THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.37 - BRIAN ENO PART ONE

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

The first of two rambly conversations with artist, musician, producer and polymath, Brian Eno. Visit adam-buxton.co.uk for links to some of what we spoke about. Music and jingles by Adam Buxton. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support, Matt Lamont for convo editing and to Acast for hosting this podcast. Download their app and check out their many other excellent shows. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton. I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Rosie. Come over here. Oh, it's nice to see you, dog. Dog, what are you up to? I'm a special dog. I've got skills. I'm sniffing around like I'm a special detective dog. And sometimes I raise my left or right paw like I'm pointing at clues because I'm important. What do you

think of the sunset, Rosie? It's nice, isn't it? You know what they say. Red sky at night. God's had a fight. Rain in the morning. Liquid while yawning. I mean, there's lots of country sayings.

But anyway, you go off and do your detective work. I'll tell the listeners about today's podcast. Podcast number 37, which I'm excited to say, features a conversation with someone whose work I've enjoyed in all its forms since I was about 12. That is a long, a long time. Artist, musician, producer, and polymath, Brian Eno. I had two relatively short sessions with Brian, who unsurprisingly turns out to be really quite busy.

They both took place at his studio, which is in West London, and the first one was in October of last year, 2016. That's what you'll be hearing in this first part. And the second was recorded in February of this year, 2017. And if you're subscribed to this podcast, I'm glad to say that it should have already plopped into your device. You're welcome. So Brian Eno, I got into his music as a young teen after listening to his late 70s work, the collaborations with David Bowie on Low, Heroes and Lodger, the so-called Berlin Trilogy, and loved those. I explored pretty much everything Eno had done thereafter,

and it was a very enjoyable journey and has been ever since. I blazed through all his solo albums over a few months getting particularly hooked on 1975's Another Green World which to me is like Eno's Hunky Dory. If you're a Bowie fan it'll mean something to you though of course that album Another Green World ended up being more of a blueprint for Bowie and Eno's first collaboration, Low. As well as the odd songs with their weird lyrics on Another Green World, you've got Eno's instrumental mood pieces. And I hadn't really heard music like that before at that point. prepared me for those wordless ambient records from Eno, like Music for Films and Apollo with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno, The Pearl with Harold Budd. Records that I rely on to this day whenever

I require otherworldly mood balm. A balm? And then there were the records that Eno produced for Talking Heads at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, especially Remain in Light, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts that he did just with David Byrne. Those are two of the records that I've probably listened to most in my life and continue to give me great, great joy to this day. As far as Eno is concerned, in the 90s and noughties, of course,

he embarked on hugely successful collaborations with U2 and Coldplay, to name but two of the bands he worked with, as well as continuing to make and exhibit art pieces that often feature the randomised interplay of colourful light patterns. I arrived at my first meeting with Eno armed with some cards that I'd printed out as a kind of homage to his famous oblique strategy cards that he created with his artist friend Peter Schmidt.

The oblique strategy cards, for those of you not familiar, feature gnomic pronouncements or instructions that you can pick at random from the deck and you read them out and they are designed to help artists think differently about the creative process when you're in a bit of a rut. My cards were like postcards and they were printouts of the kind of colourful patterns that you sometimes see when video files get corrupted on a computer. Compression artefacts. And on the other side of each postcard, I printed out phrases that I hoped might serve as a jumping off point for conversation. And I would now and then invite Eno to pick one at random. Oh, I overthought the whole thing, didn't I?

I was thinking, oh, Eno's going to love this. He's going to want to collaborate with me on a series of installations inspired by the cards. He's going to ask if he can use some of the images as album art. I'm still waiting for him to get in touch about all that. I might try and put a few of the images up on my website just so you can see the kind of thing I'm talking about. But basically, the cards were a response to something that he'd said in an email before we met

about not wanting to focus on those parts of his career that he'd been asked about so many times before. I think he'd just got a bit sick of interviews going the same way and covering the same ground over and over again. Fair enough. I actually abandoned the cards for our second meeting Fair enough. I actually abandoned the cards for our second meeting. And oddly, we ended up talking much more about the past. Even some of the more obvious bits that he's probably spoken about quite a few times. Although he had some very interesting things to say about my life in the bush of ghosts that I hadn't heard him talk about before.

