THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.38 - BRIAN ENO PART TWO

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

The second 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. And I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing listeners? Adam Buxton here. Welcome to podcast number 38, part 2 of a conversation with Brian Eno.

338, part two of a conversation with Brian Eno. Just a little bit of context for some of the things that I talk about with Brian in this part. This conversation, just a reminder, was recorded at Brian Eno's West London studio earlier this year, February 2017. When I was still wrestling with a bit of a cough cold and um it was very shortly after brian had released an album called reflection one of his long ambient pieces a single track 54 minutes in length in the tradition of his album thursday afternoon from 1985 i think i'm right in saying that that was the first time he'd tried that long single track format was on that album Thursday afternoon. Very nice it is too.

And we talk a little bit about the business of putting something like that together and how it works as a creative endeavor. We also talk about one of my favorite albums that eno worked on with talking heads front man david byrne my life in the bush of ghosts from 1981 which is one of those albums you either know or you don't really i don't think any of those tracks were ever sort of big hits or used in movies i may be wrong about that oh no i'll tell you a film that used one of those tracks were ever sort of big hits or used in movies i may be wrong about that oh no i'll tell you a film that used one of those tracks was wall street and which one did they use america is waiting i think america is waiting for a message of some sort or another oliver stone used it very well in that film Wall Street. It's just a terrific album,

one of the first albums to really exploit sampling, in particular snippets of conversation and chanting. Some of them just recorded off American radio stations, others, as you will hear, taken from records of Muslim chanting and that kind of thing. Gosh, I love that album so much. So it's kind of a thrill to talk a little bit about that with Brian. But we began our conversation by picking up more or less where we left off on the previous conversation and talking about being creative and judging whether what you're making is actually any good or not. So anyway, hope you enjoy this. I'll ramble a little bit more at the end, but for the time being, here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's tune the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. So I don't know whether I said last time that one thing I've learned after a long time is that my judgment of something when I'm doing it is completely fallible. I just have no way of knowing how well I'm doing on something. I can be working on something and be very excited about it and then a few days later I listen again and I think that was really quite boring. There's nothing new about it at all. And then the reverse, which is even more surprising, to be working on something and thinking, here I go again, same old thing.

And then coming back to it a few days later and thinking, this is really, really good. Much better than I thought. And your sense of being able to judge those moments has not improved over time? Not really, no. With experience? No. No. No, in fact, even I came in this morning and I saw this piece.

Whatever I do, I always demo everything and I put it into iTunes. I just make a rough mix of it because otherwise I would just forget. Especially when I work late at night. If I don't make a little mix of it and put it into my archive, it'll be gone forever. I'll never remember it. Right. So I had this piece. I thought, oh, yeah, that's interesting.

I'd forgotten about that. I did it last Thursday evening or something. And I remember doing it and thinking, oh, God, I'm still here. It's late. I'm tired. Do I really want to? Oh, yeah, I might as well finish it anyway I listened to it today and I thought that is really an unusual piece of music and I was thinking gosh I I have done a couple of things like that they fall into a category that I

call unwelcome jazz uh-huh and while you were making it, though, were you deliberately trying to derail yourself and wrong foot yourself? Not really, no. No, I mean, all I ever try to do is to interest myself in some way or another. And so sometimes in order to get there, I have to do a bit of derailing. But the derailing isn't the point of it. The point is to try to find myself somewhere that I've never been before. point of it the point is to try to find myself somewhere that i've never been before and sometimes the funny thing is that sometimes you you are somewhere you've never been before but you don't quite notice it you're not just not alert you're not realizing that you're already

there you know and so with this piece which i as i said i i remember thinking that was a waste of an evening and then today putting it on and thinking that's really good that could go somewhere you know oh how satisfying yeah and how does it work I'm always curious about how you what the process is for the longer pieces that you do reflection came out recently yeah that's just under an hour and so how does it work with something like that where you're working with a bit of you're working with someone else who designs the code for yes some of the things that are happening to the music i i nearly always start them in the evening i start them because i've usually i've got something to write i've got lots of letters to write or i've got a proposal to make or something like that shall i pour you some tea by the way oh yeah thank you and and one way i can keep myself interested in the job of

