Alan Moore:
Welcome everybody. My name's Alan Moore. I'm a comic
writer and warlock, and I'm lucky enough to be interviewing somebody
that I've admired for far too long... Brian Peter George St John
le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk in
May 1948. Pronouncing his own name gave him the breath control
that he would later employ to such startling effect upon his
1975 recording Miss Shapiro. Sprung from a long line of postmen,
he received a 1960's education, experimenting with a tape recorder
as his primary instrument, the young artist moved to London during
1969, before bumping into a former acquaintance named Andy
Mackay, somewhere
along the Northern
Line. Joining Roxy Music, the new band with
whom Mackay was currently engaged in playing saxophone, Eno burst
upon public awareness as the central pillar of the decadent, inventive,
glam rock period of British pop. Setting his stall out as a non-musician,
he abruptly parted company with Roxy Music to produce a string
of stunning and extremely influential solo albums, casually inventing
ambient music, and the trend for sampling along the way, he has
worked on pivotal productions with artists who range from Devo,
David Bowie, Robert
Wyatt and the new wave scene, to Pavarotti and U2.
One of our modern fin de siecle most extraordinary minds, his interest
gleefully embracing perfume, science, futurology and ladies bottoms.
I am delighted to introduce... Brian Eno.
[Audience
applause]
Brian Eno:
Thank you.
AM:
Brian, I mean, given that you described yourself as a non-musician
and then went on to completely transform music in the late 20th,
early 21st century, should we be glad that you didn't decide
that you were going to be a non-serial killer or non-dictator or...?
BE:
[Laughing]
AM:
If you hadn't bumped into Andy Mackay, where would you have
ended up?
BE:
Well, I often think about this, because this particular meeting
with Andy was really one of those little moments where your life
can take two completely different directions. I remember standing...
it was the Bakerloo
Line by the way... erm, yeah, the train pulled in
and I had a choice of going into that carriage or that one, and
I chose the one to the left and that's how I joined a band. Now,
I had been playing music before then, but I never expected to make
a living from it. I was sort of imagining that I would probably
end up teaching art and I think that is probably what I would have
done had I got into the right hand carriage instead of the left
hand one.
AM:
That would have been a tremendous loss, because I think you've
probably taught more about art in your capacity as a non-musician
than you would have done as a teacher. Was the Glam period as much
fun as it looked?
BE:
I liked playing with clothes and make-up [laughing]...
AM:
I remember.
BE:
Many people have confessed to this, but never so publicly... and
yeah, it was fun, but it didn't stay fun for very long. It wore
off quickly and I realised that my time as a band member had sort
of passed when I was on stage one night with Roxy and what I was
actually thinking about was my laundry... [general laughter]... and
I thought this is not the right job for me any longer.
AM:
Speaking about Roxy Music, I can remember... and this is a personal
confession... getting on for 30 years ago, I wrote a letter to you,
asking if you could be so kind as to possibly answer twenty questions
for a fanzine that I was thinking of doing. I didn't manage to
get the fanzine out after you had sent me back this glorious ten
page letter that was so generous...
BE:
Bastard. [general laughter].
AM:
...and so I've been writhing... writhing in guilt for the last
sort of thirty years easily. I remember one of the things that
you said about Roxy Music was that one of the elements that was
most interesting to you, was the tension. There was a tension between
your vision of what the band should be about, and Brian
Ferry's
vision... and
I was just wondering, whether that was true of that period in general?
BE:
Well, that period was the first time really that pop music had
started to take itself seriously in a way. It had become self
conscious, so pop music then was fifteen years old, something
like that, which was just old enough for people to look back
on people like Little
Richard and Elvis and
so on, as sort of historical figures and to start to look at
them as stylistic ideas. So there was quotation from the past
like that and there was also quotation from a kind of imaginary
future based on science fiction and Star Trek and various other things like
that. It felt like we were also trying to make a blend... I mean,
I think that Brian and I were very conscious of this... of
the things that we had learnt at art school... he was also at art school,
he had studied with Richard
Hamilton, England's, and probably the world's,
first pop artist... and I studied with a lot of conceptual artists, so
I was very interested in dragging the conceptual world into pop music.
He wanted to put pop into pop art. It called itself pop art, but it was
rather staid by comparison with what we were doing.
AM:
And not that popular!
BE:
...and not that popular. [general laughter]
AM:
Your first actual solo album was, Here Come The Warm Jets.
