Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Uncut JUNE 2022 - by Sam Richards

"IT WAS A MAGICAL SESSION"

Brian Eno on his new collaboration with Hot Chip and Michael Stipe for Earth Day

It's the classic charity song conundrum: do you write about the cause at hand and risk seeming heavy-handed? Or do you ignore it completely, with the potential implication that you don't really care? "Of those two options," muses Brian Eno, "the one I'm much more frightened of is 'didactic and preachy'. I really do not go for songs that tell me what I should be thinking. I go for songs that suggest a world of some kind, an emotional place that you could be. And for me, that's usually enough of a message."

Eno's new song with Hot Chip - designed to raise money for his EarthPercent charity - gets the balance spot-on, conjuring utopias rather than wagging fingers. Line In The Sand is based on a recording Eno made in St Petersburg in 1997 with two dictaphones and an Omnichord, selected by Hot Chip from a tranche of twenty or thirty demo ideas. "It had a really amazing atmosphere and sonic quality to it," explains frontman Alexis Taylor. "I love those '70s records where he's singing, like Another Green World and Here Come The Warm Jets, so just hearing his voice was wonderful."

The original demo recording forms the basis of the final song, expanded upon by Eno and Hot Chip in the latter's East London studio. The words were a collaborative affair, with Eno likening the process to "extracting or mining for lyrics. You keep digging and you get a little glimpse of something. Then another piece comes up and you start to build a picture."

"He doesn't really like the idea of people singing about what they're going through emotionally, so that's quite different from me," says Taylor, who's also just finished a new Hot Chip album to be released in August. "But I tried to tap into the fact that his words are quite musical in their sound, they're playful. It was a magical session really, working with him, which is something I've been wanting to do for years."

"Brian Eno is an incredibly nice, disarming human being," adds Fay Milton of Savages, who plays drums on the track. "I think it's so unusual for someone who's sort of a musical genius and has a huge, legendary back catalogue to be really easy to work with. It wasn't pulling out the Oblique Strategies cards every twenty minutes, it was more like, 'Let's start singing and get this shit done!'"

Milton is heavily involved with Music Declares Emergency, who will receive some of the funds raised by EarthPercent for their campaign to make the music industry more sustainable; they're currently exploring everything from renewable vinyl alternatives to less carbon-intensive ways for bands to tour. Eno says that these I shared goals make musical collaboration easier, citing another new track for the Earth Day project that he's made remotely with Michael Stipe: "On the whole spectrum of human beings, we're fairly close to each other, being bald middle-aged men who sing! But he's also very much directed towards thinking about climate change at the moment, so we had an easy common ground."

Sadly a proposed hook-up with Peter Gabriel didn't happen in time - he's donated an unreleased live track instead - although Eno reveals that he has been working on some of Gabriel's new material, as well as finishing a "whole batch" of his own music. "I've got so much ready to come out now, I'm just not quite sure what form to release it. You know, whether to release a track a day for seven years or something!" Other green worlds await...

Line In The Sand is available on Earth Day, April 22, at earthpercent.bandcamp.com, along with tracks by Coldplay, Peter Gabriel, Anna Calvi, Big Thief and Nile Rodgers