Anyway, that's in part two. But this first conversation is, well, just that, really. It's just a chat with an interesting man. Not about his career, really. Just about things. Brian Eno. Here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Ramble Chat We're sat in Brian's studio in London. And what I've done is printed out some bullet point, not questions exactly, but headings that maybe will spark off bits of conversation. I've got questions attached to some of these, but I'm interested in wherever they send you. So see what happens with the first card. Well, funnily enough, it reminds me of a picture I took in Lowestoft about four weeks ago.

Oh, yeah. I took a picture of the beach, and it was very crowded, and it looked like that with all the little umbrellas and wind screens and so on. Yes. You're a Suffolk guy, is that right? Well, yes, I am, yeah. You still have a place out there, do you? I have a place in Norfolk okay um well in fact just it's about 200 meters out of Suffolk it's just over the border right it's funny I um I bought this little house there about three years ago now and uh I like going there but I always love it when I get off at the tube at Ladbroke Grove and I come home again.

I realise, though I grew up in the country, I really feel home in the city now. Yeah. You know, it's always a question of trying to get the balance you like between nature and culture. Uh-huh. And there's a bit too much nature out there for me in the mix. I can take it for a few weeks, then i'm dying to see i think it's particularly to see different people what's so nice when i got off the train at notting hill is just suddenly there's all these other faces yeah and suddenly i feel like i'm in the 21st

century quite sexy faces in notting hill as well. Oh, yes. I don't know about that, yes. Yeah, it's a good mix of all the sexiest people. Well, that's why I live there. Yeah. How long have you been around this part of the world in London? Practically all the time I've lived in London. Oh, yeah. So I moved to London in 1969,

and for about a year I lived in Camberwell. Okay. And then I came to West London. So really for 40, 46 years, is it? Yeah. 45 years, something like that. Don't miss South London? That's where I grew up. I liked it there, but I don't miss it.

No. Well, you've kind of got everything around here, haven't you? Good mix of all different social strata. Yeah. And cultures. here haven't you good mix of all different social strata yeah and um though that mix is changing quite dramatically um to there being only one social strata now right the very wealthy yeah yeah especially here this this little muse here i've had this studio for 21 years now and when i moved in it was all bohemians um painters and sculptors and designers and just general hangabouts you know and now it's nearly all bankers oh right people who work for goldman

sachs i guess all the creative people have buggered off east haven't they yeah nobody can afford to live here yeah i mean if if you owned a place in this muse and you sold it you could buy a street in east london a few years ago so that's what a lot of people did yeah you got in at the right moment i was so lucky very interesting story about this place well it was my um accountant who said you're still looking for a studio He knew I was looking for one. I said, yes. He said, get on your bike and go immediately to this address. I cycled here. And I bought it on the spot. The architect who was working here was very anxious to move. And the reason he was very anxious to move was because he'd just got the most extraordinary job. just to move was because he'd just got the most extraordinary job. He was a very small business.

His biggest job until that time had been doing, he'd reconditioned four bungalows in Ibiza. That was the biggest job he'd had. And one of the jobs he'd done was he'd done a kitchen for an Indian man. And the Indian man turned up and said, do you remember you did that kitchen for me? The Indian man turned up and said, do you remember you did that kitchen for me? And the architect thought, oh, no, God, what's gone wrong? And the man said, do you think you could build a temple? And he gave him this job, which is the biggest Sikh temple outside of India. Right. Which he built.

Wow. So suddenly, from being this tiny little business, he went to this huge business. And while he was doing the temple, a Nigerian man came in and said, could you do a mosque? So he suddenly got this huge mosque job in Nigeria. So suddenly he needed hundreds of other people working for him. So he was very anxious just to move on from here. What was it about the kitchen that he built?

