These days, all pop music is full of contrasting ideas from different eras jammed up together – in other words, it’s come to resemble an Eno record. So it can be refreshing when they meet someone who says, ‘That one is weird – I like that one.'” They don’t trust the idea that going somewhere completely different can be as good. “But it’s easy for people to become slaves of their success. “I wouldn’t say I ever thought of myself in those terms,” he says with a politely skeptical chuckle. Yet he’s worked with some of music’s biggest personalities – almost as if he’s a mechanic who helps clear their personalities out of the way of the music. In fact, the opposite has often been shown to be true.” I never thought that because people made great music they would be interesting people. I love a lot of people’s music but I’ve never been a fan of them.
“I’ve never been a fan of anyone.” Seriously? “Seriously. So it’s a circular process.”ĭespite his cult cachet – and all the singing he does on Someday World – he has little interest in the personality-driven side of pop. “To get myself in that mood, the best strategy is to create an unfamiliar environment where I don’t have habits to fall back on. . . . I have to invent something to get excited. “Everything interesting I’ve ever done comes from excitement,” he says. Since then, he’s worked with everyone from Coldplay to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In the early Roxy days, he was a glam theorist in feather boas, throwing odd electronic noises into the mix. (Who else could out-talk Bono?) Yet he’s a generous conversationalist – like an improv comedian, he responds to ideas with “Yes, and . . .” Then he usually comes back with a better idea.īorn in rural Woodbridge, England, the son of a postman, Eno went to art school to study painting – he only moved into music after a chance meeting with Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay on the London tube. His gift of gab is legendary in U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” video, you can see him go off while Bono sits on a sofa and nods. Eno is all crazy-uncle charm, with his silver beard and red spectacles, dressed in a dark shirt, jeans and neon-blue socks. While the band takes a break, Eno perches on a chair, mending a shoe with a broken heel. “It never stops around here,” he says, shuffling a stack of sheet-music folders. Almost apologetically, Eno says today’s session has to wrap up by 6:30 – that’s when his local group of amateur a cappella singers comes by. His studio is an airy music lab – white walls covered with paintings, stuffed bookshelves, a discreet tool shelf, two mirror balls, a whiteboard with notes like “two-voice tension” and “tempo mapping.” In the studio bathroom, there’s a framed LP cover: The World of Steam, a vintage field recording of train noises.
He collaborated on hugely influential albums with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, and composed the Windows 95 start-up theme. He broke out of the English prog scene as Roxy Music‘s synth wizard, soon going solo for experimental classics like Another Green World, inventing ambient music in his spare time. The man has spent the past 40 years opening up new styles of music, then moving on to his next idea. Nobody could accuse Eno’s career of coherence. I tire quickly of things that are too coherent.” It’s not out of some sense of nobility and commitment and progress – it’s just that I want to keep myself interested. “The time to make something is when the energy’s up,” Eno says. But they’re not playing these songs live instead, they’re already back in the studio improvising new material. Their new album, Someday World, is the last thing anyone would have expected from this duo – a set of verse-chorus-verse pop songs. Today he’s jamming with Karl Hyde, from the U.K. I would add music to that list.”Īt 65, Eno remains a blur of restless creative energy.
Sausage and politics – they say you should never watch either one being made. “It’s like watching the sausage get made. “This is something we’ve never played before, and probably never will again,” Eno says with his mischievous-schoolboy grin. He plays a guitar set sideways on a podium, so he can scrape it with a slide while manipulating a fuzzbox to warp the sound, over the band’s fractured Afro-funk groove. Now, as the afternoon sun shines through the ceiling windows, Eno is jamming in his studio with his six-piece band. “I thought, ‘I’ll be extravagant with time.’ So we went for a walk in the sun, on this flimsy artistic excuse.”īrian Eno’s ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’ on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
The box was labeled Oblique Strategies, a system Eno devised in the 1970s with artist Peter Schmidt to help break creative logjams, giving cryptic suggestions like “Emphasize the flaws” or “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” “Today, mine was ‘Be extravagant,'” Eno says. Brian Eno began his workday by drawing a small card from a box that sits on a desk in his London studio.