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(dramatic music)
(dramatic music continues)
(computer warbling)
(metallic banging)
(indistinct)
- Something you're playing. (laughing)
(music and voice clips running together)
(computer blipping)
(birds chirping) (goose honking)
(cows mooing)
(tense music)
(energetic music)
- Okay, I better, better get serious.
(serious music)
What I feel when I listen to this is that it needs
punctuation of some kind.
It would be nice if something went...
(Eno imitates booming)
As soon as I hear that, it's a place.
I think about it in terms of geography.
You know, I think I've got the,
I've got something going on down there.
Now I want something going on up there.
I want something in, I want a sky.
(tense music continues)
What else do I want in this world?
Some creatures, something that sounds like life.
I can sometimes stand in that room
and work for six hours
and I'm just making something and it's happening
and I'm happening along with it.
It's my way of making a space for myself.
(energetic music)
A place that I want to be in.
When you create something, you are doing this thing
that humans are very good at, which is imagining.
It's a way of entering another world, looking at its values,
seeing how they work out,
and that tells you something about yourself
that gives you a core from which to take action.
I now have 50 years of work behind me
and I talk about it now as if I had
the whole thing figured out in my head, but I didn't.
They were just feelings of somewhere I was going.
(energetic music)
- [Gary] Can you tell us your full name?
- Brian Peter George.
St. John Le Baptist De Lasal Eno.
(computer roaring)
- Frank Zappa once said that rock criticism
is people who can't write
talking to people who can't speak
for people who can't read.
(audience laughing)
Brian Eno, composer and theoretician,
I assure you can do all three very well.
I ask you, please help me welcome Brian Eno.
(audience applauding)
It's safe to say that more people are familiar
with your music than with your visual work.
You're the producer for U2 and David Byrne.
I wonder if to begin we could talk a little bit
about your roots.
What kind of music and other art
and cultural experiences were resonant
for you when you were growing up?
- Actually, I know the first song
that really made an impression on me was
"Get a Job" by the Silhouettes.
(audience laughing)
Because the first time I heard that, I decided that
that was great music
and I would never get a job.
(laughing)
And I never did.
I've never really had a job.
(birds chirping)
- So there were these things sitting on the back of a leaf.
I've never seen anything like that before
and I thought, I don't think those are eggs.
I think those are spiders, little spiders.
Okay.
So I came back today to look at them
and I touched the leaf, which is this leaf here,
and they all fell off
and sort of shot off in every possible direction.
Yeah, I can see one right there.
Now let me see if I can take a picture of that.
It's now gonna come next to that stone. Got him.
Look okay, now you can see it.
Now you can see what they are.
Little beetles.
Okay. That's pretty exciting.
- [Gary] I wanted to ask you about
how you got into making generative music and art.
- I'm always thinking about how things happen in nature.
(bright music)
I started becoming very interested in evolution theory.
I think the thing that thrilled me most about evolution
was the idea of complexity arising out of simplicity.
Things started out simpler and they've ramified into more
and more complex and beautiful things.
I realized that it was possible to make music like this.
(water babbling)
Instead of trying to specify every moment of a piece
of music in advance, you're setting up a system
or a process. They're sets of rules basically,
which generates music.
That's where the word generative came from.
That's why I use that word.
(gentle piano music)
So let's say that's my beginning phrase.
This piece of software lets me leave out 30% of the notes.
(gentle piano music)
And then maybe I'll occasionally get one of those notes
to repeat a few times. (imitates notes being played)
Okay, there it goes. One of those repeats.
So I have a loop,
but it's a loop that is changing each time it plays.
(gentle piano music)
So you're sort of sculpting something that
has a life anyway.
You're just watching it evolve.
So I started thinking of myself as somebody
who created things that would
carry on having their own life.
(gentle music)
Instead of thinking I'm gonna make something
and that's it, that's the end of it, that's finished,
you think, I'm gonna plant something,
I'm gonna plant the seeds of this piece of music
and then that piece of music is gonna flower in thousands
of different ways in the course of time.
(gentle music continues)
You know all of the ingredients,
but you don't know the result
of letting them repattern in that way.
Our brain is very creative.
It wants to find patterns.
So one of the key aspects of generative art,
assuming the audiences are intelligent participants.
The audience's brain does the cooking
and keeps seeing relationships.
(computer blipping)
(musical note humming)
(energetic music)
I joined Roxy Music almost by accident.
I was invited around by Andy and Brian
just to tape some of their songs.
While I was there, I began showing them some
of the things you could do with a tape recorder other than
just record music with it.
Andy had a synthesizer
and I was quite naturally interested in that.
(energetic music)
♪ Make me a deal and make it straight ♪
♪ All signed and sealed, I'll take it ♪
♪ To Robert E. Lee, I'll show it ♪
♪ I hope and pray he don't blow it 'cause ♪
♪ We've been around a long time ♪
♪ Just tryin' to, tryin' to but you ♪
♪ Make the big time ♪
Synthesizers were quite new
and nobody really knew what to do with them.
I couldn't play any instruments,
but here was an instrument that I could play
because there was no way of saying how
that instrument should be played,
so I could make the rules for that.
Suddenly I thought, oh, there's a whole set of tools here
that I'm as well qualified as anybody else to use.
(energetic music continues)
There was always an ambiguity about
where the sound actually came from.
You know, people always used to say
after concerts, "I dunno what you were doing,
"but I think I liked it." (laughing)
(energetic electric music playing)
Phil would be playing guitar.
