Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Arena AUTUMN/WINTER 1990 - by Steve Beard

BRIAN ENO

Techno monk

Brian Eno is lying uncomfortably on the grass in his back garden cupping a hand over the microphone of my tape recorder. It's a thick summer afternoon in the flatlands of Suffolk, a space of slow time and quick noise, banded by the deep blare of traffic, the buzz of conversation and the peripheral scat of air turbulence. A complex pattern of sound waves.

Idle thoughts prompted not only by Eno's continuing interest in the form he almost singlehandedly invented in 1979 with Music For Airports, but also by the way he speaks about making music. It's all "frequency ranges" and "transmission losses". Or it's music as "the amplification of the movement of atoms".

It's this kind of talk which has won Eno a reputation for cerebral remoteness. But what I soon learn from meeting the guy is that he's surprisingly relaxed, humorous and open. He laughs a lot, curses a fair amount. He even does funny voices.

He looks younger than his forty-two years, much less austere than he usually photographs. Thinning, short blond hair, alert blue eyes, and a compact, mobile frame.

If he's so analytical about his craft, it's only because he's so devoted to it. His ambient recordings, even his film soundtrack samplers, are not abstract exercises in form so much as meditations on the textural crush of sound.

"It's a matter of creating a landscape which is credible to its very edges. You warn to hear to the limits of your hearing, because then you realize that there are things outside. I like that idea a lot, the notion that there's a continuum of sound which you happen to have landed in somewhere. I like strange balances for that reason, because it reinforces the feeling that you might not be in the best spot to listen."

This, ultimately, is the big difference between Eno and other avant-garde composers like La Monte Young or Steve Reich. Where they're technical, he's still funky.

"I remember giving a lecture in New York where I was criticizing Steve Reich - who I really like as a composer - for a piece of his called Drumming. I said that it was a great piece, but if he'd been a pop musician he'd have used good sounding drums instead of such pathetic little bongos. And he would. As it is, it's like a diagram of a great piece. There's no sense of the possible sensuality of the sound."

Eno listens to a lot of Nigerian pop - the expected outré reference - but is still a big fan of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. He insists that pop is historically significant because it's the only musical form to have taken sound seriously as a subject of composition. Like with hip hop's use of sampling and collage. "I think a lot of hip hop is very avant-garde indeed. If it had been produced by balding intellectuals like me at Stanford, everybody would be saying how incredibly brilliant it was."

Which is typical of Eno's perverse modesty. He's already been there with David Byrne. Their New York studio effort, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, was mixing polyrhythms and sample chants nine years ago, and it remains one of the seminal pop events of the last decade. But then, Eno's career is littered with casual triumphs. The brace of eccentric rock albums - particularly Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) - the three David Bowie collaborations, the input for Talking Heads' best album, Remain In Light. He's been so consistently ahead of his time, that he can be forgiven for the lapse in taste which led him to produce U2.

But if his experience with the immensely successful Irish rock band shows anything, it's that there's increasingly less misunderstanding between the conceptual scratchings of the avant-garde and the cash register rattle and hum of the record industry. When Eno made what was a very bold decision in the late '70s to abandon the conventional song structure of rhythm and blues, he got crucified.

"It was fucking difficult for a while. I'd betrayed my early supporters by not being the next David Bowie, and they really hated me for it. And of course the serious music scene was all sewn up. So I didn't belong anywhere for a long time, I still don't. I don't have a place here. Because England is the worst place to do this, they're such shits. Really, English cynicism is such a disgusting attitude. We really have developed it beyond any other country and it's a great shame."

Up until five years ago, Eno had been living in New York, having moved there from London in 1978. Now he resides close to his family, holed up in an English country pile in the small market town where he was born. Does it bother him to be back in England? "Yeah, it does actually. It pisses me off."

Even so, there are compensating distractions. He's collaborating with John Cale in his home studio, producing something "more rhythmic" than his most recent offerings. Plus he's kept busy working on the video installations which have brought him increasing renown over the past ten years.

He's actually only in the country for less than half of each year. Most of his time is spent in transit, leading the life of the post-industrial airport nomad, the vagabond scholar.

Eno is that rarest of breeds, a suburban cosmopolitan, a genuine English intellectual. Someone should give him a university chair fast before he quits our grimy shores for good.