Brian Eno's Another Green World (3 page)

Interestingly,
Another Green World
—with all its attendant connotations of lush, verdant landscapes— was originally inspired by a story about the frigid reaches of outer space. Now, it’s almost a cliché for musicians who work with synthesizers to profess a deep interest in sci-fi. Take Detroit techno’s fixation with intergalactic travel, for example, or Sun Ra’s heliocentric worlds. But Eno was never a big fan of the genre at all, preferring instead to devour huge amounts of non-fiction. For him, the most interesting part of the tale that inspired
Another Green World
was the part when the space travelers came back home.

“I was thinking about escaping,” Eno recalled to Ian MacDonald in the
NME
two years after making the album, in 1977. “I read a science fiction story a long time ago where these people are exploring space and they finally find this habitable planet—and it turns out to be identical to Earth in every detail. And I thought that was the supreme irony: that they’d originally left to find something better and arrived in the end—which was actually the same place. Which is how I feel about myself. I’m always trying to project myself at a tangent and always seem eventually to arrive back at the same place. It’s a loop.

You actually can’t escape.”

Eno had always been prone to this sort of blistering self-examination—observing what he did almost as soon as he did it, and thinking about his reasons.

“I started having a mid-life crisis when I was about 18, and it has continued ever since,” Eno said to the comic-book author Alan Moore in a BBC radio interview in 2005. “One of the continuing narratives of that crisis is, ‘Is what I’m doing worth doing, at all? Is there any point in doing this?’ Because I’m very interested in the sciences, and I know a lot of scientists and I can see what they’re doing, and I can sort of understand the point of what they’re doing.

“I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. What does it do for us? What does it do for me? What does it do for anybody
else? Could we do without it? Is it a useful job? Does it make any difference to the world? Those kinds of questions. Their answers quite directly affect me because I’m not intellectually dishonest enough to always answer in my own favor. So sometimes I come up with the answer—for several years at a time, sometimes—where I say, ‘It really isn’t worth doing. There are better ways of spending your time.’ This is a sort of crisis, because then I don’t know what to do, and I think, well, the only way to find out is by trying it again and seeing if I can get somewhere different this time. And if I find myself going down the same road again, I think, this is hopeless.”

You could write off Eno’s tendency to self-analyze as mere navel-gazing solipsism, but it wasn’t that he was spending all of his time preening in front of a mirror in his room. He spent a lot of time thinking about the artistic process, and he liked being able to explain things, to come up with a theory for why something—anything—worked the way it did. He still does this today; he’s one of the most articulate musicians in the history of rock, and his profuse thoughts and opinions on every subject, from art to pop music to politics to science, pour out into hundreds of pages of articles and interviews. But there were some things he couldn’t explain so well. For instance, he couldn’t remember many specific details of making his first
solo album,
Here Come the Warm Jets
, in 1973—it all went by so fast—and had almost no memory of writing the lyrics. He wasn’t quite sure how
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
was made, even shortly after the fact; the arty, off-kilter rock album was jammed with so many different ideas that he couldn’t keep track of all of them. “For me,
Tiger Mountain
is kind of a magic album; there’s so much in there that I just wasn’t conscious of putting in at all,” he admitted to the critic Lester Bangs a few years later.

The artist Judy Nylon, his girlfriend through much of 1974, recalled that she would often catch him recording himself talking in his apartment, fearful that he would forget a fleeting idea. He religiously kept a diary, too, and seemed to be archiving his every thought, waiting for the muse to strike.

Eno had his reasons to feel a bit self-conscious. By 1974, he had already spent several years in the public eye. In the earlier part of the 1970s, he was the art-glam outfit Roxy Music’s synthesizer player—an androgynous character with long, flowing locks and a penchant for lipstick, feathers, and form-fitting synthetic fabrics. If you look at footage of Roxy Music performances from that time, it’s impossible to keep your eyes off Eno, clad in a leopard-print getup and twiddling a small analog synth in a fold-out briefcase to add mangled blasts of electronic noise.
It’s easy to see, in retrospect, how he quickly began upstaging Roxy’s dapper frontman Bryan Ferry. David Bowie may have talked a good game about being from Mars with Ziggy Stardust, but Eno was far more convincing as an actual alien. He looked more reptilian than Bowie, and his sound seemed more aggressively futuristic, more surreal.

Eno parted ways with Roxy Music in 1973 after a major falling out with Ferry. Later on, Eno claimed that he knew he was through with Roxy Music when he started thinking about his laundry during performances. Whatever the reason, leaving Roxy Music was probably one of the best things Eno ever did; he wasted no time building a career of his own. According to popular legend, he wrote the song “Baby’s on Fire’’ the very same day he left Roxy Music, in 1973.

By the end of 1974, Eno was 27 years old, and, by all appearances, was on some kind of cosmic hit streak. He was riding high on a wellspring of fresh ideas, which were leading him in exciting new directions. After making two jumbled but inspired albums with Roxy Music earlier on in the decade, he masterminded two jumbled but inspired solo rock albums of his own—
Here Come the Warm Jets
in 1973, and
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
in 1974. He also made an experimental album called
No Pussyfooting
with wily King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp in 1973, and was
now pitching in on John Cale, Nico, and Robert Wyatt projects, collaborating with former Roxy bandmate Phil Manzanera on a side project, and releasing the odd single to boot. He had even cracked the U.K. Top 40 that year with a goofy one-off single called “The Seven Deadly Finns’’—perhaps the only hit single ever to feature yodeling, multiple double-entendres, and several specific references to cybernetics:

Although variety is the spice of life

A steady rhythm is the source

Simplicity is the crucial thing

Systemically of course

(work it all out like Norbert Wiener)

The shout-outs to classic cybernetics ideas (“variety,” “simplicity,” “systemically,” and so forth) weren’t just random stabs at goofiness; Eno was very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art-school student in the 1960s, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird’s eye view. In addition to books on cybernetics, he was reading books by the avant-garde composer John Cage, along with books taking a wide-angle approach to analyzing culture (a book called
Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts
, by Morse Peckham, was a particular favorite).

