When we think of Brian Eno we usually think of the cerebral egghead who makes ambient soundtracks, or maybe the Glam guy from Roxy Music.

We tend to forget his four “proper” solo albums in between. Which is a big mistake, as they brilliantly bridge the experimental and the accessible across a range of musical styles, and have been massively influential on much music that would follow.

None more so than this track, Third Uncle.

Taken from Eno’s second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), it’s post-punk before post-punk had been invented… hell, before punk had been invented.

From the brilliant bassline with echoes (pun intended) of Pink Floyd’s One Of These Days – itself borrowed from the Doctor Who theme – to the sudden arrival of the skittering drums by Freddie Smith, doubling up with Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt, in concert with the urgent, jagged guitar that would become the template for post-punk.

It never stands still: the burbling bass runs by Brian Turrington, the queasily dissonant guitars played by erstwhile Roxy colleague Phil Manzanera and Eno himself, his instrument credited as “snake guitar” – which perfectly captures its serpentine abstractions.

Then there’s Eno’s distinctively deadpan delivery of those nonsensical lyrics to what is another list song: “There are tins, there was pork / There are legs, there are sharks / There was John, there are cliffs / There was mother, there’s a poker”

And finally, as if mocking the very notion of a love song, the expressionless pay-off: “There was you. Then there was you.”

The song continues towards the five-minute mark the duelling guitars create an uncomfortable off-kilter feeling akin to seaskickness, spiralling out of control as the dissonance disintegrates into atonality: a result of Eno’s so-called Oblique Strategies – hand-written cards giving random instructions to the musicians to create a kind of ordered chaos in the studio.

The lyrics had a similarly Dadaist genesis, Eno initially singing random syllables to the backing tracks before converting them into words.

I remember when his first two solo albums came out – the first was the even better Here Come The Warm Jets – my friend and fellow Roxy fan Paul and I puzzled endlessly over whether or not they were meant to be taken seriously, or as some sort of pastiche.

We never really found out. And we were too young to realise that it doesn’t matter.