(energetic music)
The guitar was coming into my synth, so I could do things
with it, like duplicate it and copy it and change the time.
(energetic music continues)
It was a way of bringing some of the things
that recording studios had made possible
into a live situation.
That was part of the identity of the band at that point.
We made sounds that other bands couldn't make.
(energetic music continues)
♪ Far beyond the pale horizon ♪
♪ Some place near the desert strand ♪
- If you take something from the past
and put it in the context
of other things in the present, you change it anyway.
I mean it's like creating something, something new.
I mean we don't, we don't just play rock revival.
We also put it in the context of say, electronics and oboes
and the way Bryan sings and so on.
So it becomes a a different kind of--
- I think if you ever-- - ...experience anyway.
- It probably works in the sense that we take one step back
and two or three steps into the future.
(energetic music)
- We wanted to start being conscious again of those things
that had been rejected as showbiz-y,
like stage costumes,
and we thought a lot of the people we really like,
like Little Richard, put on a show for their audience
and we want to put on a show.
♪ But you blew my mind ♪
(energetic music)
- [Interviewer] Brian, you said that would
embarrass your daughter
just then. (Brian laughing)
Will it embarrass you
or does it embarrass you looking at that?
- No. - Not at all, no.
- No.
- Do you think it should?
- Not at all. No, no, no.
No, no, no,
Were they happy times?
Did you actually enjoy those times?
- Yes, I did, but I never liked touring
and that's why I've never done it since.
Touring for me is a waste of time.
You know, 23 hours of the day spent getting ready
for one hour of the day really.
It's very hard for me
to concentrate on anything else when I'm touring.
So I didn't enjoy that
and in fact that was one of the reasons I left the band.
I just want to get back to what I like doing,
which is dabbling.
(rapid snatches of music playing)
-Colors.
Funny. Nature.
- [Interviewer] As a matter of fact,
that gets us to a point that
how is it that Brian Eno does, you know, sculpture
as we're going to see and painting and video installations
and design.
- Shirts. - Shirts.
(Brian laughing)
Yeah. Just explain what is, tie...
- Tie-dye.
Not T-H-A-I, no, T-I-E.
No, it's an old thing from the sixties.
It's sort of unsuccessful dyeing really turned into an art.
You know, to dye things with an even color
is very difficult.
To do most things in the way that you're intended
to is very difficult,
and in fact you can make a career by looking at these things
and doing them badly and celebrating the fact.
That's really the basis of my career, you know, saying,
okay, I can't do this well, so let's see in
what interesting ways I can fail at it.
And this is a good example of that, you know, I mean
to dye a shirt evenly blue is actually quite hard.
(soft music)
Where are we? '87.
I've been keeping notebooks for a long time.
The oldest one in here was started when I was 14.
(soft music continues)
My reasons for doing it are probably the same
as everybody else's who keeps notebooks.
It's a way of working out ideas.
I use drawing to work out ideas.
I think the main value of keeping a diary
is paying attention to what you've been paying attention to.
It's the process of trying to organize it enough
to actually clarify in my own mind.
I have to think about now
how does that actually connect with that?
This is a time when I tried to think of a new way
of evaluating things I was working on.
I thought, okay, I shall think of
all the criteria that matter to me.
Fun,
work,
glory,
money,
good exercise,
and how long it's gonna take.
(chuckles)
It's got some sweet drawings by my daughter
who was then two.
Oh yes, and this her abstract period.
(soft music continues)
So on this page you have a drawing for a light box.
You have a suggestion to try to make a formant generator
and a comb filter,
and you also have my shopping list.
It's the process of trying to organize it enough.
That's when you know whether you really
understand it or not.
And once I've written it down
and worked it out, I don't really need the notebook anymore.
In fact, had I just destroyed all these diaries
after I'd finished with them,
I wouldn't be in this situation I am now.
Having to talk about them. (laughing)
Don't forget, somebody's gonna want
to make a documentary one day.
Get it all out of your life now.
(computer blipping)
(wild music)
I actually spent about 80%
of my time I think in recording studios, which suits me fine
because I'm happier in the recording studio
than anywhere else I think.
If anything, the recording studio,
not the synthesizer is my instrument.
Can you just play that middle bit again?
With recording studios, making music
became much more like painting.
If you think about it, when you go to work in a studio,
what you're really doing is composing a sound picture.
What you're doing is making something over a period of time
and building it up incrementally.
And I thought this is really what I trained to do.
I was trained as a painter
and I always had that feeling about what I was doing,
that I was making paintings.
But they were paintings that existed in time
and we call them music.
(energetic music)
I suddenly realized there was a real space for me actually,
somebody who could exploit the new technical
possibilities that existed.
Understanding what you could do in a studio
that you couldn't do anywhere else.
- [Singer] One, two, three, four.
(energetic music)
♪ Baby's on fire, better throw her in the water ♪
♪ Look at her laughing, like a heifer to the slaughter ♪
I was almost always working with people
who were very un-dogmatic about what I should be doing,
but simultaneously completely baffled by
what I was wanting to do.
I mean, my first managers were very supportive
but they didn't pretend that they really got it.
(Brian yodeling)
I was generally at the time regarded as a sort
of failed glam rockstar,
you know, as if I had actually,
that was the only thing in my life I'd ever wanted to be.
(solemn music)
There's a huge momentum attached with success.
You know, it's like having a sort of,
an ocean liner pushing you along
and it's very hard to change the direction of it I think.
I felt a terrible pressure of expectation in England about
what I ought to be doing.