It must have been really good. It must have been amazing. Everyone coming around, praying. All right. Right, do you want to try another card? Okay. Let me just... I think this is a rather attractive one. How to annoy Brian Eno. You seem someone who's pretty even-tempered,

sanguine, from the outside looking in. So I'm curious to know what sort of things, on a personal level, make you irritable. Quite a few. I'll give you an example of something I saw, one of the few times I've seen you clearly peeved, and that's on a YouTube clip. And it's you in a gallery somewhere. And there's a fellow filming you. I don't know if he's doing something official or what. But, you know, you're going and you're talking to someone else. You sit down at a table all the time this guy's filming you.

And eventually you just say, hey, give me your camera. And I'll film you for a bit. See how you like it. Was that recent? Yeah, five years or something. Okay, I have to look at that. And the guy's very cagey, and he's like, oh, no, it's okay, I'm filming you, it's fine.

You're like, no, no, let me film you for a bit. It feels weird being filmed all the time, so I'll just give you a taste of that. And you do it in a very pleasant way, but I felt like you were probably kind of pissed off. I do get pissed off, yeah. I think that not respecting somebody else's conversation is very rude. And that quite often happens, I think, when I'm in a public place.

I mean, I don't get that much hassle. I'm not complaining about it that much. But occasionally, if I've given a talk, for example, and after the talk I'm having a conversation with somebody and I'm clearly into the conversation and somebody else just walks right in between with their back to the person who's talking to me and kind of takes over the conversation. Yeah.

And I think, how rude do you have to be to do that yeah because the problem is that there's a sort of reverse filter working which is that after any kind of event where a lot of people have seen you it's the pushy ones who actually get to talk to you generally um and the ones you can see the kind of interesting looking people with sympathetic faces just are much too well mannered to push their way through so they're all are the kind of interesting-looking people with sympathetic faces, just are much too well-mannered to push their way through. So they're all at the back of the crowd there, and you sort of want to say,

you, six rows back, do you mind coming forward? That's right. So that's an annoyance, and I think that's the only thing that really gets to me a lot. That kind of rudeness. Well, on a personal level, you know, I i mean obviously there are things i'm global things global things like i'm incredibly annoyed by boris johnson for example i know gliding from one plum spot to the next seemingly indestructible prime shit stirrer yeah you know i i was following him from the sort of 90s onwards in

seeing the poisonous stuff he was writing from brussels when he was the e the european correspondent for the times i think it was the telegraph sorry and i just thought this is awful what this guy's writing he's just making most of it up anyway and it's just designed to cause trouble it's just designed to make people feel annoyed and for whatever particular agenda he has and then he's bloody foreign secretary you know that that is really disgusting it's a shame i think the other thing that is taking hold in the world now as well is that people who are decisive, pushy and decisive, because decisiveness has always been regarded as a positive attribute of power, especially in politics. If you're not decisive, you're seen as weak, as a liability. Flip-flopper.

Yeah. U-turner. Right. Flip-flopper. Yeah. U-turner. Right. And so anyone who comes out and makes a virtue of being obnoxious but decisive,

Trump being the obvious example at the moment, suddenly accrues all this respect and admiration. Yes, well, I think what those people are selling, and you can understand why it's popular, what they're selling beyond anything else is simplicity so they're saying look ignore all those idiots in white hall or the white house who make it all look so complicated it's easy all we've got to do is this and they come up with some simple formula which sounds sort of yeah feasible okay we're we're losing our jobs and there are lots of

foreigners it must be the foreigners taking the jobs you know the equation kind of makes sense at the first blush you know until you realize that in fact it's automation and it's companies outsourcing stuff to other countries and so on and so on that are losing jobs as much as anything else this is what johnson thrived on and this is what actually most of the Tory politicians have thrived on, the idea that it's simple. All we have to do is austerity. All we have to do is this or that. And I'm just longing for some politicians who say, do you know, it's not simple at all. It's a fucking mess and we're going to have to improvise our way through it. And mess and we're going to have to improvise our way

through it and that means we're going to have to change direction several times right we're going to sometimes have to say okay this isn't working let's try something else yeah and to say all right listen we got it wrong and i'm sorry and just to have people admit that they don't know but they're going to do their best but it's hard to vote for those people, isn't it? Because it seems like more of a gamble. Well, I remember this great quote about democracy that, I wish I could, I can never remember the name of the man who said his name, something like Charles Stettelheimer,

something like that. And he said, democracy is a system of government for people who are not certain that they're right. So if you're certain you're right, you don't need democracy. You don't need the input of the people. You just do your program. Right, you do your patriarchal thing and say, look, I'll sort it out. I know how it works.

