“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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