There was a sense that I ought to be doing
something or other.
And trying to sidestep this railway train
pushing me down these tracks
was very, very difficult.
I remember one piece on the album, Another Green World,
which I made in tears
because I just didn't know what the fuck I was doing.
I had the studio booked, I had to use it, you know,
studios were very expensive then.
I can remember standing there playing this piece
with tears running down my cheeks
'cause I was thinking, I'm absolutely lost.
I'm only doing this because I've paid this money
and I've gotta do something.
I've got a deadline coming up.
I have to deliver a record.
And this piece is a little piece called "Spirits Drifting."
You know, it's not the most significant piece
of music in the world,
but it's the piece that convinced me
that there's no correlation between the feeling
that I'm having at the time
and how the piece stands up in the fullness of time.
That's the important thing.
It's learning to trust yourself.
(solemn music continues)
(Brian whistling)
(soft music)
The question that's been interesting me
for my whole life really is why do we like music?
If you start to think about that,
that is the most incredibly difficult question to answer,
because I think in a way we can understand a lot about
human beings by trying to answer that question.
I want to know why do we like music?
(energetic music)
Why is one collection of notes nicer
than another collection of notes?
♪ We could be heroes ♪
This melody as opposed to that melody.
♪ Nothing compares ♪
That beat (dramatic music)
as opposed to that beat.
(rapid piano music)
What means something to us?
♪ In the name ♪
What gives us feelings?
(energetic music)
Why do we care?
(singer vocalizing)
I never lost interest in trying
to answer that question.
Why do we like music?
(repetitive music beat)
I am more and more starting to think
that music preceded language.
It was making noises together that people did first.
(singers vocalizing)
And I think one of the thrills of music is that sense
that you have, that you're synchronized with something.
(dramatic music)
You know, if you go to a big concert, 15, 20,000 people,
the thrill of being there is not just the music,
it's the thrill of being part of a huge crowd.
Suddenly you stop being just this one little person
and you're part of a huge tide.
It's that sense of being part of a bigger you.
I think it's a feeling that humans have always wanted,
because we're such social beings.
We're hardly individuals at all really.
I think possibly the strongest drive in human beings
is to belong.
I think it's stronger than the sex drive, stronger than the,
I want to be top of the heap drive,
stronger than anything really.
The need to feel that you belong to something.
(audience applauding)
Hello everybody.
I kind of misunderstood this.
I thought there were gonna be about 15 or 20 people.
(all laughing)
And we were gonna work on a couple
of songs together like I do with my acapella group at home.
But I guess that won't be the case.
(gentle music)
♪ I gave my all for my dear children ♪
♪ Their problems still with love I share ♪
When you have a group of people singing together,
there's a level of cooperation
and telepathy involved in that.
That is so beautiful to hear.
♪ Bring them home from anywhere ♪
I think singing is the key to world peace actually.
And I have this idea that
the more singing groups there are,
the happier everybody will be.
♪ And from that goal some sweet day ♪
That got really good at the end.
(audience applauding)
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure singing with you.
(computer blipping)
Can I begin?
So here they are.
These were the first Oblique Strategies,
cluster analysis, body percussion.
Look most closely at the most embarrassing
details and amplify them.
Take a break.
I started doing these immediately
after we finished the first Roxy album.
So that was in 1972.
(dramatic music)
We were a new band and we had a quite tight budget
and a limited time in studio.
So I was just doing what we had to do
and not really living in the situation
that we were in at the moment.
And so I started making a little list of
reminders to myself really.
So I thought I have to make it so that these things
stop the kind of headlong momentum
and divert me, throw me off at an angle.
So I thought I'll write them onto cards.
(dramatic music)
And my friend Peter Schmidt had also been keeping
sort of similar ideas to do with painting.
And so his are very nice,
I'll just read a few, "towards simplicity."
"The light cannot see the shadow."
"Every nuisance is a part of reality."
So it was putting together my cards
and his notes in his book
that gave us the Oblique Strategies.
(dramatic music continues)
The very first one I remember was
"Honor thy error as a hidden intention."
If something happens that you didn't expect,
the tendency is to get rid of it
because you don't know where it's gonna lead you
and you don't have time to think about it.
So you tend to just reject it.
Whereas I thought, well if I'm working at home on my own,
I often get the best results
by actually following those things.
Seeing where that's going that I wasn't going.
You always have habits, you know,
habits develop very quickly.
I just think it's always worth questioning those
sorts of assumptions.
You know, it might turn out that they're right.
It's not to say that you never, ever resort
to that model again,
but it's just saying, what about if we don't do
it that way this time?
I mean, I use them when I'm in a fix really.
I don't really use them for fun that much,
but it's quite fun using them if you're
playing with other people.
One of the games that David Bowie
and I used to do was we would each pull a card
and keep it secret, not tell each other what we'd got.
And so we'd both be proceeding under some kind of order,
(note rumbling)
and then at the end we'd find out what it was.
(soft music)
I remember one day when we were working in Berlin on those
sessions, I guess for "Heroes."
We were working on something together.
The piece was going through sort
of quite radical transformations
as it went back and forth between us.
(soft music continues)
And so we'd each pulled the card
and my card "was change nothing
"and continue with immaculate consistency,"
and his card was "destroy the most important thing."
(Brian laughing)
So out of that came,
I think it was the piece called “Moss Garden”
I think came out of that.
You'd never know from those two instructions.
(soft music)
But that was fun.
We used to do game playing like that.