writing proposals etc is by making a piece of music at the same time it sounds like a funny thing to do you are multitasking so what i do is i i go into the studio there and i set up a very simple musical proposition of some kind which might be a group of slow loops playing against each other not not synchronized but so they keep crossing each other in different and forming different relationships so then i start writing or doing whatever I'm doing and I'm listening and I'm working away and I'm thinking, that's not a bad piece, but there's much too much of that note or those sounds are too dissociated from each other or something like that.

So then I wander back into there, fiddle around a little bit, change some things, come back out again refreshed for the for further writing that's the nice part about it that the two activities sort of refresh each other in a way and then I start working again and I I keep trying to make the music useful basically to say what do I need it to be in order to make a good working situation for myself? And a working situation usually means a thinking situation. What kind of atmosphere do I need in here to be perfectly happy sitting in this chair,

writing proposals and writing, basically? There are events that happen within that long piece. It's not all just looping and looping and looping yeah there is a structure to it that's always been the case with your longer pieces isn't that right yeah and so how do you work out that structure because you don't want it to be too eventful because then then it'll throw you out of the mood that you've created that's right so that that's what the listening part is about so most of the composing is actually listening i'm using software synths generally or samples

and tinkering with the sound so so it sits in the right place you know in in the right place in my consciousness is what i'm talking about really and then because the it's quite hard to describe this to people who haven't seen it being done but because a lot of the events there are statistical that's to say they they are the result of saying something like do this 20 of the time and this 15 of the time and this 15% of the time and that 7% of the time and then knowing that at some points all three of those things are going to be happening together or any two of them you know so you have to listen to wait for those things to come around and see what happens when the rules cross each other like that and that's where you get to

this issue of how eventful do you want it to be i like it a lot when there are what i call sports in in gardening you know they gardeners talk about sports no i've never heard that oh have you not no well when you're hybridizing plants and you have all your plants planted out and you see one comes up that's different from all the others that's a sport so so very often that's the one you'll try to grow from if you're growing you know pansies or something like that and you've got got one that has a very distinct pattern on it or a funny combination of colors that's the sport and so then you try to take seed from that to grow copies of itself right and of course the tendency is for in nature is for sports to disappear because you get this

thing of regression to the mean so i've been working now with peter who helps me with these pieces i've been saying what can we do that's analogous to that if if we get a sport which is really an unlikely combination of statistics in nature sports don't disappear immediately they do disappear eventually generally but they don't disappear immediately so can we make the system recognize when it has produced a sport and reproduce them at some later time so that's what we're working on now it's a very very arcane bit of theory that people wouldn't associate with making music very much uh-huh but a sport though isn't it, that's an aesthetic consideration, isn't it? Yeah.

So how is it possible for mathematics to spot something like that? That's a taste thing, isn't it? Well, it's an aesthetic consideration, but it's also, in this case, it's the product of some particular actions, you know. So if, as I said, you have number of um rules that say things do this for 10 of the time that for 14 of the time that for 11 of the time and that for two percent of the time you can predict that for maybe 0.1 of the time it will be doing all those four things it'll be very rare that all those rules combine but there will be a time when they

do so the system could know that those are the sports actually so the system doesn't make a taste judgment about them it just knows that or we hope we can make it know that at some moments all of those rules are being followed at the same moment producing this very unusual flower that you might only ever hear once jingle jingle I can't you see where I am coming from The discipline of writing a more formal pop song, first chorus, first chorus, middle eight, chorus, chorus, that's a whole different set of tools. It's very hard, yeah. Nobody should ever think that that's a whole different set of tools it's very hard yeah nobody should ever think that that's easy