I'll sort it out. But when you're not sure, when you need to draw on the intelligence and talents of other people, that's what we call democracy. And so I think it's really paradoxical that all of the media, almost without exception, drive people towards a certainty that can't possibly be real, that they can't possibly support. real that they can't possibly support. I remember when I first moved to America in 1978, Carter was still in power then. And I always liked Carter. And one reason I liked him was because he didn't project that kind of certainty. But you know, it was very interesting in America that made him equally unpopular with conservatives and liberals. The liberals also wanted John Wayne. They just wanted their version of John Wayne, you know, the liberal version of John Wayne.

The guy who doesn't load his gun but still strides into town. But the fact that Carter showed some sort of human vulnerability and also the ability to change his mind made him look terrible and the american press of all colors just um dismissed him for that dismissed him as a sort of simpleton peanut farmer yeah and that was how he was characterized that's right yeah and and in fact most americans still do talk about carter in that way he hasn't been kind of rescued by the rosy glow of history yet. Carter is still the weed. I bought a kalimba. I bought a kalimba. I bought a kalimba. I bought a kalimba. I bought a kalimba.

Let's do another card. Okay. Are you okay with this system? Yes, it's fine. I just think I'll go for that one, which says choice equals freedom. Freedom is such a big word these days. That's freedom is the word that, of course, both Brexit and Trump are predicated on. The idea that something oppressive is holding you down the eu or government in general you know the whole trump

thing is that government is a sort of intrinsic he's kind of a libertarian really trump he's an authoritarian libertarian in that he he's sort of anti-government unless it's him it's also called being a dictator he's he's a natural he's a natural dictator so the the idea that there is something called freedom that politics can give us or can take away from us is the question here there's a book by richard rorty the philosopher which is called look after freedom and the Truth Will Look After Itself, which I always like. So he's saying that with genuine freedom, there is much less discussion about what the truth is

because there's much less investment in one particular version of it being peddled. The truth, as we like to refer to it is is a temporary agreement between people it's a consensus you know we we reach an agreement about what this reality is and then gradually we change it again that's an that's a very unconservative idea because the history of western philosophy until the 20th century anyway was the idea that there is such a thing as the truth. Immutable.

Immutable and separate from us. It's nothing to do with us actually, but we can, by scratching away at logic and so on, we can find it. Whereas what people like Rorty says, if you create a situation in which people can do whatever scratching they want, so that kind of freedom, your freedom to scratch wherever you want, then people will probably arrive at some kind of consensus about what reality is. I mean science is a very good example. Science is a very free system in a certain way.

And it's free of something very important. It's free of ideology. So the idea of science is that if you're an Eskimo transgender fireman doing an experiment or a BBC journalist doing an experiment, if you do the science correctly, you should arrive at the same result. So the idea of science is that you free it from values, essentially. That's what an experiment is. And what, of course, is happening with Trump and the Brexiteers and so on is that everything is absolutely laden with values. There's no possibility of getting an objective judgment about anything because it's absolutely laden with values.

So, you know, Brexit, whatever its failures, we won't ever know about them because the way the story will be told, as it's already being told in the Daily Express and so on is that if things are going wrong if the pound is dropping it's because those bloody european bureaucrats are undermining the whole experiment or jeremy corbyn is or some crypto liberal fifth column is is working against the british people you can't have a discussion any longer because everything is ideologically so heavily freighted it's different in other countries you know i was talking to a friend of mine who is in the german government and he said it's very fascinating to

us germans how you suddenly in england suddenly appoint somebody to be a foreign secretary who has no experience of that at all and i said yeah well so how does it work in germany he said well of course you know if we have a minister of agriculture for example it'll be someone who probably studied plant botany or agriculture or farming or something like that. And he'll have a staff, a large staff of very well-qualified people whose field of work that is, and he'll also be answerable to somebody whose job is to coordinate what he's doing with all the other departments and what they're doing. So they, quite contrary to Michael Gove,