It just tilts things in an interesting way sometimes
- A lot of the recording situation for Brian
and myself is sort of a a what if kind of situation.
It's like there's a lot of play involved with what we do.
In the late seventies when we worked together,
a couple of the guys in our band at that time
found what Brian and I wanted to do kind of stupid and childish
and I guess they're probably right,
but it produces great results. (laughing)
(energetic music)
- I dunno. (laughing)
It's always a really embarrassing question for me,
'cause I'm not quite sure what it is that Brian does.
He doesn't play very much.
I always mix my albums.
So I guess it has something to do
with the fact when he puts some stuff into a work situation,
he just changes the parameters of what you're doing more
by verbalizing different approaches to what one does.
So it's more, it's more kind of a philosophic content
with Brian.
(energetic music continues)
- Working with Bowie, the most interesting thing
was watching him adjust the character.
- Hello, Space Boy!
- And of course the best pop singers are always inventions.
They're sort of characters that you put onto stage.
When you're singing you think, who am I being now?
Where am I coming from?
I remember one song we worked on.
He goes in and does a vocal.
He comes back out, listens to it.
He says, "It's a bit lumberjack, isn't it?"
(laughing) And I knew exactly what he meant.
He said, "I think he needs to have a bit more
"of a nine to five job." (laughing)
And then he goes out and does another vocal
where this character is less macho
and sort of assertive, and is slightly confined
and slightly looking over his shoulder.
You know, somebody's his boss sort of thing.
Just the nature of the voice carries a message.
And I think in pop music, that's always what you're doing.
Who is this person singing this song?
♪ I, I wish you could swim ♪
♪ Like the dolphins ♪
The record was just called "Heroes."
I think that concept is important
because again, the voice is heroic.
The voice is a careful construction of somebody standing up
and saying, you know, "I'm here and I'm gonna brave it out."
“I'm gonna face it out.” That's all in the voice.
♪ Though nothing will drive them away ♪
♪ We can be heroes just for one day ♪
♪ And we can be us just for one day ♪
(computer blipping)
- Retrace your steps.
(dramatic music)
(dramatic music continues)
(tone beeping)
(audience applauding)
(person laughing)
- Our next category is for Best Producer,
and to present the award, Mr. Bryan Ferry.
(audience applauding)
- Hello.
And the winner is Brian Eno
for James’s Get Laid and U2’s Zooropa.
(audience applauding)
(energetic music)
- [Announcer] Brian Eno, one of rock's
most sought after producers.
Other credits: Devo, David Bowie, Ultrvox, Carmel,
John Cale, and Talking Heads.
- Thank you very much.
This is a big surprise.
As you probably all realize
that making records, like most aspects
of modern culture, is a highly cooperative enterprise.
And lots and lots of people are involved, including
that sniveling coward known as the producer.
Well, I'm one of those.
(audience applauding) Thank you very much.
A lot of my work as a producer was saying,
where in this have we never been before?
What's the thing that we've never heard before?
Let's make something of that.
If you do that and pull it off, it's a big thrill.
- [Voice On Computer] Is grammatically correct.
- Just shut up.
- [Kuti] Ready, ready, one, two, three, four.
(energetic music)
When I first started listening to Fela Kuti,
it absolutely was like taking drugs for me.
I just, I sat there, I listened
to it again and again and again.
The incessant ferocity of that just knocked me out.
And when I first met Talking Heads, I took them to my flat
and played them this record
and I said, "This is the music of the future."
♪ To describe her ♪
There's this kind of cascade of backing vocalists.
it's very much like what Fela was doing
with the brass sections.
♪ Darker, darker ♪
See, that's a brass part really.
♪ She is moving by remote control ♪
♪ World of light ♪
I'll play you one more, not by Talking Heads,
but this, this was an example of--
(indistinct voice)
Oh, shut up, you.
- [Announcer] Waiting for you to fill with your family.
- This is "Moment of Surrender" by U2.
Okay, so this song, this had a very interesting beginning.
(energetic music)
Danny Lanois and I always used to get into the studio early
so the band would walk into something exciting.
We found that was a good technique
for getting something going rather than walking in
and sort of listening to
what we'd done yesterday or something like that.
So I was playing with this loop that had a kind of
strange camel-like lope to it, you know?
(loping music)
That's it. (energetic music)
It's really...
I was playing with it and trying
to straighten out a little bit.
It was kind of a weird loop.
But before I got it sorted out, Larry walked in
and just started drumming with it as it was.
And as soon as he came in, I thought, this is it.
This is the big song for this album.
(energetic music)
♪ I tied myself with wire ♪
I made the verse two measures longer than you
would expect it to be.
I've always thought that you're more likely
to get a good piece of music if you start on a more
complicated terrain of some kind.
So this, this was an interesting terrain, first of all,
a clumsiness built into the beat
and an awkwardness built into the shape of the whole song.
But that little thing, (imitates beat)
which I don't know,
it gives a signature to the thing that is very unusual.
Shall we have lunch now? (laughing)
(audio clips running together rapidly)
(energetic music)
(energetic music continues)
So I was living in New York in the eighties
and that was a very exciting time in a way in New York
'cause there was a lot of activity downtown.
And I was living on West Eighth Street
near Washington Square Park.
(energetic music)
To set the scene, Washington Square Park was always busy,
there was always a lot going on,
lots of different types of things.
And one of the things I saw there one day, I was walking
through and I saw this one guy sitting there
playing an auto harp with little hammers.
And there was just this sort of little oasis
of calmness around him.