How liberating an experience was that for you after having worked
with a band?
BE:
Oh, it was fantastic. I did it very quickly. It was just a burst
of energy that came out. I don't remember, for example, ever
stopping to write lyrics. I can't remember how those lyrics
came about.
AM:
You wrote the music first presumably, and then the lyrics afterwards,
is that... ?
BE:
Can't remember! [general laughter] I honestly can't remember
how a lot of those things came about. They happened so quickly.
I know, for example, with a song called Baby's
On Fire that
the title for that was the first thing that came along, and
so then I wrote a song to justify the title.
AM:
Is it right that that was written on the actual day that you
left Roxy Music, or is that just apocryphal?
BE:
No. I think that's true actually. Yeah. I was very, very high
with the thought that I could now do anything I wanted. What I
mostly wanted to do was to expose a lot of music that I didn't
think many other people had heard. I was particularly interested
in the English experimental music scene and so I then started my
label called Obscure Records, basically to highlight a whole field
of English music that I thought was absolutely fascinating and
unique. That released Michael Nyman's first record. Gavin
Bryars.
John Adams. Harold
Budd. I mean, I only released ten albums and
about seven of them were first albums by a lot of people who became
very well known.
AM:
With your solo albums, you can gradually see the songs giving
way increasingly to instrumental pieces. Given that you said
that you loved writing songs... but
obviously people love your songs... there seems to be some kind of ambivalence
in your feelings about putting words with music? Have you resolved that?
BE:
Well, I just... actually, just finished a new album which is
all songs, funnily enough... the first one I've done like that for
a very long time. Twenty five years or so. Song writing is now
actually the most difficult challenge in music. It's very easy
to make music now. I just bought a synthesiser the other day... a
plug-in synthesiser... the
sounds are so complex that you can just sort of hold a note down
and you've got an ambient album... y'know, as long as you can be
bothered to keep your finger down for thirty five minutes. [general
laughter].
AM:
I'm sure we can come up with a lyric generator, or something
like that...
BE:
Well, this is a big interest for me... lyric generators. That's
something I'm working on at the moment.
AM:
Really?
BE:
Yeah. I think that's... lyrics are really the last very hard
problem in music. Software... and hardware... have changed the
rest of music dramatically in the last thirty, forty years. It's
very, very easy to make pretty good music. I could take anyone
in this room and within two hours we could make a pretty good
piece of music. 'Pretty
good' isn't very interesting, but 'pretty good' is possible. But
writing songs is just about in the same place as it was in the
days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop. Hip hop is the only sort of
break through in a way. Rap. Because it breaks away from the strict
adherence to melody and beat structure and so on. But the problem
of how you write a song that is in any way original is a really
interesting one I think. And that's way I couldn't let it drop.
I thought I can carry on doing instrumental records till the cows
come home and I'd love to try doing this really hard thing and
see if I can.
AM:
I'm fascinated by this idea of a lyric generator. Because
it will probably just like make me completely redundant and ruin
my plans for a contented retirement. How far are you along with
it? [general laughter] Let's get back to the beginning here. You
were born in 1948. Your great grandfather, grandfather and father
were all postmen. I can see the interest in communication being
established there... [general laughter]... but actually, in light
of your later ambient work, isn't the main thing that distinguishes
a postman's life, those kind of gloriously long stretches of
silent contemplation?
BE:
Yes. I remember one of the only things my father, who was
a very taciturn, Suffolk man, ever said to me about his own feelings
was, "I
really love getting up early in the morning, and going and sitting
on Broom Heath for ten minutes before I go to work and watching
the sun come up," and it was such a funny comment for him to make
because he didn't seem like that kind of person at all. But I think
that was a line that ran through my family. My grand father, funnily
enough had a rather parallel career to me, because he was a post
man, that was his main job, but his real interest was in repairing
musical instruments, particularly mechanical musical instruments,
which of course were the synthesisers of their day... things like
hurdy-gurdies and those things that had huge brass plates that
went round with waterfalls on them and so on. And he had a house
full of these things. But he was also an organ repairer and he
built several organs for local churches and when they scrapped
their old organs he would take the pipes and gradually he built
a six hundred pipe organ and the pipes were just stuck on to the
ceilings and on the backs of chests of draws. There were pipes
every where.
AM:
His life was a balance between that silence of the postman and
interesting noise.
