Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/Dr. Doyle/Eno/nmetxt

Text File | 1994-10-14 | 12KB | 191 lines

            EVERYTHING YOU'D RATHER NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT BRIAN ENO

   Chrissie Hynd (1974) New Musical Express February 02: Pages 24 and 29

    Everything you'd rather not have known about Brian Eno.



   It was with a certain apprehensive curiosity that I first noticed the
   brown lace-up shoes. He displayed a normalcy that I just couldn't
   trust. After all, I'd seen his photos and I knew I was dealing with no
   ordinary deviant.

   Yet the toned-down reserve, the limp handshake (handshake?) and the
   nice-guy inoffensiveness had me baffled. He just didn't come on like
   someone who keeps an extensive collection of breast bondage literature
   in the bathroom.

   I mean, what do you say to this guy? "Oh hi Eno .... Hear you shaved
   off your pubic hair?" He answers the door wearing a red satin kimono
   and black dress pants. We pass through the dimly-lit hallway to a
   large white room which consists entirely of a lit candle, two pillows,
   tape recorder and beige carpet.

   "Carpeting gives you a whole new outlook on life, you don't need
   furniture."

   Eno's voice has absolutely nothing in common with the vocal tracks on
   "Here Come The Warm Jets", his forthcoming L.P.

   His pronounciation is that of a soft-spoken gentleman. His singing is
   not unlike the shriek of a hare that's just caught an air gun Pellet
   up the ass.

   Given only the minutest amount of prompting, he will talk non-stop for
   hours. In this case, the mere mention of his vocal techniques sets him
   off "VOCAL TECHNIQUES. That's something I've never even thought about.
   Why, I propose the question to myself do people sing certain ways at
   certain times in history? Why should I want to sing through my nose?"
   (He breaks into "Baby's On Fife", a track from H.C.T.W.J. and, as if
   it's her cue, a 6 ft. 2 in. 195 lb. negress enters the room, lights
   his cigarette, and without saying a word, exits.) -- What I like is
   when you get a combination of something that's very turned-down and
   dark and sinister, but not dramatic - very underhand and almost
   inaudible, as opposed to the kind of aggression that people like the
   Floyd use, which is very obvious assault. Iggy Pop does it as well.

   "I like taking something that's played down -lowkey - contrasting with
   a voice that's very anguished, making the whole sound grotesque and
   aggressive in a pathetic and laughable way. "Baby's On Fire", starts
   out as though it's going to be very sinister, but has very ordinary
   words, sung with an incredible amount of passion." What about the song
   which incorporated 27 pianos? - the one that was inspired by a dream .
   . . "You mean "On Some Faraway Beach". It wasn't only inspired - all
   the words to that occurred in the dream. I quite often wake up and
   write down my dreams because I find them so completely mysterious. I
   can't see what it was in me that made me put together that particular
   combination of items. "I find the dreams are always much more
   brilliant in their construction than anything I consciously think of.
   On that particular one, I just woke up with all these words in my head
   and I wrote them straight down in the dark. When writing from dreams,
   you don't feel any responsibility for what you do, which is important
   to me. Another way I write lyrics is to get the backing track down and
   then play it with a cassette near by and, as it's playing, I start
   singing anything to it - like 'ba-do-de-be-de-n- do-day'. And I do
   that a lot until I finally end up with a version in scat singing. Then
   I listen to that again and again until eventually I don't hear it as
   nonsense anymore and I start hearing words. Then I write them out and
   they become the words to the song. I find it absolutely impossible to
   sit down without music and write lyrics because basically I haven't
   got anything to say in a direct way like that. The actual musical
   context of a song is always so much more expressive than the words
   are. Lyrics in songs, in nearly 8O% of cases, actually make the song
   less interesting. The lyrics I like best are the ones which are either
   completely bland like the early rock lyrics, where there's obviously
   no attempt to do anything but to sing a melody - or, on the other
   hand, I admire the ones of the great librettists like Noel Coward. And
   also Bryan . . ." "Ferry?" "Yeah, I think Bryan's an extraordinary
   lyricwriter, but in a style that I could never do. That kind of verbal
   imagery doesn't really come from me very much. I have no pretensions
   to poetry at all. "The deciding factor about what words I use is what
   vowels they have in them - what their phonetic structure is. "If you
   use a word that's got an 'o' vowel sound in it, it necessarily sounds
   soft and subdued and grave and solemn. If you use a word that's got an
   'e' or 'i' sound in it, it usually sounds angry, i.e. (sings) 'Baby's
   on fiiyerr' You could never do that with a word with an 'o' in it. "If
   it said: 'Baby goes sloooo-ly', it wouldn't have the same Aggression
   rating, and that's the basis I choose words on. It could have been
   baby's on anything - 'Baby's on hire' (ha ha ha). which is an
   interesting variation. "Fuck! I wish I'd thought of that! I should
   have done this interview before I did the album! "I'M ALWAYS PRONE to
   do things very quickly, which has distinct advantages - you leave all
   the mistakes in, and the mistakes always become interesting. The
   Velvet Underground, for example, are the epitome of mistake-filled
   music, and it makes the music very subtle and beautiful. "Any feature
   can be the most important one - as long as there is one important
   feature. There are so many bands who present you with a large number
   of well-done features - none of which are important. "I think that
   bands like Yes and E.L.P., even The Floyd who everyone's saying are
   the beginning of something new and exciting - the new rock tradition -
   are just tying up a lot of loose ends. "They're finishing something
   off which is a useful function, but not one which should be confused
   with breaking new territory." His voice trails off as he spies a copy
   of Search magazine. He leafs through it with obvious pleasure, but the
   gleam in his eyes softens, and sadly he shakes his head - -,It's a
   burning shame that most people want to keep pornography under cover
   when it's such a highly developed artform - which is one of the
   reasons that I started collecting pornographic playing cards I've got
   about 50 packs which feature on all my recordcovers for the astute
   observer. "There's something about pornography which has a similarity
   to rock music. A pornographic photographer aims his camera absolutely
   directly, at the centre of sexual attention. He's not interested in
   the environment of the room. "I hate the sort of photography in
   Penthouse and Playboy which is such a compromise between something to
   give you a hard-on and something which pretends to be artistic. The
   straight pornographers aim right there where it's at. "Which is
   analogous to so many other situations where somebody thinks one thing
   is important, so they focus completely on that and don't realise
   they're unconsciously organising everything else around it as well. I
   have such beautiful pornogragraphy - I'll show you my collection
   sometime."The last guy invited me up to see his etchings. "One theory
   is that black-and-white photography is always more sexy than colour
   photography. The reason for this is provided by Marshall McLuhan, who
   points out that if a thing is 'high definition,' which colour
   photography is, it provides more information and doesn't require
   participation as much as if it is 'low definition'." I.e. a horror
   play on the radio is always very, very frightening because the imagery
   is always your own. If you'rechoosing your own imagery, you'll always
   choose the most frightening, or in the case of pornography, the most
   sexual. "The idea of things being low definition has always interested
   me a lot - of being unspecific - another thing which is a key-point of
   my lyrics. They must be 'low definition' so that they don't say
   anything at all direct. I think the masters of that were Lou Reed and
   Bob Dylan (on "Blonde on BIonde"). The lyrics are so inviting.

