My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Brian Eno–David Byrne, February 1981” Images may be subject to copyright.
“When it came to ‘Waft Off'”, Johnny recalls, “I wanted to do something of an old haunted castle ‘trope’. But I wanted to do something also more kind of abstract, around this sort of ‘Castle of Otranto’ type medievalism”.
“With ‘Waft Off’, when I started to put some lines together around this, I was struck with this sense of there being something very out of whack about having this centre of town with all this Victorian-Edwardian architecture, here in the midst of this continent”.
“It’s anachronistic, these old structures that permeate this gloominess. Thinking about the timelessness, and the vastness of this land, this kind of imperialism, it’s so ridiculously out-of-place”.
“‘Waft Off’ followed on from ‘Put It On’ in that respect, in the sense that late nights, getting out of The Bohemian for a bit of air between sets, back in 1990, it made me look at things around, like that, and dwell on it a bit”.
“I had the guitar riff for Waft Off already from back around four years before but I recorded the song, and I went back into the studio and spliced up the vocals, just to try to get a sort of ‘jerky’ effect. I wanted the impression of getting signs from the spirit world, like someone possessed”.
“Back when I was a kid, I was into the Brian Eno and David Byrne record, ‘My Life in Bush of Ghosts’. I thought that, if I tried to imitate something a bit like a track on that, the lyrics would come across like that, and I think it did. The lyrics are a bit of jive-talkin’, built around a stream of conscious set of archaic or outmoded words from Imperial days”.