Heroes and track Warszawa from the b-side of Low. And more recently (although not that recently) he became something of a champion – probably one of the only champions, actually – of the Yamaha DX7, and one of the few people to wrestle with its FM synthesis and win.