to do you know there used to be this thing when i first started making music that jazz musicians used to think that oh they'd go and make a lot of money by knocking off a pop hit because it was always considered then that you know rock music was a sort of simplistic, inferior kind of music and that anyone who was good at music would be able to do those things easily. Well, it turns out it's not easy at all. It might look simple and the ingredients might appear limited, but to get a good one is very hard. And when you're writing them and have written them in the past, have you been trying to get close to the more conventional songs

that you like to listen to, the sort of do-what music, for example, and your songs have just been failed attempts at doing that? Or were you deliberately, you know, I love your songs, so I'm not sort of saying that they're crap but was that the process or was it you thinking well i don't want to do something that conventional i want to plan my own faro and write a song that's a bit off kilter yeah more like that yeah so for example i remember very early on when i started writing songs thinking if I make a decision never to use the personal pronoun I never to use you in the singular or love I thought if I make a decision

never to use any of those three words in a song I will already be in a very tiny area that nobody has explored very much. So that's kind of the trick, I think, is to say, okay, there's one target and everybody's shooting at it, the love song. What about if I just invent another target? And so what's it going to be like, for instance, I very early on thought, I don't want to sing about me. I want to sing about us. So I did a lot of songs that were in the first person plural. You know, like We Climbed and We Climbed, Oh How We Climbed. That to me is immediately more interesting.

That evokes all sorts of human experiences that are not dealt with in love songs basically being part of a community in fact nearly everything i've done that had a lyrical content was about being part of a group of people rather than about being me yes i mean there were exceptions obviously you didn't always that you've got i'll come running and that sort of first verse. Yeah, okay, that's an exception. That was a sort of attempt at a slightly perverted love song. I think it's the only love song I ever wrote, actually. It's a funny kind of love, though. Why do you say that? It's sort of a...

It sounds fairly straightforwardly romantic to me. Does it? Yeah. I'm trying to think of the words. I'll find a place somewhere in the corner. I'm going to waste the rest of my days just watching patiently from the window. Yeah, it's the song of a voyeur, really. Uh-huh.

It's a watcher rather than a doer, you know. And the kind of apex of his desires is to be able to tie somebody's shoes rather than have sex with them. Okay. So you were thinking sort of explicit submission i was thinking sort of nice romantic submission i'll come i'll do anything you want i'll come running to tie your shoes no i was thinking more of the kind of person who's so timid that he hides away and looks out from behind the curtain and doesn't have the nerve to do anything at all except dream yeah of this wonderful moment when he can actually tie her shoes

it's so funny isn't it because it's you don't need to know that of course to enjoy the song clearly there's an art to keeping things sufficiently vague yeah that it is possible for the listener to inhabit that world that's's right. And I think those are generally the best songs. That's why radio plays are so much better than television plays, I think, because they don't give you much information. There's so much less information in a radio play, which means there's so much more activity on the part of your own imagination to fill in the rest of the picture, you know.

Absolutely. I don't like it when lyrics are very on the nose i can't bear it that's why i don't like political songs that's right i was thinking about that yeah because you know obviously it's not a question of not wanting to engage with politics it's a question of it being leaving no room for your own imagination yeah that's right it being too didactic. In a sense, it belittles the listener because it says to them, you are going to take away exactly what I put in. And what I always think is much more interesting is to plant a seed in somebody's mind for it to grow into whatever their mind wants it to grow into.

You know, to accept that they are co-creators, essentially. For instance, if you think of those early Steve Reich tape pieces, where you have loops going very quickly on and on. And they fall in and out of phase. Going in and out of phase, that's right. And your brain starts to become more and more intrigued by the tiny elements of the sound that you would have missed on only one or a few cycles.

So you really create that piece in your head. I mean, the composition is very simple in a way. The effect is very complex because your brain is doing a lot of work. Gavin Breyer's Jesus Blood is a similar thing, isn't it? That's an adventure you go on, a tremendous emotional arc despite the fact that it's just these two elements. It's a brilliant piece of music, that.