you know, we've had enough of the experts. Yeah. They say the experts are people who know what they're talking about. Right. That's why we like having them around. So we don't make stupid mistakes. Let's see what your response to the legend on the back of that okay accidental erasure it's interesting that you should pick this one because just a few days ago I had a very good instance of an accidental erasure it wasn't really an erasure, but it was an omission. I was working

on something, and it was one of those days where I had all sorts of interruptions all through the day, people dropping things off and these kinds of things arriving, you know, pieces of work and so on. And I was working on it, trying to work on a piece, trying to keep my mind on it. And another interruption for about half an hour, and I went back into the piece and hit play, and suddenly it sounded really wonderful and clear. I thought, ooh, that's a nice feeling. And I realised that just before I had gone out

to deal with the last interruption, I had switched something off so that I could focus on one of the other elements. So I'd taken out one of the main elements of the thing and forgotten to switch it back on again. So that became the whole beginning of the piece, just with that big omission. So I didn't erase it.

A lot of your stuff seems to be about removing things. Yeah, it's nice to see how little you need to do to still make something because the whole temptation with this kind of technology is to keep adding to keep adding and to keep processing to keep doing more and more activity but it's an interesting thing that you notice that as a listener you require far less action than you do as a maker. When you're in the maker hat, you're always trying to do more, to fill the spaces, not to leave any page unturned, to screwdriver every moment of the thing. Because you feel that you're working harder and people will appreciate it. Yeah, I think that's what it is. You like to think you're working hard.

I noticed this actually years and years ago when I would make something at one speed, one tape speed, and then I'd switch it to half speed and listen to it and think, oh, that's much better. It's got exactly half as much activity as I put in it, and it's better. Yeah. So I was alert to that idea that you have to take yourself out of the maker mode sometimes and put yourself into the listener mode and you will make

different decisions so you would be always a guy that would generally slow things down rather than speed things up because there's people like Prince and and Ween I don't know if you know the band Ween yeah yeah they love to speed things up. Frank Zappa, I guess, he was up for speeding everything up at certain points and making it sound kind of crazy and cartoonish. That's the problem for me. It does sound crazy and cartoonish, and I don't like it so much then. I mean, I like hearing people playing very fast. For instance, I've been absolutely entranced recently

by this drummer called Jojo Mayer do you know who he is? No I don't. He's a drummer who started listening to drum and bass and that kind of computer-based music where the rhythms are incredibly fast impossibly fast square pusher exactly and he learned to play them so he plays like that and it's fantastic to watch. It's just amazing to see someone playing like that. Yeah. In fact, I love that thing about the fact that if you do something on a computer that kind of replicates and then exceeds a human player,

some human player is going to say, oh, no, I can do better than that. And so they step above it, you know. And I had a very, very nice thing happen. I often tell people that the best concert I ever saw was this show in 1995 when I was working in Montreux with David. And coming back from the studio one evening,

I heard this amazing music playing. The Montreux Festival was on and I found my way to the concert hall and I went in it was Michelle Ndege Ocello who I knew and liked before anyway but I'd never seen her play and I'd never heard her with a big band like that it was an amazing show and I it just changed all my thoughts about rhythm. Anyway, about a month ago, I found on YouTube part of that concert. I thought, wow. The actual one that you'd seen?

The very one. Yeah. And I thought, oh, that's amazing. And I'm watching it, and I suddenly realized that the drummer was a young Jojo Mayer who I had just discovered about three years ago doing this drum and bass stuff. But he was the drummer in that show. So it was a very interesting circle to be completed.

It's gratifying when things link up. Yes, my taste was somehow consistent over that period of time. Do you go on surfing missions on YouTube, swinging from one video to the next? At breakfast time, I do. Uh-huh. If the news is too depressing. Yeah, yeah.