BE:
Yeah. Noise in either its presence or absence was a big part
of his life... and
of my Dad's actually. My Dad... I told you he was taciturn... well, when
I was, I'd say, about thirty five... so I'd been a professional
musician for a long, long time, I said to him in passing, "Did
you ever play an instrument Dad?" He
said, "Oh yeah. I used to have my own band." [general laughter] He'd
never mentioned it before.
AM:
Fathers are strange like that aren't they? They can just keep
things to themselves.
BE:
He was a drummer.
AM:
Really?
BE:
He'd never told me!
AM:
In 1975 you had presentiments of doom, not for the first time,
which culminated in an encounter with what Alan
Ginsberg called
The
Taxi Cabs of Absolute Reality, I believe... On your way to
hospital after this accident you felt quite strongly that you'd
brought this on yourself. Which reminded me of William
Burroughs'
sudden premonition on the day before he accidentally killed his
wife where he was talking about being possessed by what he called
the 'ugly spirit'. Do you have any thoughts about these self
destructive energies. I mean, what are they for?
BE:
Yes, I do actually. I have a lot of thoughts about that. I
started having a mid-life crisis when I was about eighteen... and
it has continued ever since and one of the continuing narratives
of that crisis is, "Is what I'm doing worth doing... at all? Is
there any point in doing this?" And because I'm very interested
in the sciences and I know a lot of scientists and I can see
what they are doing and I can sort of understand the point of
what they're doing ... I've
spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being
an artist is. What does it do for us? What does it do for me? What
does it do for anybody else? Could we do without it? Is it a useful
job? Does it make any difference to the world?... those kinds of
questions. Now, their answers quite directly affect me because
I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to always answer in my
own favour. So sometimes I come up with the answer... for several
years at a time sometimes... where I say it really isn't worth
doing. There are better ways of spending your time... and this
is a sort of crisis, because then I don't know what to do and
I think, "Well,
the only way to find out is by trying it again and seeing if I
can get somewhere different this time." And if I find myself going
down the same road again I think this is hopeless. I'm in such
a privileged, luxury position I can do whatever I want and I'm
doing the same thing as I did before.
AM:
You talked just now about how purpose in art is something
which has obsessed you. The ambient music... this was music with
a social function... was this kind of a break through for you in
actually finding a different way to apply music?
BE:
Yes, well, I think I'd noticed that one of the things that
characterises all new forms of music is an accompanying new way
of listening. Every new musical proposition, is a new proposition
about what you do as a listener. So, y'know, when Elvis came along
and suddenly you are aware that there was a musician who actually
was alive below his neck, y'know... the suggestion that music could
have a physical function, a physical job to do to make you shake
and wriggle. So I think that music always suggests new social roles
for itself like that, and I had noticed in the 70's that I wasn't
listening to albums any more the way that you're supposed to. I
hated the way albums were put together, y'know... fast track, slow
track, fast track slow track... as though every three and a half
minutes you needed to be sort of woken up again because your attention
span was so short. I wanted music that I could use like I would
use light in a room. Y'know, you don't want the lights to keep
flashing on and off and changing colour and sometimes strobing.
You want light... and I wanted sound like that.
AM:
Given the tremendous influence of those first ambient recordings,
how do you feel about the way that the form has evolved and mutated
since then with its influence probably more evident in chill-out
compilations?
BE:
No, I like the whole chill-out idea. I think that's quite
a good contribution y'know to suggest to people that ...
AM:
It did emerge from the actual environments at raves - what
we used to call the St
John's Ambulance tent... [general laughter].
Later, In 1975 you released Another Green World, going into the
studio without pre-prepared material... which must have initially
been quite nerve-wracking... Now I remember some time around this
time you recounted an anecdote about getting lost on a high Scottish
hill side at dusk, and stumbling across a swathe of flowers that
were almost fluorescent in the failing light. This was quite a
worrying situation being lost on a remote Scottish hill side at
twilight... but you hit upon the notion that the element of risk
may play some vital part in our appreciation of the beautiful.
Does this tie in with the studio risks that you were taking with
Another Green World?