The frame around that sad old voice, the frame gets more and more gorgeous and fabulous, you know. It's like gilded and gilded and gilded and at the centre of it there's still that sad voice which becomes more and more emotional because the frame gets bigger, you know. It's a wonderful piece, that.

It really is. Never bow with me yet Never bow with me yet. Never failed me yet. Jesus' blood never failed me yet. This one thing I know, for he loved me so. This is the beginning section of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars, originally released in 1975 and clocking in at nearly 26 minutes. Throughout the track, Gavin Bryars' instrumental accompaniment to the singing fades in very gradually.

I found a piece online in which Gavin Bryars himself explained how the track came about. He says, In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song, sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads. And one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song, sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads, and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song, Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. This was not ultimately used in

the film, and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one. When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. Never found me dead Jesus' blood Never found me dead Disgraceful Only love Jesus' blood I think it's such a clear statement of an idea, really, about finding music and doing something with it.

Oh, I love it. I was thinking as well about those kinds of things, listening to Bush of Ghosts again the other day, and thinking about Quran. And that was a track, for those of you who don't know the album or don't know the original version of the album that eventually was removed from later editions. Because it featured, what was the deal with that? Where did you get the original chanting?

It came from an album called Voices in the World of Islam, which was on Turnabout Records. Is that still available? I don't know. It's a fantastic album. It should be available. Yes, so that particular track used the voices of some Algerian Muslim men singing from the Koran. And in my completely irreverent, atheistic way,

I just dropped the voices in wherever they sounded good in the music. And was that a piece of music that you generated before you heard that record? Yeah. Well, yes, we had a start and then I put the voices in and then we finished it around the voices, as it were. So, yes, the piece of music pre-existed the finding of the voices. And then, of course, what I didn't know at that time was that the Koran is regarded as in itself holy, as the word of God or Allah. So to use it in a way like that was considered quite blasphemous. So about a year after the

record came out in 1981 you got a letter that's right asking us if we would withdraw it and that was the world council of islam that's right and it wasn't so much the actual words as much as it being married with the music that was a problem. Is that right? I think it was because, of course, I didn't understand what they were singing about. Yeah. And I just dropped it in to the track wherever I felt like it. So I had a pause button. I had it on a cassette in that case.

I transferred to a cassette. And I just used to use the pause button on the cassette as a way of making the words I was using fall rhythmically into the music. So I was chopping words right in the middle. It didn't mean anything to me. It was just the sounds that you were interested in. Yeah. yeah so i think um i can understand they were a bit sore about that because it must have been quite harsh on a on the ear of anybody who understood who could hear arabic um but funnily

enough that was the second time that that record was withdrawn because on the first version of the album which was never released we had used the the voice of a Christian evangelist radio preacher called Elizabeth Kuhlman, who had the most terrifying voice. She sounded like this. Which track was that? It was the track that became... Jezebel Spirit. Jezebel Spirit. That's right. And she talked like this, with this sinister,

horrible, horrible voice. Anyway, we had that song, the song that became Jezebel Spirit, on the first version we made of the album was her voice. It was only when we made the whole album, put it all together i said to david i said you know what we probably should ask permission for using some of these things yeah this was back no one had ever really used sample significantly not really no no it was a kind of an we were doing it like art students you know yeah stick that on there and a bit of that there and not even thinking that there are rights and all that sort of thing so we got in touch with turnabout records and they were extremely nice and helpful i've never forgotten

their kindness and they said great idea that's fine mention the name of the album on the cover and in fact everyone was fine except the estate of elizabeth coolman who said if you gave us 10 million dollars we would not let you release this wow and we'd already pressed the albums the covers were done everything was finished they'd listened to it had they or was it just in principle we sent it okay so they listened and they and they they heard the sinister atmosphere i think they heard what we heard. Yeah. So we had to destroy all the pressings of that. And all the covers and everything. So that all disappeared. And then we released the album.

