Thinking about music with Brian Eno

Brian Eno was born in the village of Woodbridge, Suffolk, on May 15, 1948 and educated by nuns and Brothers of the De La Salle order until he was 16 - at which point he enrolled for a two-year course at Ipswich Art School.

"I went to art school because I didn't want to do a conventional job. I saw a job as a trap and something to avoid. In fact, that's a characteristic of my life: making moves not so much towards things as away from them, avoiding them."

Although young Brian knew he didn't want to be ordinary, his conceptions were, at that point quite as ordinary as those of his fellow students. He was in need of a shake-up.

"By a stroke of luck I happened to go to a very good school. Ipswich was run by a guy called Roy Ascot - a very brilliant educationalist, I think - and what he and his staff were concerned with was not the teaching of technique so much as experimenting with notions of what constitutes creative behaviour.

"So, instead of sitting there doing little paintings, we found ourselves being required to get involved in discussions and self-investigation projects. Like, the first thing we had to do was a 'mind-map', which was constructing a series of tests to find out what sort of behaviour we exhibited in different situations, from which it was decided what sort of character type we each were .

"Having established that, we had to behave in a way diametrically opposed to our normal selves, ie., if you were naturally extrovert, you had to be introvert; if you were a born leader, you had to be a follower, etc."

Which were you?

"I had to become a follower. I had to execute everyone else's ideas, not make a fuss, not try to dominate the proceedings.

"Some people really pushed it. One girl was very perky and exuberant and the only way she could get herself to calm down was to tie her legs to her chair. Another girl, called Lily, was very nervous - she made herself learn how to walk the tight-rope.

"I sat on this porter's trolley all day. If anyone wanted me to do anything, they had to wheel me to where I was required.

"All of this was very exciting and disorientating and aroused in me a lasting interest in working with other people under what might normally be considered quite artificial restrictions."

During this period, Eno met a major influence in the artist Tom Phillips, who was one of the staff, and began to get interested in music via a chance encounter with John Cage's book Silence and the occasional visit to the school of avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew.

Unable, as yet, to manipulate a conventional musical instrument, he started playing about with tape-recorders and, by 1965 - at which juncture he left Ipswich for Winchester Art School - he had amassed about 30 machines, of which only two were in full working order.

Winchester was a traditional institution and Eno found his newly-inspired experimentalism forced underground. The staff and most of the other students made no secret of finding him rather odd.

"I felt that art was more serious and important than they seemed to think. They regarded it as merely decorative - or there to make things a bit better or something. I thought there was much more to it, but I couldn't then put my finger on it.

"Also, there was my mother-in-law - a very bright woman, a logician into scientific method - who'd always say to me things like 'I can't understand why somebody with your mind is wasting his time doing this'. She was very cutting about it indeed.

"So I was forced into justifying my position and that started what has been a continuous train of thinking over the last ten years."

*From New Musical Express, November 26th, 1977
Here's the full article.