I go onto YouTube. Yeah, I do. I particularly, for some reason, like drummers. I love watching good drummers and seeing what they're doing because it's to me it's it's so much something that is almost unique to our music you know to modern popular music that there is no drumming tradition anything like that in western classical music and even if you think of folk musics and so on the drummingming is all pretty simple. It's not until you get this infusion from, you know, Africa, basically, via Brazil or Cuba or Haiti or New Orleans or whatever,

then you start getting all this fantastically syncopated stuff that makes modern drumming. You're not a drummer yourself, are you? No, that's probably why I'm so fascinated by it. Yeah, yeah. I'm a hopeless drummer. Do you think you can learn to be decent as a drummer, or is it just something that you either have or you don't,

that sense of rhythm? I think you could learn to be decent. I don't know whether you could learn to be great. Yeah. Because one thing I notice about drummers is they never stop drumming. You know, everyone you know who's a drummer is always doing this sort of yes yes the little paradiddles everywhere they're always doing that but then you know a weird not very flashy drummer can sometimes be just the ticket oh yes mo tucker obviously sure stands out sure yes yes you don't have to be

you don't have to be hyper technical and in fact a lot of the great funk drummers don't do much but what they do is so good that it's worth it you know yeah yeah so you've never have you ever accidentally wiped a lot of work um yes or lost a drive yeah quite recently i um was working on a piece for most of the day and i had a quite serious crash and it i thought it had all gone so i thought okay i'm still in the same frame of mind. I'm just going to start again. I think I can remember what I was doing. And that's always quite difficult because I'm using often chains of processes and so on with all their separate values set.

But I thought I could probably do it. And I reconstructed the piece. And then I discovered that actually it hadn't crashed. It had just reappeared under a different name. I don't know how that happened. So I then had two versions of the piece, which was quite interesting. And they were incredibly close. I was very impressed by my ability to...

Get back in the same place. To recall the whole process. Because in the past, I've sort of argued against doing that. Because I've sometimes been in studios where there was an erasure oh it's terrible if you just get into that thing of you know somebody saying no no the guitar isn't the same weren't the drums a bit more it's just hopeless it can go on for days so my usual policy if I'm working with other people is to say if something gets lost just to say it's, it's lost, let's go on and do something new.

Don't even try to replicate it, just let's forget it. But I wondered if I could do it on my own, and I think one person can possibly do it, to their own satisfaction anyway. And then there are stories about you following the oblique strategy cards to the letter, which sometimes are asking you to jettison everything you've done. If it was good, we probably wouldn't have been it. Right. But if you come up with that card that says destroy everything,

and there is one of the cards that says that, and you find you're incredibly reluctant to follow it, then you shouldn't follow it. The point about the cards is not to boss you about exactly but to to make you think in a different way yeah so if that i'm sure if that card came up in that situation you'd say okay well what could we destroy so it would be a way of thinning the thing out really but the cards work quite well i i'm i use them just sometimes just to refresh the direction of things because you get into creative habits yeah of course you resort to the same old tricks over and over again and

just to wake yourself up it's sometimes good to um turn it over i've always wondered what my response to the card accretion would be oh really yeah what's what what would you do with accretion i don't know i'm not even sure what it means i would accrete something uh-huh um so it means to build something up by addition okay essentially it means keep doing more of the same thing i think that's that's the way i would read it there's another one which is sort of related to that which is not building a wall but making a brick um so so that's sort of the opposite of accretion building a wall is a is an accretive process if you like making a brick is sort of trying to make the fundamental unit which you can then accrete so how do you make that unit what's

it going to be what what should it be is it you know is it a single beat or is it a rhythm or is it a loop or something like that? So it's sort of moving your vision to a level of detail that it might not have been at otherwise. Yeah. I remember the first time I worked with Paul Simon, he said, okay, well, let's, we'll start on, you know, nine o'clock Monday or whenever it was. We'll just be getting some things set up. So if you come to the studio at 11 we'll be be ready for you then so i turned up at 11 and paul was listening to this tiny little fragment of guitar that kind of went do not play it again please

once more Once more. Da-da. Da-da. He says, yeah. Can you drop me in between the da-da and the da-da? So the engineer's going, da-da. Da-da. Trying to record this tiny, tiny fragment of guitar playing. Anyway, he carries on like this for about an hour and a half. It took a long, long time. Then he said to me, so what do you think of it so far and i'd heard nothing else and i said i said paul this is like inviting someone into a