And it had the World Council of Islam after us. So that was then withdrawn. And then a third version came out. so there were three versions of that album why did you not use the music track for quran again because it's so strong anyway wouldn't it work without the vocal or with a different vocal did we not i can't remember no it was left off entirely i think very very hungry replaced very very hungry that's right yes this is a good question i guess we didn't think of it i didn't realize that we hadn't reused that this is an instrumental section of quran you can find the full version on youtube How often do you get to hear these bits and pieces that you do? Is it only when they're played to you,

or do you ever go back and listen to them yourself of your own volition? Very rarely. I find it an uncomfortable experience mostly uh-huh it's uncomfortable in two completely opposite ways one is in the sense of you hear it and you think jesus i could have done that so much better that's one thing you think but the other thing you think sometimes is where on earth did that come from? Who was the person who made that? You don't recognize yourself in it at all. How did I have the courage or carelessness to leave that thing in that condition?

It's a little bit like I was very shocked recently listening to superstition, Stevie Wonder's superstition. Have you heard that recently? No, not recently. It's amazingly sloppy it's not all right because now all those things would be quantized completely sorted out you know they would like the riff they would find one really good example and loop it through the song you know well first of all he's playing on two clavinets he does it he doubles it and doubling is so off and i'm sure part of the thrill of that song is that you you hear somebody totally confident about what they're doing so confident that they don't bother to tidy it up

yeah so so anyway all this is a long way of saying that listening back to things is a very mixed problematic you know sometimes you just think god i wish i still had some of what that person had okay of course you know that you now have other things that that person didn't have but nonetheless you can't help sometimes be nostalgic about the sort of insane, gleeful carelessness of your younger self. Idiot glee. Idiot glee, yeah. And it's false to pretend that you can. That's the thing.

To fake it is really bad. You know, when you see these older bands still trying to write basically really bad versions of what they started out doing. It's just not, there's no point in that at all, I think. It's embarrassing, in fact. That's always the case, though, isn't it, with almost any type of creative endeavor. If you go back and try and revisit something, it's like these, well, the second Trainspotting movie came out 20 years after the first one. And I think it's got generally positive reviews.

I haven't seen it. But that's an expedition that's so fraught with complications, isn't it? It's going back and you're all old. And Danny Boyle, I think the director, has tried to incorporate some of those themes and address the whole issue of aging and legacies and all that sort of thing that's those are themes he plays with but still i mean it's you're on it's a losing wicket isn't it yeah well i saw the film actually uh-huh and i really really enjoyed it oh yeah and i was so surprised because i had expected to be disappointed, actually. I thought, what a daft thing to try.

Yeah. How can you fail to mess it up, really? But he didn't. And I think he's even set himself up for a part three. Oh, really? Well, there are all these loose ends. Yeah. There's so many loose ends that you think they're thinking of part three.

Good one. He's a clever guy, Danny Boyle. guy very he's a very good director yeah anyway now do you mind if i quote the email that you sent me which sort of started the ball rolling for us being in touch and this was after i'd sent in a question for a six music lecture that you did, the John Peel lecture. And you were taking questions afterwards with Mark Radcliffe. And I texted a question that he read out. I was very excited about that. And then afterwards, you were kind enough to sort of follow it up and say, I never really answered that question of yours on the radio, but ask it again and I'll try and answer it. And you also said,

your Bowie Eno Visconti video is one of the funniest things I've seen on the internet, which I was very happy about. This is a video, listeners, that I did with some animators called the Brothers McLeod. And it was a sketch I did about the recording of the track. How do you pronounce it? Vassava?