By 1975, Roxy Music was growing steadily more refined, smoothing out all of the lumps that had made them interesting in the first place. David Bowie was losing the plot.
Young Americans
, his “plastic-soul” excursion, would show him running out of ideas and running on fumes. Marc Bolan of T. Rex was still alive, but he was practically a non-entity—about to exile himself to Monte Carlo in an attempt to escape the British tax system. By this point, all Eno seemed to have in common with his creatively exhausted glam compatriots was a lingering fondness for women’s makeup. He was at the peak of his creative powers, but he was tremendously critical of himself.

Eno’s “mid-life crisis’’ probably had its start somewhere around 1964, when he enrolled in a small art school called Ipswich. It bears mentioning to the American reader that British art schools were a different animal compared to their US counterparts. Of course, every art school had its own unique approach, and Ipswich at the time was one of the most radical. But across the board, there were big differences between the US and UK schools—in terms of curriculum, structure, and method, and also in terms of the students themselves.

British art schools were fast becoming a force in the music world. Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s 1987 book
Art into Pop
documented the grand tradition of UK art schools and popular music, enumerating a
litany of rock stars who had done time in art school: Pete Townshend of The Who, Ray Davies of the Kinks, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, John Lennon of the Beatles, and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, for starters. Barring a few outliers—Mick Jagger, oddly enough, studied at the London School of Economics—it seemed as if the British art colleges were an incubator for the rock and roll leaders of tomorrow.

A handful of American art-schoolers went on to achieve international fame in the rock circuit; David Byrne of the Talking Heads, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, is one example. But big-time American rockers who attended college tended to go to liberal arts schools, where they honed their budding lyrical skills while studying things like literature. Lou Reed, for instance, studied English at Syracuse University; Bob Dylan studied poetry before he dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year.

If these American and British musicians had one thing in common, it was the fact that hardly any of them majored in music. With the exception of a few radical outposts like Mills College in California, which bred a whole generation of groundbreaking experimental composers, music programs were generally considered to be the staid preserve of the establishment. Even
John Cage, the household name of new American music, rarely taught at music schools; for a time, Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design, established by the legendary Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy.

Ipswich Art College in the mid-1960s was ruled by Roy Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his aggressively offbeat teaching style. A few years earlier, Ascott had been the head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where Pete Townshend had been. “The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation,” Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. “We were set projects that we could not understand, criticized on bases that we did not even recognize as relevant.”

One of Eno’s art teachers at Ipswich, Tom Phillips, quickly became one of his trusted allies. (
Another Green World
’s cover art is a detail from a painting by Phillips.) “When I went to teach at Ipswich in the Sixties it was quite a sleepy place,” Phillips recalled in an interview with
The Independent
in 1998:

[B]ut the art school had been taken over by a dynamic futurist called Roy Ascott who wanted to run it as a sort of experimental course. As one of a team of
quasi-progressives, the first thing I did was present the students with a life model and say: “Just make lots of dots as quickly as possible and see if you can say something about the model.” Everybody did this very diligently and pretty boringly, with one exception. There was this strange blond boy in the corner who did millions of dots and then tore the whole thing up into the shape of a human being.

For Eno, the “strange blond boy’’ in Phillips’ class, this dots exercise was the least of his worries. Ascott’s teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises—an echo of cybernetics’ emphasis on “systems learning”—and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do—study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create “mindmaps’’ of each other.

The extreme discombobulation of Ipswich left a deep impression on Eno, shaking up his most fundamental notions of what an artist was and what art could be. Ipswich was also where he began experimenting with tape recorders, delving into sound with Phillips’ encouragement. “I had links with a musical world Brian didn’t know,” Phillips recalled to
The Independent
. “I introduced him to Cage, for instance.
Cage was what you’d nowadays call ‘empowering.’ He made you realize that there wasn’t a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn’t appreciated. When you’re a young artist, all you seek is license, and Cage had done that, shown that this gate was open. I remember a game emerged between me and Brian and a couple or others which was called ‘sound tennis.’ We went around Ipswich buying up old wrecked pianos and put them all round the room. Then we played a kind of hand tennis and scored according to the quality of noise we made when hitting a stripped piano. It was a rather good game.” Cage was a touchstone for legions of budding artists, and Eno was no exception. The 1961 anthology
Silence
, once jokingly described by the critic Rob Tannenbaum as “the
Das Kapital
of avant-garde composing,” packed Cage’s ideas into a wallop so heavy that it would send shockwaves reverberating through culture for decades to come. It was easy to see why Cage’s ideas were so engaging. In addition to Cage’s entreatment to open up our ears to the wide variety of sounds in our environment, he elevated the importance of the artistic process. A composition wasn’t simply about the finished product, but about the path it took to get there. He was also famously a proponent of “indeterminacy” and chance operations; his use of the ancient Chinese system, the I Ching,
to make compositional decisions was a spiritual forefather of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. Cage’s ideas had obvious visual and literary appeal, too; his detailed instructions for his works were works of art unto themselves. He was a tremendous meta-thinker, with the canny ability to position his ideas within a larger cultural and theoretical context, and some might argue that his writings are more enjoyable than his music. Plus, Cage was a Renaissance man in his own life—in addition to being a world-famous composer, he was a painter, a printmaker, a writer, an avid mushroom collector, an amateur Zen philosopher, and a macrobiotic cook, among other things.