great big field and you're standing there with a single house brick and you say to him what do you think of my new house yeah make yourself comfortable so i wonder if he was always like that or is that something that um garfunkel would have yanked him out of do you think back in the day i don't know i don't i don't know much about the relationship between them except i was told quite a funny story once which was that um one of the things they always argued about was who was louder on the mic you know so there was always a big thing with the engineer about balancing them properly and they were apparently always arguing about you know no no he's louder than me he's got to take

him down a bit and so it was to do with how far you stood you know from the mic and so on there was very strict regulation no you've got to be six inches from the mic or three inches whatever it was and so they they didn't play together for years and years and years then they got this comeback tour this very big tour in about 2009 i think and the story i heard was so they finally come out walk to the mics in the sound. And the first thing one of them says to the other is, you're too close to the mic. In fact, Paul told me that story, I think. And he also told me that they had, as a cameo in the set, they had the Everly Brothers.

The Everly Brothers did five songs. My goodness. Exactly the same story. Yeah. They were always arguing about who was being favoured on the mic. Too loud or that engineer is always favouring you. Once you're in that relationship, it's hard to derail it, isn't it? Yeah.

I think those paranoias last a very long time. Yeah. What is the point? Oh my gosh, this is such a big question. So that's something I've heard you talking about before. And obviously it's something that everybody asks themselves from time to time, most creative people would. But what are the circumstances that lead you to ask that question and how do you resolve that situation for yourself? Well, I first started asking myself this question when I was about 17. I had a girlfriend and she had a very interesting mother. I became very friendly with her mother. Her mother was a sort

of self-taught disciple of the logician Karl Popper. Karl Popper wrote some very, you know, fairly dense books about the philosophy of science, really. Anyway, I became friendly with the mother, and she had a sort of salon outside Cambridge in a caravan, and some quite big scientists would hang out around there um francis crick watson and um bondy was there and various other scientists and it was quite an interesting place for me to be at that age because it was a high level of conversation anyway she liked me and liked having me around and was very nice to me and didn't object to me sleeping with her daughter, which I thought was...

It's always a bonus. It wasn't very nice to. And one day she said to me, I've always liked you, but I really don't understand why somebody with a mind like yours would want to waste it by being an artist. That's what she said.

You were at art school at that point, were you? Yes. And that really sort of stung, I thought. So ever since then... Why did that throw you off then? I would have thought you would immediately dismiss that as just being a foible of hers. No, no, I really respected her opinion about things.

She was a very, very intelligent woman. And I'd never really met anyone like her who who had such a an independent mind about so many things she she was one of those people who kind of made up her whole philosophy herself really she'd arrived at her thoughts quite independently from... And she didn't come in a package. You know, most people, you hear two or three ideas from them. You sort of know what package they come from.

Yeah. I'm sure I'm the same as anybody else in that respect. You sort of... Oh, yes, he probably reads that paper and he probably, like... You can kind of get the whole thing. But with her, she was constantly surprising in that none of it fitted together in the normal way. And yet if you questioned her about it, it became consistent.

You saw the consistency of it. Anyway, so she asked me that question, and I thought about that and have continued to think about it ever since. Why do people make art? What is the reason for the existence of art? A, why do people make it? And B, why do other people want to see it? Why do we all want to have art in our lives? So of course, this involved me in a set of questions about what does it mean? What does art mean? what is it? And I concluded finally that art is everything we don't have to do.

So any area of our lives where we engage in non-functional stylisation is art. That's where we're doing art. So that would include, therefore, not only symphonies and Cezannes, but cake decoration and earrings and funny ways of walking and... Fancy cooking. Fancy cooking, anything. All those things where we start to add a creative dimension to something that we don't need to.

We could just eat pretty much the same stuff every day and we could all wear Chairman Mao jackets and so on, but we don't actually. Even when we are told to conform we still slightly stylize as much as we're allowed to within that so my question is what is what is it doing for us that that we do that and also relevant that everybody else on earth seems to do it as well we don't know of any human cultures where that isn't the case we don't know of people who don't do art just like we don't know of people who don't do religion there isn't a culture without religion and there isn't a culture without art religion you can sort of understand as being everybody wrestling with mortality.