Yeah. As part of the album Low. And I'd always, in my mind, felt a bit sorry for Tony Visconti. The whole way that that album was written about and being a longtime Bowie fan and reading a lot about Bowie history, I was surprised when I found out that Tony Visconti had actually produced that record. I assumed that it was a Brian Eno production as a young fan. And I think that's partly because the story of you becoming involved was so much more colorful that everyone focused

on it at the time you know you and bowie and and this trilogy of albums that you made and i always sort of thought like i wonder how that feels for tony visconti i bet he's quite pissed off and then i sort of started hearing little bits and pieces that supported that theory a little bit and so i did this sketch kind of on the one hand to kind of give him his due like to say hey he was there you know and on the other hand to sort of take the piss out of that whole thing that that whole uncomfortable way that credit is accorded and history is written etc so your email continued the video is one of the funniest things i've seen on the internet

unfortunately i keep meeting people who think it's a real depiction of how things were between us in the studio. In reality, Tony was absolutely key to the work we did together. Without him, I think we wouldn't have made it or certainly would have made it less well. So now I feel bad for Tony, who, despite his great sense of humor, must feel a bit fed up with being seen as the overeager outsider trying to get a word in. Because in the in the sketch, your discussions with the Bowie character are punctuated by the Visconti character raising his hand and sort of saying, that's co-producer Tony Visconti doing a lot more than people think on this record. So what have you been up to while I've been away, Brian? Well, I've been working on a piece of music, actually, David.

If you don't like it, I'll use it on one of my weird albums. Do you want to have a listen? Yes, I'd love to hear it. I could use some cheering up. Could you roll the tape for us, please, Tony Visconti? Yeah, sure. I mean, I am co-producing this record, so it's not a big problem for me. Doing a lot of co-production, probably more than people think. Here we go.

And so, I mean, I've heard since that he's okay with it. He tweeted at the time that he thought it was funny. But you're never quite sure. I was never sure, like, is he saying that because he wants to be seen as a good sport? Or is it just like, oh, you know, fuck off. And I was sort of, I mean, I got carried away and I amused myself doing the sketch. But in the back of my mind was like,

I wouldn't feel good if any of these people were annoyed by it. But it must be odd. I'm curious to know what it's like for you seeing versions of yourself coming back at you in various forms and history being written in all sorts of different ways. I find it annoying quite often because there's a tendency, which I'm sure we all have, to try to localize creativity into a few heroes. You know, oh, Lou Reed was so great. Well, actually, the Velvet Underground was great. Okay, it wouldn't have been the Velvet Underground without Lou Reed, but it wouldn't have been without Mo Tucker either,

and it wouldn't have been without Doug Yule or, you know, all the other, John Cale, all the people who were involved. So it's just a sort of shorthand we have. It's so much easier to discuss single people and to kind of put all the credit onto them. And so, you know, having now been involved in lots and lots of collaborative working situations and sort of trying to understand the chemistry of them what makes for a fruitful working situation and what makes for one is not only having heroes it's it's having people who quietly do things well and who who understand what you need to do to keep a situation running. I'll give you a very good example.

It's Dan Lanois, who I've worked with often, both as a collaborator and as co-producer and so on and so on. His perception of what might happen in the future of a piece of music is so clever. So he'll come into the studio early and he'll think i bet you at some point larry is probably going to want to play some percussion so let's set up a percussion corner down there with some mics and get a headphone balance so that when he walks over there puts the headphones on and starts playing i'm ready to record it sounds good in his cans there's not the usual 20 minutes where you say uh give it just hit the can you hit the bongo there oh yeah a bit more on the conga all that bollocks that you normally get yeah so he will do that completely invisibly and then an

idea is caught when it's fresh when it's still adventurous and before it's got normalized out. Because the main effect of time on ideas is to normalize them, to knock the rough edges off. But often the rough edges are the idea. So anyway, I just cited that example of Dan as an example of something that would not figure in any conventional description of a creative process as an important part. You know, it's not like the lead singer who comes out with the great melody or the drummer who does the great fill or whatever, the great guitar solo. It's just somebody thinking, how do we make this situation work? What is it that makes it work?