This turned out to Laraaji.
- At the time that Brian Eno approached me
with a note, I was playing music in Washington Square Park.
I usually play with my eyes closed or half closed.
And of course I was accepting donations.
And after one evening of playing music, I opened my eyes
and there in the tray, in addition to money, was a note.
He didn't know my name or how to get in touch with me,
but obviously he had to leave early.
So he left a note on how I can get in touch with him.
And he expressed his interest in exploring
a recording project.
Within two weeks we were in the studio.
- So I met him and we became friends
and we made the record,
I think in one afternoon I think was,
he just came into the studio and played.
It's very bright, what he does.
It always makes me think of, you know,
when you're looking at a lake and the sun is shining on it
and there's just this constant susurration of light.
And of course what I love about it is this quiet,
strong sense of being alive in the moment,
which he is more than actually anybody else I know.
(energetic music)
(energetic music continues)
(audio clips bleeding together)
(computer blipping)
(energetic music)
(energetic music continues)
♪ Jolly roger in a pickup ♪
♪ Has a packet on the horses ♪
♪ He's a docker with a bucket ♪
♪ Just the ticket in a thicket ♪
♪ Silly sally isn't pally ♪
♪ With the crackers in the alley: ♪
♪ She's a smacker and a whacker ♪
♪ Wouldn't dally with a slacker ♪
♪ Sally keeping in her locker ♪
♪ Little packets for the docker jolly roger ♪
♪ Looking pretty, just the sucker for a shocker ♪
♪ Jolly roger in a pickup ♪
♪ Has a packet on the horses ♪
♪ He's a docker with a bucket ♪
♪ Just the ticket in a thicket ♪
- [Interviewer] So what was this about?
- This is all latex here, which as you know, is an extremely
flexible material.
And this is not, this experiment is not,
as yet, a complete success, I must say,
but it's an attempt to see
what happens if you make a speaker that is allowed
to flop around and hear it.
(energetic scratchy music playing)
Oh, I think I've just blown that one up probably.
(interviewer laughing)
Yeah. Oh, dear me, it's done something seriously bad.
(metal thumping)
Hey, listen to that.
(metal thumping)
Well, anyway, I won't, I won't bore you with that,
but that's rather an interesting effect as well.
It's blown the amplifier up in a funny way, I think.
(Computer blipping)
(soft music)
- And here they're midway through a series of concerts
that are described in the program
as “seamless musical invention,”
ideal for lovers of all things ambient.
Music from people like Michael Nyman, Robert Fripp,
the Penguin Cafe Orchestra,
and visuals by the man
that many believe is the founding father
of ambient, Brian Eno.
- I think I'm one of the founding fathers of the recognition
that there are other ways of hearing music
and other ways of using music.
(soft music continues)
The first really conscious piece
of ambient music I made was Discreet Music.
That was 1975.
And I had already been playing with different kinds
of listening experiences.
1, 2, 3.
I was getting more and more drawn to the idea of trying
to make music that did something in your life,
because I was using music that way.
(soft ambient music)
I call the music I've been doing ambient music,
taking the sense of an ambience as an atmosphere,
or a surrounding influence, or a tint.
The type of situation I imagine this being used in is
by creative people who pay attention to the construction
of their environment, who pay attention to the types
of lights they use, to the positioning
of their working surface in relation to a window.
And who pay the same kind of attention to the kind of sound
that they have in the environment.
So they regard the whole, the sensory construction
that surrounds them as one thing designed
to create a useful mood for them.
That's why I make that music and that's why I listen to it.
It's a funny thing. I think my biggest contribution
to a lot of things has been slowness.
There are so many things that happen at slower speeds
that don't happen fast.
And it's because really they're happening in your brain.
It's your brain kind of dealing with
what is a comparative paucity of information.
We're used to a fast rate of stimulus,
particularly with modern media.
And when that doesn't happen, the brain becomes very active
to kind of occupy that area, that vacuum.
It's to do with the slowness of it
and to do with what that does to you.
(soft music)
I've never been able to meditate,
but I suppose it's a little bit like that,
from what people tell me about meditation.
I'm much too nervous to ever meditate,
but I think that's sort of
what I'm doing when I make these things.
I'm making an occasion for myself to
just stop. (Laughing)
Just move at a different speed. You know?
(soft music)
The general public have always been extremely kind.
- New age music, Brian Eno, synthesizers, ambiance music.
- It's rather slow.
- I mean, it's the kind of music you use
for these things like healing
and that you would use for meditation.
- But critics, they just thought it was bogus.
Like a con, you know?
"Oh, he's gonna do a whole bloody album of that."
(Brian laughing)
That's money for old rope, isn't it?
- I was in a record shop in Atlanta last year
and the only things that were in the shop, apart from lots
of pseudo Greek columns, were these records of ambient music
with landscape sleeves.
Please, you know, it's music for people
who don't actually like music.
- I honestly felt really disappointed
and hurt actually, that something
that I'd done in good faith, thinking
I've really got something good here,
could only be greeted with sort of derision.
And in fact, there was a period when my name
became an adjective in this country
and it meant wimpy.
The word Eno-esque became a word
that people would use in reviews as a kind
of thumbs down, you know?
And in fact, that led to
the greatest mistake of my career.
Joni Mitchell, who I admired enormously,
she phoned me and said,
"I want to make an ambient record with you."
And I was just thinking, I never want
to hear the word ambient again in my life
because I'd had so much shit heaped on me for it.
And I said, "I'm sorry,
"I'm just not doing that kind of thing now.