Yes, that's right. That sort of makes more sense. And trying to find a way of entertaining some kind of hope for the future, thinking there is a plan to it all. Did you come to any conclusions? Yes, lots of conclusions. And I'm going to just talk about one of them for the moment. So we all know that children learn through playing. Everybody understands that when kids are doing things like tipping liquid out of cups and playing with stones and building things and singing songs and so on, we know that that's all part of their way of coming to understand the world, both physically and socially and intellectually and so on. And nobody says,

why are those children wasting their time doing that? Why don't they do something useful? You know that that's what children have to do. That's their way of becoming acquainted with reality. So I came up with this idea that children learn through play and adults play through art so i think what we're doing when we're making art we're continuing that process that children do and which we're sort of told to stop doing after a certain age you know by 11 plus, you're supposed to be getting serious and doing serious work and homework and putting in the hours and sort of thing.

But throughout their lives, adults are engaging in this kind of play that we call art. And they're either doing it vicariously by watching other people doing it, going to the movies or going to galleries, or they're doing it themselves by doing versions of it, you know, styling their hair or wearing their clothes in an interesting way or finding new ways of telling stories or whatever. All of those things I think are art. And I think we do it because we are, our primary power as as beings as creatures is that we're imaginative creatures that's the only thing that humans have got over the animals actually the the fact that we can

imagine we can imagine a bridge and then build it we can imagine a new kind of treatment of an illness and then implement it. We can imagine, and we have to practice imagining all the time. We're born with the equipment to do it, but we aren't born with the capability of doing it. We develop that through life, and we develop it through play and through art, I think. So this is one answer to the what is the point question. This is one answer to the what is the point question.

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first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Oh, sun is nearly down now the air is getting a little bit bitey it is very apocalypse now over there on the horizon and i'm like uh eastlia's Colonel Kurtz, heading home to sit in my palace, drip water on my bald dome. What? That sounds... Okay. So, Brian Eno. Whoa. Thank you so much to him for meeting me. thanks to his assistant joe rendall for diary juggling

if you're listening to this joe thanks for helping me arrange the meeting really appreciate it anyway when i got back home after meeting him that first time i wrote down some notes and i thought i'd share with you this small section. When our time is up, Brian goes to the loo. I can hear him singing loudly to himself while he's in there. Not a song I recognise. Exciting to hear that voice in full swing. He continues singing as he emerges. It's a contrast with how he's been the rest of the time, not shy but softly spoken and undemonstrative. He stops singing and says, Adam, look at the colours, as he points to a couple of opaque Perspex light boxes sitting one on top of the other on a table in the corner of

the studio, a couple of art pieces he's been working on. The boxes are both square with several smaller squares within. The outer and inner squares change colour very slowly, independent of each other. As Eno emerges from the loo, every part of the squares has turned the same colour. The odds against that happening are astronomical, he says delightedly. Then, turning his attention back to me, he smiles, shakes my hand, and softly clasps my shoulder. It's time for Mr. Eno's next appointment. And your next appointment with Mr. Eno is now! So join me in part two for a talk about writing pop songs, So join me in part two for a talk about writing pop songs,

insights into making the classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne, and hear Brian's response to my sketch about him working on the album Low, the track Vassava, with David Bowie and co-producer Tony Visconti, doing more than people think on this record. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support. Thanks to Matt Lamont for conversation editing. And thanks very much to ACAST for hosting this podcast. They were anxious to point out that the analytics I quoted in the context of the quartermasters, i.e. the listening figures for the very end of the podcast, were solely for the ACAST platform,

and not necessarily indicative of the listening habits of the podcats as a whole over various other platforms. Anyway, I still think of you as the quartermasters. But thanks to ACAST for their continued support of this podcast. Download their app and check out their many other excellent shows, why don't you? There's lots of them out there. For now, take very good care and I'll see you in part two. I love you. Bye! Bye. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe.

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