Forty Years of Thursday Afternoon

Brian Eno and the Power of Formats

I became a record-buying music fan when I was 14 or 15, which suggests it was probably early in 1984. I have a suspicion that becoming a music consumer during this era has a lot to do with why I’m obsessed with formats. Going into a shop in search of an album around that time meant you had to decide if you wanted to buy on LP, CD, or tape.

This October marks 40 years since the release of the first album I knew of that came out only on CD: Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. I heard the record not long after its initial release via my brother Merrick’s copy, and bought the CD I still have a couple of years later. It’s still one of my favorite Eno records, taking ideas from earlier ambient releases like Music for Airports and Discreet Music and distilling them to a hushed, tinkly piece that, depending on how deeply you listen, is either constantly changing or doesn’t change at all. For me, it closes Eno’s 10-year run of ambient brilliance. I’ve liked plenty of music he’s done since, but I’m not sure I’ve heard any ambient music proper from him that I like as much as what he put out between 1975 and 1985.

Thursday Afternoon was CD-only because it was 61 minutes long, and Eno wanted it to be heard without interruption. He liked working with duration and the vinyl medium was limiting for him. The title track of Discreet Music takes up the entire A-side of the record and lasts just over 30 minutes, which is a long side for an LP. This length meant that it had to be cut extra quietly to allow for narrower grooves, which in turn meant that any surface noise on the record was louder than it would be on a conventional LP cut. From one perspective, clicks and pops on an Eno record are no big deal—given how he approaches sound, one could easily say, Christian Marclay style, that the wear on a given record becomes part of the “piece.” But with Thursday Afternoon, he wanted something uninterrupted that fit the music’s ultra-quiet nature, and the invention of the CD made it possible. I still play the piece somewhat regularly, and it’s the rare ambient recording I’ve heard “played out”—more than one massage therapist has put it on during a session, and I imagine in that line of work it has the added bonus of measuring a single hour almost exactly.

So Thursday Afternoon was designed for CD and it did things that only CDs could do, but it was first conceived as the sound portion of a video work, also called Thursday Afternoon. Though it was initially an installation piece, the video was issued commercially on VHS and LaserDisc. Despite hearing the music for 40 years, I’ve never seen the video until today, because I never thought to look for it. But now it’s free for all of us on YouTube, at least until it gets taken down.

In the liner notes to the CD, Eno writes that he was trying to make a video that held up to repeated viewings the way recorded music can be enjoyed over and over, something that could be admired without concern for narrative or sequence. And the video is a slow-moving series of treated and processed images of a woman’s body.

Thursday Afternoon was what we now call a “vertical video,” which is ubiquitous in 2025 but extremely uncommon then. Back in the ’80s, if you were to buy a copy of the Thursday Afternoon tape and watch it at home, you had to turn your television on its side. As TVs were then were bulky, bulbous cathode ray tubes, that would have been challenging. I remember reading Eno’s description of the video in the notes with the CD and it made me dream—a vertical video, what a crazy idea! I had more than a decade of TV-watching under my belt, and I never thought of turning it on its side.

One last item from the CD’s liner notes: “The cover is a painting by TOM PHILIPS, reproduced here actual size.” He’s bragging: Rather than bemoaning the loss of LP-sized artwork with its shrunken dimensions, he tasked an artist with creating a 4.75” x 4.75” image suitable for a jewel case. Every detail was considered, every gesture performed with intention. With this single piece, Eno embraced and then subtly reinvented two fledgling formats.