"You know, I love your work and everything,"
but I just, I thought fuck, why didn't I say yes?
Why didn't I say yes?
I can't imagine what that could have been.
Joni, I'm still here. (laughing)
I'm ready, I'm ready at last.
I'll do it.
When working in a studio,
or actually in much of the rest of my life,
I always have a little recorder with me.
I can't write music.
So if I want to remember a melody
or something, I do it just by recording it.
So Gary and his crew here have forced me to listen to some
of these absolutely appalling tapes,
which are mostly full of utter shite.
This is an MC 60, so that must be 1990.
(bright music)
Here they are. (laughing)
(Brian humming)
♪ Alisado ♪
♪ Hey ♪
I could sing higher then.
(indistinct)
(Brian humming on recorder)
Oh God, shut up.
This is soon going to become quite embarrassing,
'cause it's all right to know
that somebody did this once or twice.
But to think that they did it for hours
and weeks and months and years.
(recorder rewinding)
I feel like I've hated myself for liking it.
I hate to think that I could have liked myself
for hating it.
(Brian laughing)
I hated liking myself for liking to think
that it should have been obvious.
I hated liking myself for thinking
that I liked hating myself.
(Brian laughing) (indistinct)
(energetic music)
This is U2.
(singer vocalizing)
That's me and Bono
(Brian humming)
(soft music)
- Ready when you are.
- We're ready when you are.
(energetic music) (indistinct)
Most people write songs not in the way you imagine.
You know, people normally imagine somebody sitting down,
they strum the guitar
and they write down the first line,
then they strum, they, write down the second line.
I've never seen anybody write a song like that.
I've seen lots of songs being written.
I have never seen a song written like that.
(energetic music) (indistinct singing)
What normally happens is that people start playing
and they go, (singing indistinctly).
You know, they're singing, they're getting a feeling.
That's a person who's singing that.
That's a different, and as opposed to if I go,
♪ Ooh sir, I'm all alone (indistinct) ♪
That's another person with another world.
So people nearly always, in my experience,
start songs like that.
They're just singing shit, really.
♪ Sing a song, (indistinct) ♪
♪ I'll be (indistinct) love song ♪
What they're doing is they're defining a personality.
Is it vigorous?
Is it retiring?
Is it confident?
Is it humble?
They're making a person,
and that person is gonna exist in this musical world
that is also being made.
(energetic music)
(energetic music continues)
Think I would just like to know
that we have got a good take if you, even if there are one
or two things to repair,
and then we can go on with some sense of, less sense
of desperation into doing some other takes.
- What do you think, Bono?
You wanna try a few lines on this?
- I'll do some scatting if that's any help to you.
(energetic music)
♪ In the name of love ♪
(indistinct)
♪ In the name of love ♪
♪ In the name of love (indistinct) in the name of love ♪
♪ What more in the name of love♪
♪ Of love ♪
- [Brian] Sounded great.
- Yeah. Yeah, fantastic.
- Maybe a bit more passion this time, Bono.
- Yeah, it was a bit restrained actually.
- Yeah.
- Maybe you could try standing for this one.
- The only direction I might offer you is
that the first chorus might be a little more restrained than
the others, but I wouldn't like
to inhibit what you're doing.
(energetic music)
♪ Love ♪
(Bono vocalizing)
That second low verse was beautiful on this.
I must say this track is really bringing
something out in your singing.
So this song is now four minutes, 30 seconds long.
It was five minutes, 30 seconds at the castle.
But brevity is the essence of wit. (chuckles)
It's nice for this song to be a little shorter
than it was before.
- You're in the chorus,
before you're in the verse.
You know, you've finished the chorus before you've started it.
It’s like as if the song's over before you begin it.
I don't know if it's, if it's the fact it was late at night but,
it just doesn't seem grand.
- [Brian] Well, why don't we try
just slowing it down a little bit.
- Yeah.
(energetic music) (indistinct)
- All the British rock and roll people,
even the punk rock people, Joe Strummer
and Paul Simonon, they're all art school.
John Lennon, art school, Eric Clapton, art school,
Jimmy Page, art School, they're all art school.
Brian Eno was our art school.
- Do you want to hear in its...
- [Bono] Entirety.
- Entirety.
- [Bono] Well, I like it alright.
(energetic music)
(beat clicking)
(energetic music)
(energetic music continues)
(computer blipping)
- [Eno] One of the things I would like
to rectify in the way people talk about art is to sort
of downgrade that idea
that it's about a few geniuses throughout history who've
suddenly appeared out of nowhere and changed everything.
The more I looked at creative situations like Saint Petersburg
in the early 20th century, Paris in the forties and fifties
and sixties, these places where there was a huge amount
of creative work going on, the more I found
that in fact they were very complicated networks
of people involved.
It's very difficult to disentangle, first of all
where the ideas really came from,
and secondly, who created the situation in which they could
appear and be recognized and nurtured.
And so as an alternative to genius, I came up
with the idea of scenius, which is the kind of creativity
of a whole scene of people.
The world isn't arranged with a sort of pyramid,
with a few geniuses at the top, and then more
and more unimportant people at the bottom.
It's an ecosystem,
and if you take one part out of that jigsaw,
it can have far reaching effects.
(soft music continues)
(computer blipping)
(energetic music)
- [Interviewer] One thing I want to know
is about the fountain.
- In 1913, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal
and it was very notorious
for opening up a new idea in art
that the artist was not necessarily somebody
who made something, but somebody
who created an art experience by naming it as such.