BE:
Yeah... well, I think if you're aware that your taking a risk,
you have that thing I was talking about earlier of all your antenna
are out. During that time I used to book a different instrument
each day. One day it would be a cello, another day a marimba, trombone...
anything. I couldn't play any of them but I just... as part of
my kit, I would have a little idea I'd write for myself... "Swing
the microphone from the ceiling" and "Hire a trombone." So
I've got two rules I'm going to use that day in the studio...
and I'm going to try to make a piece of music. Now, those aren't
very promising ideas actually, but the effect of that is that
as soon as anything even remotely one percent promising starts
to happen, you really jump on it with great enthusiasm and build
on it quickly.
AM:
Your choice of luxury on Desert
Island Discs was, I think,
initially a life-times supply of interesting drugs... and then you
thought that would probably be boring and that what you would in
fact would prefer was a giant man eating spider that would... [Eno
laughs]... do
you remember saying this?
BE:
No, no... I don't think that's true.
AM:
Well, that's a shame, because that completely blows my question.
Let's pretend... [general laughter]... that you did say that your choice
of luxury on the desert island was a giant man-eating spider to
keep you alert... [Eno still laughing]... to keep you creative and
to force you to think of new solutions to deal with the giant man
eating spider.
BE:
[still laughing]... I wish I'd thought of that but I don't think
I did. I think I stopped at the life-time's supply of hallucinogenic
drugs actually.
AM:
That's where I would have stopped... but if you had said that... imagine... then
given the current terror saturated global situation, have we all
been given the luxury of our own giant man-eating spider?
BE:
Yes. That's a very good point. Yes.
AM:
...and do you think that when the pressure's on that that does
actually force people into novel and creative solutions?
BE:
There are some novel and creative solutions growing now. As
people have lost faith in politics... I think particularly in this
country for the last few years... they're starting to realise that
if they want to do things they had better get them done together
and do them themselves. One of the most... in fact the most exciting
thing to me about the internet is the birth of a new democratic
culture which I think hundreds of thousands of people are now participating
in... making new experiments in social innovations... government...
I think this is all so much more exciting than anything that's
going on in politics right now. Somebody just wrote an interesting
essay called The
Second Superpower, based on something Noam
Chomsky said... Chomsky said
that there are two superpowers now. There's the United Sates and
there's World Opinion... and it's the second one that interests
me really.
AM:
I remember seeing a lecturer from the London School of Economics
who was talking about the fact that the internet makes it much
more difficult to regulate currency. He was saying that we could
be looking forward in the future to a period with no currency and
therefore no government.
BE:
Well I think what we'd look forward to actually is something
slightly more complicated than that... which is elective citizenship.
So you might choose to educate your children in Sweden, to pay
your taxes in Demark, to support an English football team... that
the only thing I can think of for England... [general laughter]...
and so on and so on, and the idea that we are all nationals and
this particular historical accident of our nationhood defines us
I think is going away.
AM:
I remember in this letter I've been wracked with guilt for,
for the past thirty years, you also mentioned something which I
thought was a wonderful way of using a library. You'd take along
numbers...
BE:
Yeah, well, I used to get the numbers from the car... I'd choose
a car... the
last car I saw before I went into the library, and then I'd use
that as the Dewy number for pulling out a book.
AM:
So it would be upon some subject that was completely at random,
and would introduce you to an area of knowledge that you might
of previously have been shying away from.
BE:
Like breast feeding, for example, was one of them I remember... [general
laughter]... I had been shying away from that actually... I hadn't
faced up to my inner-mother.
AM:
But I glad you were able to get over your denial there, y'know... In
this same year, 1975, you teamed with Peter Schmidt, to publish
Oblique Strategies, that were cryptic instructions that were designed
to jolt the stalled creative mind out of it's rut.
BE:
It started with me when we were working on the second Roxy
Music album, I noticed that every evening when I went home I would
think of things I had forgotten to remember in the studio. And
these were not things like "Put on a guitar solo"... [general
laughter]... they were more like things like "If you listen from
outside the door, you hear things you don't hear in the studio."
Or "If
you listen to all the quieter details of something that's sometimes
a nice way of hearing things." So I just started making a simple
list of these. It turned out that Peter Schmidt, who was a painter,
had been doing something similar, and we looked at our ideas and
what was interesting was that they were remarkably cross applicable.
So we started to think that maybe we could come up with a kind
of universal set of cards that gave you some strategies you could
use in difficult working situations to kind of knock yourself out
of the furrow that you might have inadvertently got yourself into.
Some cards... their ideas have entered the culture so much that
you don't need to say them any longer. Other ideas still seem fresh.
