For a man whose exterior is not particularly photogenic, Brian Eno has an extremely well-known face. It's a face that rarely adorns the sleeves of his records, and appears even less on the front covers of magazines. When it does, it's usually painted rather than photographed; witness Stuart Catterson's oil painting on the cover of this month's E&MM.

But the reason Eno's visage is famous has nothing to do with external appearances. It's what lies behind the exterior that's important. Because throughout his long and eventful career, Eno has been an inspiration for musicians, composers and artists of all descriptions. Every time E&MM has run a readership survey, his name has figured in the Top Five of contemporary music figures people have wanted to see featured in the magazine's pages. We've battled for what seems like years to get an audience with the man, but it's been an uphill struggle. Almost alone in modern music, Eno is a man who derives little pleasure from talking about himself, with the result that opportunities to interview him occur rarely and at short notice.

Luckily for us, a freelance music writer happened to be in the right place at the right time, and offered us first option on the story. We took it with open arms, and we're glad we did. Alan Jensen's piece is a lengthy one, more detailed than the average E&MM interview. But we feel justified in devoting a large number of pages to it because so many people have expressed a desire to see it, and because it makes easy and rewarding reading.

Considering that he dislikes the idea of doing interviews, Eno has an awful lot to say into the Walkman microphone. Clearly, he's not a man to shy away from the big topics. Art, culture, travel, music theory and The Smiths all feature in his conversation with Jensen, and his comments on all those subjects are well worth hearing. You may not agree with all of them, but they're worth taking the time to learn about.

Then again, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Eno is capable of taking on vast, conventional bodies of opinion and coming out on top. He's achieved the respect he has because he hasn't been afraid to take risks, to diversify when he's felt it necessary to do so.

As a musician, he left Roxy Music just at the time when the band had started to achieve significant commercial success. As a composer, he left the safety of the traditionally-structured rock song for the uncharted waters of an entirely new form of music. As a businessman, he put money behind record labels aimed at giving an outlet for fresh, inventive, but totally uncommercial music. And as a producer, he's put hand to fader for a huge variety of acts — Devo, Talking Heads, U2 — and succeeded in wringing the best from all of them.

It's in the role of composer that Eno has had the biggest influence, though in the context of his work, 'composer' is a misleadingly restricting term. When Eno makes an album under his own name, either solo or in collaboration with others, he plays a decisive role in writing and arranging the music, choosing and treating the sounds, and mixing the results into a charming musical confection that's as unexpected as it is cohesive.

That, in a nutshell, is why Eno's influence has been so much more widespread than sales figures for his albums would indicate. Like so much of his music, Eno's sphere of influence is a quiet, unobtrusive phenomenon, something few non-musicians will ever be aware of (though his name isn't far off approaching household status), but which hundreds of today's performers admit to be inspired by.

You can count the number of interviews Eno has done over the last year on the fingers of one hand. Trying to quantify how many other interviewees have named him as inspiration, is an altogether more difficult task.