He picks up one of the Oblique Strategy cards, and bursts out laughing. I mean I’m not fucking interested at all in me. “God, are we going to do any interesting questions? This is all bollocks. So it comes as a shock when I ask where his string of first names comes from, and he explodes. He has been talking quietly and beautifully about his parents. She arrived in Dendermonde near Brussels weighing five stone.” Eventually she returned to Belgium at the end of the war. His Belgian mother had spent the war in Germany building planes in a labour camp. I thought even if I have to turn to crime, I won’t get a job the horror of being that exhausted and doing your work just to keep things going the lack of freedom in your life.” I remember him coming home from work and sitting at the table my mother had just put the food down and he fell forward, asleep. I realised years later he was in a permanent state of jet lag because his eight-hour work day was shifting every week. It was a three-week cycle, mornings, afternoons and nights. Do you think you’ll ever settle down and get a job?’ Hahahhaha! She said: ‘You could get a job in the Post Office.’ In the office! You know, not trudging delivering mail.”Įno decided he didn’t want a regular job when he saw the effect it had on his father. When I was in my mid-30s, and my mother and father were living in a house I had bought for them with the proceeds of my music, my mum said: ‘Dad and I were talking. You’re a sonic postman? “Yeah! I help people communicate with each other in one way or another. “And my two uncles.”ĭid he ever think that was his destiny? “Well, I did go into communications, didn’t I?” He laughs.
“And my great grandad actually,” he says enthusiastically when I mention it. You might assume he was an aristocrat, but his father and grandfather were postmen.
Internal oblique travell and simons full#
His full name is Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (the St John le Baptiste de la Salle was added at confirmation). His voice is as soothing as his ambient music. He would be brilliant on Just a Minute – no repetition, hesitation or deviation. Photograph: Brian Cooke/RedfernsĮno talks slowly, calmly, eloquently. “That will be just the job, I should think,” he says. I tell him I have brought a pack with me in case we find ourselves struggling. As a producer, he encourages artists to pick up Oblique Strategies cards to alter the path they are taking. At the same time, Eno loves to embrace the random. One journalist said that Eno had interrupted their chat to play him an Elvis Presley record that lasted two minutes and seven seconds, and then added two minutes and seven seconds to the interview so the journalist wouldn’t be shortchanged. His interviews tend to be 45 minutes long precisely. “Just 30 seconds now.” There has always been something fastidious about him. “I’ll just be 40 seconds, finishing off my lunch,” Eno says. His assistant asks me to join Eno at his table. Nowadays, he looks like a stylish academic. The head was shaved, the makeup washed off and the feather boa dispensed with. As his music became more pared down, so did he.
Minimalist in its big white empty spaces, maximalist in the numerous books carefully filed away (library-like sections for African, Asian and European art), old-fashioned hi-fi equipment, a parked bike, and his own Rothko-ish artworks.Įno, now 68, could not look more different from the louche glamour-puss of the early 70s. It is a mix of the minimalist and maximalist. We meet at his studio, near Notting Hill in west London. There is Eno the visual artist Eno the activist, tirelessly campaigning for a fairer world and Eno the philosopher, endlessly thinking of ways in which to bring this new world about. There is Eno the visionary, who helped conceive a 10,000-year clock and invented an influential pack of cards called Oblique Strategies that offer creative solutions for people in a pickle. There followed a sustained solo career, starting with the more poppy Here Come the Warm Jets, progressing to the defiant obscurity of his ambient albums and on to commercial Eno, the revered producer behind many of the great Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay records. So cool that, back then, he didn’t bother with a first name.Īfter two wonderfully adventurous albums he left and Roxy became more conventional. With his shoulder-length hair and androgynous beauty, there was something otherworldly about Eno. There’s the first incarnation of Eno as the leopardskin-shirted synth-twiddler who overshadowed the more obviously mannered Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music. B rian Eno’s new album is called Reflection, and what better time to reflect on an astonishing career? Or careers.
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