Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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BBC SEPTEMBER 28, 2022 - by Staff Writers

BRIAN ENO ON HOW WOODBRIDGE HELPED CREATE AMBIENT MUSIC

The "father of ambient music" has been speaking about the influence of US airbases on his musical education.

Brian Eno, the former synth player with Roxy Music, has worked as a collaborator and producer with world-famous artists and bands including David Bowie, U2 and Coldplay.

Eno returned to his birthplace of Suffolk at the weekend to open the Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival.

He said he was happy ambient music had returned to Woodbridge.

The son of a postman, now in his '70s, Eno lived in Woodbridge for eighteen years.

He attended Ipswich Civic College in the 1960s where he studied painting and experimental music.

The festival audience at St Mary's Church heard about the influence of the nearby US air force bases at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, since vacated by the Americans.

He said Woodbridge then had a population of about 4,000 locals with some 17,000 Americans within a five-mile radius.

He described hordes of large Cadillac cars regularly getting stuck in the narrow Suffolk lanes.

"We had something like eleven or twelve coffee bars with jukeboxes... which had almost exclusively American Southern R&B music," he said.

"So there was an entirely different music world here than almost anywhere in England.

"What was playing in these jukeboxes was so much better than the English version of rock n roll at that time."

Eno said it was those formative experiences that got him "thinking about music".

"What became very clear was that you had to search out good music. You couldn't just switch on the radio and get it automatically," he said.

"I eventually ended up exchanging cassette tapes with other people who were into music, and finding I liked tapes where the music did not change very much, where there was not much variety."

Eno said in the 1960s "albums always had the idea that there had to be variety".

"So you'd have a fast song and a slow song and another fast song. The assumption being, nobody would want to stay in the same mood for more than three-and-a-half minutes," he said.

"I was very clear that I liked staying in the same mood for hours on end if I could.

"I remember I used to take walks towards Kyson Point [overlooking the River Deben estuary] and I used to imagine what would it be like if you could make music like a painting."

Eno said he liked music "that stayed still, so that you were the person that did the moving in relation to them".

"ENDLESS, RATHER STILL, MUSIC"

By the time he got to art school, he had begun listening to left-field classical composers like Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich who were creating what has been termed as minimal music.

Their sounds often had an "intense repetition" that was attractive to the young Eno, but he still felt "it was all a bit too spectacular".

The musician said it was "really here in Woodbridge where I started imagining this idea of a kind of endless, rather still, music".

He began making ambient records in the 1970s.

"I came up with the idea of ambient music. Of course it wasn't just me - there were a lot of people who also felt it in the air and wanted to work in that musical area - I just gave it a name."

Eno was speaking to an audience about his musical connection to the area just before introducing tabla player Talvin Singh and pianist Tom Rogerson.

He ended by saying: "I'm here just to introduce this concert and to say how glad I am that ambient music has come back to Woodbridge. I hope you enjoy it."