Baby's on Fire

Eno recorded "Baby's on Fire" at Majestic Studios in Clapham in September 1973 with Simon King, Marty Simon, Robert Fripp, Paul Rudolph and John Wetton. The lyric is a surreal fantasy about a photography session involving a burning woman and unthinking, laughing onlookers. It opens with a tense hi-hat and bass line under electronic sounds, and Eno's vocal, described as nasal, gives way to a guitar solo of about three minutes by Fripp, who said he played it just off a plane from America, with flu and exhausted. Douglas Wolk of Blender called it "a two-note wonder" built around a guitar meltdown, and Pitchfork ranked it 192nd among the songs of the 1970s in 2022.

The first live recording came on 1 June 1974, when Eno played it at an Island Records concert with Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Ollie Halsall and Eddie Sparrow. Eno liked the result in part because the instruments were so out of tune. In 1998 the song featured in the film Velvet Goldmine, sung there by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.