Brian Eno explains why art students make great musicians
As far as musical journeys go, Brian Eno has enjoyed one of unparalleled diversity and understated influence. If their peacocky garb and pioneering soundscapes weren’t enough of a giveaway, Roxy Music, Eno’s formative band, was formed by a group of edgy art school students hellbent on continuing the good work of The Beatles et al.
While Eno only stuck it out as Roxy Music’s synth player for two of their ten albums, his contributions were seminal. Above all, he can boast of the band’s most artistically revered album, For Your Pleasure. Following his departure from Roxy Music, Eno embarked on a solo career that traversed a lesser-walked path.
Over four solo avant-pop releases over the mid-1970s, Eno established himself as a skilled producer and creative mastermind. His production abilities and charming demeanour attracted the likes of David Bowie and Talking Heads in the late ’70s, who enlisted his guidance for a series of seminal albums heading towards the ’80s. Thereafter, Eno worked with U2, Coldplay and countless other prominent acts while further asserting his creative force in the field of ambient music.
While Eno worked with global titans like David Bowie and U2, he never became a stadium tour pop sensation himself. Chiefly, this was because his music teeters on the line between accessibility and experimentalism. His themes and structures are very rarely preoccupied with the acquisition of radio air-time.
In a 2013 interview with the New York Times, Eno explained the difference between popular art and his usual output. “Your nervous system has two major sectors, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The first one is the fight-and-flight zone. I think most popular art is directed towards that. The other part, which is also called the rest-and-digest or breed-and-feed, is what you’re using when you relax.”
“My theory is that what I’ve been doing is more directed at that second part,” he continued. “And I think that also is the part of the nervous system people are using when they say they’re having a spiritual experience. Now I want to make clear that I slightly shrink from the word “spiritual,” because I don’t like anything occultish, and I’m not religious.”
When asked if he disregards pop music as an important art form, Eno asserted: “Oh, no. I think that’s an important part of what art can do for us. It’s thrilling. Dance music is essentially about that. I was at a fantastic party in Mali the other night, where I danced for three hours in 42 degrees of heat. I thought, ‘My God, it’s amazing that music can make you do this. I’m being forced to dance.’ When I finished, it was like I’d been thrown in a swimming pool.”
Elsewhere in the interview with the New York Times, Eno discussed why he thinks art students like himself make for unique and, therefore, salient musicians. “Art students, by definition, are people who are looking at how a medium works and thinking about what you can do with a medium,” Eno opined. “They’re different from folk musicians, who, in general, are accepting of a tradition. That kind of slightly outside-looking-in approach that art students brought to music meant that they were completely able to accept a lot of new possibilities, whereas music students were not interested in them at all. It’s very conspicuous that there were a lot of art students involved in pop music in the ’60s and ’70s, and very few music students.”
“There’s another reason for this,” he added. “By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas. Once you’re working in a multitrack studio, you stop thinking of the music as performance and you start thinking of it as sound painting.
“After Phil Spector and George Martin, and Joe Meek, this new role called the producer had started to become an important creative role. When art students really started flooding into music, it was at exactly that point where recorded music had become more like painting. So it was a natural transition for art students. They knew how to work within a medium that required continual revisiting, where the elements were mutable, could be scraped off and replaced the next day.”