And that's a big part of the producer's job, presumably, in that. Well, he's a genius at that. But you see, Tony Visconti was that kind of producer as well he's very very good at making an atmosphere where you could do good things you you weren't struggling if you wanted to do something that was a little bit different from the routine it wasn't like a lot of oh that's a tricky to set up never got that from him and funnily enough you do from some people they just don't want to get out of their routine they're sitting down you see producers sit down that's already already a mistake i think everyone should stand up to work did you have an engineer on that record as well then who would be in the chateau with you well the particular track you're

talking about low no no you're talking about yes so that was something that you'd done on your ems i started that on my own yes yeah so david had to go away to paris and uh he said you know the studio's there you might as well use it. So I just started working on something with the thought, if he doesn't want it, I'll do something with it. So I recorded the beginning of that. That's to say most of the music that's in the background of that track, behind the voices, is me playing on my own.

So there wasn't really an engineer then is that all off that one little briefcase synthesizer i think i was actually using a mini moog then ah i think i read that it was an ems it could have been i i that's what they put in the vna exhibition did they yeah oh well they could be right i was working between two synthesizers then i had the ems and i had a mini moog as well okay um so i only had those two so it was one of them i i thought it was a mini moog just the only reason i think that is because the tuning is quite reliable on that track, and the EMS had such bad tuning. I sort of think that it possibly wasn't that one

because it stays in tune for the whole track. Right, right. Sorry, getting very Trainspotter-ish there. Which of these games are you most likely to play, Brian Eno? A video game, a game on your phone, a board game, a parlor game, a mind game, Game of Thrones, or the Game of Love? Board game, parlor game, Game of Love. Okay. And what sort of parlor games? Oh, well... What's your go-to parlor game if you've got

you know clumps no clumps is a great parlor game it may be that i know it under a different name how do you play it it's it's a game where the it's you can only do it with quite a few people so you divide up into teams hopefully three at least and then you have a question master who has a list of things, and they might be things like Jack of Hearts, 1989 Burgundy, the law of conservation of energy, whatever, a random group of things like that. So somebody runs out from each team, and you whisper the clue, law of conservation of energy.

And they have to run back into their team and they have to draw this they can only use uh drawing they mustn't use any words or any non-pictorial clues they they can't you know give you any other way of so they have you have to try to draw the law of conservation of energy right isn't this like win lose or draw i don't know that i think it's a tv show yeah well there's it's almost certain it's like um pictionary yeah there you go a little bit like that right but it's a fantastic game played in teams because it's so frustrating for the person doing the drawing yeah when it's obvious to them what person doing the drawing. Yeah. When it's obvious to them what they're drawing and nobody can get it.

And they're going, England? Isle of Wight? No. Crystal? Castle? Square? Town Square? That sort of thing ends up with people just underlining things a lot. Yes, that's right.

And putting arrows. And going round and round. This, this, this! Why can't you see in my mind? I love that game. just underlining things a lot. Yes, that's right. And putting arrows. And going round and round. This, this, this! Why can't you see in my mind? I love that game. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website I see success.

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So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Rosie, I'm going this way. Oh, it's a flypast from the hairy bullet. So there we go. Brian Eno. Very exciting for me to meet him and talk with him. I hope you enjoyed listening in.

I've put a few links on my blog to some of the things mentioned in that podcast, in that two-parter with Brian, and you'll find them at my currently fairly erratically maintained blog, adam-buxton.co.uk, where you will also find an embryonic merchandise section that I hope will have a few more bits and pieces added to it in the coming months. Check it out! Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support. Thanks to Matt Lamont for conversation editing. And to ACAST for hosting this podcast. And thanks to you for listening. I hope you'll subscribe and join me again for more rambly conversations. Until that time, go carefully out there.

It's crazy. I love you. Bye! There's a little non-ambient goodbye for you there see ya and subscribe Thank you. ស្រូវាប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ Thank you.