   "DO YOU KNOW WHAT 'burning shame' is by the way? It's a pornographic
   term for a deviation involving candles. "Ouch!" - Very popular in
   Japanese pornography. They're always using lit candles because
   Japanese pornography is very sadistic, partly because of the Japanese
   view of women, which is a mixture of resentment and pure animal lust.
   "In the traditional view, a woman is still expected to be at the
   beck'n' call of her husband, so that manifests itself in that kind of
   pornography. Of which I have a few examples, of course. "Mexican
   pornography is an interesting island of thought because they seem to
   be heavily into excretory functions. The traditional American view is
   that anything issued from the body is dirty. It's incredibly
   puritanical and it resents bodily fluids, so if one is trying to
   debase a woman, you cover them with that and hence you get the
   fabulous term 'Golden Showers' - the term for pissing on someone,
   which some well-known rock musicians are said to be very involved in .
   . ."Here comes the warm jets? "That's certainly a reference." That
   he's considered to be a film star of sorts in a few very 'elite'
   circles. - Any chance of him making a comeback to the Screen? "Some of
   the movies I did were very funny - they had to pretend to have a plot.
   Ha ha. "Can I show you my pubic area?" (! ! !) He exposes his stomach
   down to his, ah - about six inches below his Navel. "Absolutely bare!
   Now I've got this beautiful bare belly! I've got this new Japanese
   thing, you see and the Japanese don't have much hair on their bodies
   'Japanese culture I tip as the next big thing." I glance nervously
   over at the flickering candle on the windowsill. Out of nowhere, Eno
   produces a very extraordinary looking object which he explains to be
   the 'Double Punkt Roller', a massage device used in Victorian times. I
   mavel at its aesthetic qualities and he assures me that it can only be
   fully appreciated when used on the bare buttocks. We conclude that art
   which demands participation holds the greatest appeal. "I think that
   until the turn of the century, art was always the abject - the thing
   on the wall - whereas now, the orientation is more to think that art
   is the process, or what happens to you when you view it. "I think this
   is an important part of Gary Glitter's records in that they make you
   move in a funny sort of way. Or reggae. It's not possible to assess
   them without taking into account the part of their existence which
   causes a certain kind of behaviour. "I've always been interested in
   the idea of what I call systems art/systems music', which is where you
   think first of all of your activity as a system which must be intact
   and interesting - and you think of the artwork which also must be
   interesting - and you think of the listener as a system which must be
   interesting too. So you must work on all these levels. "That's why I
   don't like the idea of spending months and years recording, because
   essentially, that isn't an interesting process to me." AT THIS POINT,
   a leather-clad redhead, her fingers covered with glue and green
   parakeet feathers enters the room and announces the arrival of 'the
   carpenter'. At 1.00 a.m. the inhabitants of the house appear to be
   waking up, an what all the excitement is about I'm rather reluctant to
   discover. Gentleman that he is, Von Eno sers me to the door, and,
   gazing down the night-time street: "Did you know there's a girls'
   school with 400 girls just round the corner? Very nice, I'll tell you,
   it really is lovely. I mean they're so beautiful those little girls
   are. My conscience won't let me tamper - feel I might damage their
   lives if I do anything."