This urinal was on show
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I was due to give a lecture there called “High Art, Low Art.”
And I thought, how ridiculous
that this particular piss pot gets carried
around the world at, it costs about 30 or $40,000
to insure it every time it travels.
I thought how absolutely stupid, the whole message
of this work is you can take any
object and put it in a gallery.
It doesn't have to be that one.
So I thought somebody should piss in that thing
to sort of bring it back to where it belonged.
So I decided it had to be me.
Of course it was behind Bulletproof Glass,
but it was made in sheets that didn't quite meet.
There was a very small gap in between.
And I looked at this gap
and I decided that I couldn't actually get my
organ through the gap.
So what I did, I went to a plumbing supply shop
and I bought some very thin plastic tube.
And then I filled the tube with urine in a manner
that I shan't describe in detail.
- [Interviewer] Right. Okay.
- And then I went into the museum
and I stood close to the glass
and there was a guard right behind me.
I could see him in the glass.
And I took it out
and got it through the glass and fed it through,
and then just let the, let the piss out.
And it happened at a time in New York when this word
decommodification was a very big buzzword.
And I called what I did re-comode-ification. (laughing)
(birds chirping)
(soft music)
(cows mooing)
My thoughts are always divided between
what I'm doing artistically
and what possible relationship it can have
to the rest of the world.
And by that I mean the political world, you know, the world
of resources and climate change
and breakdown of civilization.
For any artist, I think that has to be a very difficult
question at the moment.
You have to be thinking, does this have any relevance,
all this stuff I'm doing?
Does it make any difference to anything?
Could it make any difference to anything?
(soft music)
I think one of the sort of long-term inspirations
for being an artist at all for me was
that I grew up in the country
and I've always drawn on that experience of rural life
and the feeling of watching how nature works.
Look, there's a little fish down there
For me, the river was always a way of going somewhere.
Every child here, I think in this town spends a lot of time
around the river because of all the mysterious things
that live down the river that don't live elsewhere.
And because you can go swimming there and catching eels,
and there's an idea about water that I like,
which is that it's constant but not solid.
So the river is always going somewhere.
(water rushing)
I mean, a lot of the songs I wrote are about
being on rivers. (laughing)
I started to realize that I was doing this on a planet
that was suddenly quite noticeably getting worse, actually.
I thought, well here's an odd paradox.
Here I am sort of celebrating nature
and taking inspiration from it,
and at the same time I'm watching it disappearing.
Let's acknowledge that without it,
none of us would be doing anything.
We've gotta start looking after it.
(soft music)
(singer vocalizing)
I'm encouraged by an English environmentalist,
Tom Rivett-Carnac.
He said, "We always overestimate what we can do in a day
"and underestimate what we will do in 10 years."
And I think that's a very encouraging thought,
because human capability is increasing exponentially,
just as environmental threat is increasing exponentially.
The only way we can hope to survive is by dealing with a lot
of separate issues.
We have to have a new economics,
we have to have a new sense of justice,
we have to have a new relationship with the planet.
We wanted to solve all those problems anyway,
climate change just gives us a really strong
incentive to get on with it.
The optimistic side of me says, if we get through this,
we'll be in a better world.
I mean a much better world, it'll be a new place.
(dogs barking)
I've just realized, this must be
where the professional dog walkers congregate.
Go and walk the fucking things, don't stand around here.
(dogs barking)
So it's wonderful being an artist and every day getting up
and thinking, what shall I do today?
But it's actually a bit terrifying as well.
You know, every day you have to think out,
so what am I gonna do today?
You know, of all the things I could do, what shall I do?
And some days you just don't answer the question properly
and you spend a day sort of fiddling.
I used to get up, make tea, make breakfast,
read emails, read things, articles, whatever.
And the whole thing took about an hour,
what I would call breakfast time.
And then this year I decided,
what about if I stop having breakfast?
I started to realize that you can't do input
and output at the same time.
So what I had been doing, get up in the morning, input,
food, drink, news, you know, emails,
blah, blah, blah.
It was just all in, in, in.
And when I wasn't doing that, when I just sat down and
stopped.
stuff started coming up from inside.
I started remembering ideas from a long time ago
and it's really sorted my life out quite, quite well.
I don't go into the day with a kind of muddle of stuff
that I've already taken in that then all the things I have
to remember to do and people I have to call and so on.
It kind of smooths everything out quite a lot.
And then I look forward
to having my breakfast at midday,
and Jesus, do I look forward to that.
Like now, I'm so hungry.
You can't believe how hungry I am.
Is it anywhere near 12:00 yet?
- It is 11:30 - 20 minutes.
- By the time we get back.
(energetic music)
This is the title song actually.
- That is the title song? - Yeah.
It's called, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today."
- Why? - Yeah.
- It seems to kind of express what a lot of the songs seem
to be, the kind of feeling that a lot of the songs have of
sort of dread, but genuine,
but sort of positive at the same time.
- Dread and promise actually.
- Yeah. - Dread, dread and promise.
(group laughing)
It's nice to have, it's quite ambiguous
because everything that happens will happen today.
Could be a great message or a terrible one,
and is in fact both together, really.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
Is there something you're trying to put out to the world
with these songs?
- Well, I guess sometimes you put out
what you would like to get back.
- Yeah, that's what I think it is.
(laughing)
It's, you make the music that you would like to hear.
That's how I've always thought about it.
I don't ever try to second guess
what will happen to an audience.