AM:
So "Honour thy accident as your hidden intention" that has...
BE:
That was the first one for me...
AM:
That is the one that has probably
pervaded the culture more strongly the other ones. I've certainly
used them myself for writing comics or for writing. Do you still
use the cards yourself or...?
BE:
Yeah.
AM:
Yeah?
BE:
Yep.
AM:
So, your methods haven't sort of changed...
BE:
In fact I pulled one out this morning. It said, "Change nothing
and continue with immaculate consistency." Which is what I'm trying
to do.
AM:
Well, you're certainly doing that. That's fantastic.
BE:
I didn't even change my clothes!
AM:
In 1976, you commenced a string of remarkable collaborations
with David Bowie, starting with Low. What was it like working together
on those albums? Did you have a sense that this is something quite
momentous?
BE:
We played together in what must have been a great show I think
at The Rainbow. He was headlining. Roxy Music was support band
and it was a real sort of battle of the bands thing and all the
music papers couldn't decide who'd been best. But it was a good
show though. But I didn't know him well. He went through a very
bad period in the mid-70's with cocaine and apparently he said
to me sometime later that he'd used Discrete
Music as the sound
track of his recovery. He'd only been listening to that one record
over and over and so that was sort of the basis on which we started
to work together. That was all done very quickly as well. It's
very hard to remember in an detail what we did. There's an Indian
saying, “The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly,” and I think
there was some... a lot of ideas that he'd had and that I'd had that
had been ripening for a long, long time and suddenly when we met
in that studio... whoop... it all came together, really without any
discussion or any argument that I can remember at all.
AM:
Between 1978 and 1983 you were living in New York and you
created your video paintings I believe, [Mistaken] Memories Of
Mediaeval Manhattan? This was a response to what you saw as an
escalating spiral of hysteria in music videos where every new music
video had to have more nuns and Nazi's and explosions...
BE:
Actually it was not so much a reaction to pop videos, that
stuff I was doing, it was more a reaction to what was called Video
Art, which it seemed to me was entirely enslaved by Hollywood,
either by trying to be like Hollywood or desperately resisting
being like it in any way at all. So you got terrible Video Art
shows where some not very attractive looking artist was staring
at a camera, flabby and naked for forty five minutes... of course
in black and white because colour was Hollywood, y'know... so it
was sort of reducing every thing to its least sensual and least
beautiful... I thought
what you could do with video which nobody had done, was to make
paintings that happened to change, and that's where all my sky
films came from. They were at natural speed. They weren't sped
up or slowed down. They were of what I saw out of my window. And
it was very interesting, when I used to make those things people
would to come round to my flat sometimes, they could sit looking
out of the window if they wanted to but they always sat looking
at the video of the view outside the window... [general laughter]...
AM:
From your guest appearance on Father
Ted...
BE:
A bit of a highlight that.
AM:
...from some of your comments in the diary [A Year With Swollen
Appendices] that you kept for a year and also from many of your
own lyrics, there is an incredible sense of humour, and its obviously
something that you do have an interest in. British comedy - what
are your thoughts?
BE:
Actually, I think that is our great export, comedy. I think
British comedy is really very good indeed. Much better than British
football, actually. What I like about it is that it's very experimental.
It really does pull in ideas from everywhere. If you think of The
Goon Show which was radio Dadaism really. I can remember
my Dad, a postman, being totally gripped by The
Goons, and it was
about as experimental as anything that was going on in the culture
at the time... and then Peter
Cook and Dudley
Moore, who are the
two characters that Bowie and I always
slip into whenever we meet... [general laughter]...
AM:
That conjures quite an image.
BE
[In the voice of Pete 'n' Dud]:
"We only ever talk to each other
like this... so... done any new music lately?"... [general laughter].
It's true. We hardly ever have a conversation in any other voice
in fact... [more laughter]... so next time you listen to Heroes...[more
laughter]... "We could be heroes Dud... just for one day."
AM
[Also, in the voice of Pete 'n' Dud]
"Funny how the ambiance
seems to follow you round the room..." [more laughter]
BE:
[laughing]... That's a good ending! AM:
Could I have a very big round of applause please for the remarkable... Brian
Eno.
[A very big round of applause]
Alan Moore was interviewing Brian Eno.
The series producer
was Jane Berthoud.
The producer was Tilusha Ghelani. |
