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Paul Morley The Observer, Sunday 17 January 2010 Brian Eno in his studio. Photograph: Harry Borden When influential music website Pitchfork listed its 100 greatest albums of the 1970s – which in certain other lists is calculated to be the greatest decade for rock music – the modestly immodest, driven, musical non-musician Brian Eno was directly and Little Richard, or Duchamp and doo wop, or Mondrian and Moog, Eno busily and bossily remodelled pop music during the 70s. He looked at what the Velvet Underground, Can, Steve Reich and the Who had done, went forth and multiplied. Eno created an atmosphere, and helped determine what the history of electronic music was between the avant garde 1950s and the pop 21st century. He demonstrated – as an abstract part of the early and surreal Roxy Music, the evocative Bowie Berlin trilogy Heroes/Low/Lodger, the nervy NY Talking Heads, as a floating collaborator with Nico, John Cale, Robert Wyatt, Cluster, Robert Fripp, Kevin Ayers, Jon Hassell and Harold Budd, as stern futurist mentor to Devo and Ultravox, as discerning curator of the beautifully conceived contemporary music label Obscure, as careful discoverer of the pulseless, wordless, eventless, timeless music he lovingly called "ambient" – that pop music was where you could be the kind of artist he wanted to be. In 1981, he designed the influential sound and content of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne – the prestigious culmination of his solo and group work in the 1970s, the studio combining of inner space, other worlds, random impressions, scrupulous visions, found sound, taped memories, cut-up text, stolen rhythms, daring edits, painted space, original borrowing, inquisitive permutations, mutant gospel and electronic interference.Then there was U2 and recently, as if relishing the snobbish horror of those who dismiss U2 as pompous irritants, he's attended to another ambitious four-piece male rock group with delusions of splendour, Coldplay, producing their last multi- million selling album and now, at the age of 61, finishing their next. A mischievous ghost of the glammed up art pop star Eno that was first noticed as part of the theatre of Roxy Music now haunts the sound and image of the two biggest rock bands in the world who would claim to be, in fact, post-Eno as much as post-punk. Coldplay didn't really belong anywhere before Eno apart from inside their own success. Now they have attached themselves via Eno to a very particular history of avant pop practice. Eno himself is prone to chuckle good naturedly when faced with bemusement at his connection to Coldplay. He stays behind the scenes, more likely to curate an art festival or present a public lecture on something to do with pleasure, beauty, atheism, perfume or nuclear disarmament than appear to have anything to do with rock or pop music. If Roxy Music are ever spotted together on stage, he will be somewhere else, searching for something new to astound him. Much, naturally, has changed since the volatile, fussy, sublime Eno of For Your Pleasure, Here Come The Warm Jets, Discreet Music, Heroes and Once in a Lifetime, but he's still talking about what he does, and why, working out his place, the place of art, the history of progress, the enigma of meaning, the mechanics of creativity, the mystery of aesthetics, reluctant to think too much about his past in case, as he says, he starts to feel "useless awe towards his former self" but politely prepared to look back at his work if he thinks someone might find it useful. When you meet him to discuss something or other to do with his always perfectly organised research and development thoughts about something or other, you arrive as he is finishing one conversation with someone about, say, how technology changes the way our brains work, and as you leave someone else is arriving for a conversation about, say, the shrinking divisions between art and science. Or how Jeremy Clarkson almost moved into the house next to his office which was previously owned by Jason Donovan. I talked with him as part of a series of conversations that were filmed for a BBC Arena documentary. On talking: 1 "I heard a recording that had been made of me 35 years ago chatting with some friends and I thought the tape must have sped up because I sounded so fast. When others spoke, they were at a normal speed. It was me, I was speaking so fast. What I find both disappointing and reassuring is that I was saying exactly those things I will be saying today. I don't know what to make of that. A few different references, but the basic ideas haven't changed at all. No difference whatsoever! I suppose it's good to see I've been consistent as sometimes over the years it seems as though it's all been a bit incoherent, a bit of this, a bit of that, a while doing this, then one of those, followed by three of those. It seems all over the place when I'm doing it. Listening to me now talking then suggests there has been a pattern." On the intensity of ideas "If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. You expect to be engaged with ideas strongly whether you are for or against them. If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture." On listening "If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison. That had a lot to do with my feeling about sound and space, which became a big theme for me. How does space make a difference to sound, what's the difference between hearing something in this room and then another room. Can you imagine other rooms where you can hear music? It also made a difference to how I feel about the communality of music in that the music I liked the most, singing in church, was done by a group of people who were not skilled – they were just a group of people, I knew them in the rest of the week as the coal man and the baker." On destiny "It was a dilemma for me at the end of my time at school. Am I going into music or painting ? The Who were important to me when I was working out whether I would go into fine art or popular art. I felt they had found an important position between the two. Then the Velvet Underground came along and also made it clear how you could straddle the two somehow. It helped make my mind up to go into music." On recording "I came out of this funny place where I was interested in the experimental ideas of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Gavin Bryars, but also in pop music. Pop was all about the results and the feedback. The experimental side was interested in process more than the actual result – the results just happened and there was often very little control over them, and very little feedback. Take Steve Reich. He was an important composer for me with his early tape pieces and his way of having musicians play a piece each at different speeds so that they slipped out of synch. "But then when he comes to record a piece of his like, say, Drumming, he uses orchestral drums stiffly played and badly recorded. He's learnt nothing from the history of recorded music. Why not look at what the pop world is doing with recording, which is making incredible sounds with great musicians who really feel what they play. It's because in Reich's world there was no real feedback. What was interesting to them in that world was merely the diagram of the piece, the music merely existed as an indicator of a type of process. I can see the point of it in one way, that you just want to show the skeleton, you don't want a lot of fluff around it, you just want to show how you did what you did.As a listener who grew up listening to pop music I am interested in results. Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop. Did it work? No. We'll do it differently then. Did it sell? No. We'll do it differently then. So I wanted to bring the two sides together. I liked the processes and systems in the experimental world and the attitude to effect that there was in the pop, I wanted the ideas to be seductive but also the results." On being like nothing else "In my house in Oxfordshire, we have this big, beautiful Andrew Logan sculpture of a lovely Pegasus with blue glass wings.

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