I just assume that since my tastes aren't
that different from any anybody else's,
that probably it'll be something like what happens
to me when I listen to it.
(bright music)
Okay, so this is an interesting section coming here now.
(singer vocalizing)
(both laughing)
It suddenly goes sort of, I don't know what it is,
Holiday Inn or something.
(both laughing)
(indistinct singing)
- I think this one was done at your studio, right?
The vocal?
- Yeah. - That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
I had a kind of rough vocal that I'd done in New York,
but it just wasn't, wasn't quite right,
and so then, uh,
we kind of restructured the song,
had another go at it.
- That's when this character came.
- Yes. (laughing)
- Yeah, yeah.
This, this guy's, he's slightly demented,
(laughing)
but he's feeling good about it.
- [Interviewer] What's that one called?
- "I Feel My Stuff." (laughing)
(audio clips running together)
Have you ever seen a double pendulum?
(music humming)
It's an example of how two simple systems
interacting can produce very complex results.
I use this as a simplest example really, of
what chaos theory is, and what complex systems do,
(tense music)
because we are embedded in complex systems,
like power stations and transport systems
and banks and so on.
But we act as though we're still embedded
in linear systems.
So this is really a way of trying to remind myself
that complex systems require quite a different kind
of prediction than simple ones.
(computer blipping)
- Ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure,
I give you Mr. Brian Eno.
(audience applauding)
- So you have this funny situation
that we depend on each other more,
but we understand each other less.
The worst thing is to start with something
that looks so fantastic, you're frightened of it.
You have to define art as everything
from Cezanne to cake decoration.
Every interesting rock song is a new universe of sound.
And I say that culture is everything
that we don't have to do.
It's completely bonkers, isn't it?
(audience laughing)
I want to ask the question,
what is defense defending us against?
The interesting thing is when ideas flow
in the other direction.
Okay, I think I better stop, my voice is gone.
(audience applauding)
The very first lecture I did,
that was a turning point in my life.
I was invited by Michael Nyman to come up
and deliver a lecture.
I worked on it for about a month before.
I can remember sitting there rewriting
and rewriting and going over it again and again and again.
And I thought, I'm just gonna write it out word for word so
that if I freeze, I'll actually just read it out.
So I went to Trent
and I was shitting myself the whole way
up there on the train.
I was so nervous.
And we walked across the green to the lecture theater,
1500 people.
It was a huge lecture theater.
And I suddenly thought, fuck,
I've left all the notes in the senior common room.
And it was at that point, I just couldn't say,
"Oh, sorry," because it was about a five minute walk
there and back, you know?
And I just thought, I just have to start.
And I did.
I just started without any notes
and I realized I had the whole thing in my head.
And of course it was much better than if I'd been
reading it off notes.
It had some life to it, you know?
Afterwards I thought, I'm very pleased I did that,
first of all, because I worked out that whole body
of thought properly.
But secondly, because I realized I can do talks.
I really work better if I've got a
destination for what I'm doing.
And so this became very useful for me as a way
of thinking things out.
(audience applauding)
Thank you very much.
Now you might wonder why I'm doing talks like this.
The reason is because I think art in general is kind
of under threat politically.
And so I think it behooves me, people like me
to talk out on its behalf
and to say it's something people do,
something all people do actually.
And it's something that's essential to
human understanding of the world.
(birds chirping)
(bees buzzing)
I think that the kind of change
that art makes is at a rather
deep level of consciousness.
If you've had the experience of being really moved
by a piece of art, it's like magic.
In art, you put together a few materials, a few colors,
a few shapes,
and suddenly, bang! There's something that never existed
before and it's awesome.
You know, you're struck by it.
I remember when I was young, I thought, what do artists do?
Why do I want to do that so much?
So this question really stayed with me,
and I never lost interest in trying to answer that question.
What does art do for us?
Why do we want art at all?
I've come to think that feeling is really
the most important part of it.
Feelings are what artists deal in the whole time.
That's what it's about.
It's about creating a situation
where people can have feelings to examine them.
But a lot of people don't like the idea
that art is about feelings.
It's supposed to be about big issues.
Art is supposed to be important.
And I sort of believed that for a while as well,
but now I more and more think,
what about if we just say it's about feelings?
Is that such a shameful thing to admit to?
Is that too small an ambition, to say that what we want
to do is to understand how the world of feelings works?
(energetic music continues)
(singer vocalizing)
Art is a way we synchronize our feelings about things.
And that of course, all impacts on
how we think about the world that we actually live in.
What sort of society do we want to live in?
And what sort of people do we want to be within that?
If you think that we're all in a kind of lifeboat,
which is on a choppy sea, we really need to be able
to harness the intelligence
and creativity of everybody actually.
Art is a way we do that.
I think that's a real hope for the future.
(energetic music)
(Brian humming) (birds chirping)
(audio clips running together)
I have to stop because I have
to leave here at 12:00 or else I shall be murdered.
- Okay. - What time is it now?
(indistinct)
Okay, thank you.
Okay, here's your tape.
Sorry, I have to run. (voices overlapping)
(indistinct)
(bright music)
(bright music continues)
♪ All I remember if gathered together would be ♪
♪ Solitary firework flashes over a fathomless sea ♪
♪ Feeling new feelings, Ketty Lester, Dee Clark, Bobby Vee ♪
♪ Walking the dyke out to dark ♪
♪ Where the river turns into the sea ♪
(energetic music continues)
♪ All I remember if gathered together would be ♪
♪ Just solitary firework flashes over a fathomless sea ♪