Brian Eno: ‘All the world is musical if you choose to listen that way’

“This is rather fun,” Brian Eno says. Pop’s great conceptualist — co-founder of Roxy Music, pioneer of ambient music, 74-year-old elder statesman of sonic experimentalism — is standing by the edge of the Serpentine lake in London’s Hyde Park squirting a seagull with a goldfish-shaped water pistol. “It’s quite a good pistol, isn’t it?” he remarks.

I have joined him for a walk in the park a few days before the release of his new album, ForeverAndEverNoMore. Starting at the top end of the neighbouring Kensington Gardens, not far from Eno’s Notting Hill studio, we have marched towards the lake at a brisk 120 beats per minute. Eno tells me the tempo: he can calculate it as our feet beat a tattoo over the ground. “Quite a few of my favourite songs are in 120,” he says.

ForeverAndEverNoMore is his 22nd solo album. It arrives 50 years after Roxy Music’s debut, when Eno’s inquisitive energies were first unleashed on the world of pop. He quit after two albums, frustrated by the conformity of band life. His 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports coined a name for a new genre of electronic minimalism. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a 1981 collaboration with David Byrne of Talking Heads, made prescient use of sampling, a key technology in modern pop.

He has produced albums by huge rock bands such as U2 and Coldplay, made sound installations for art galleries and devised apps for generating nonstop computer music that seems to never repeat itself. Many a musician has reached for his card set Oblique Strategies, which he created with the artist Peter Schmidt in 1975 as a lateral thinking aid to conquer creative block.

Chance, intellectual curiosity and playfulness are hallmarks of his work — like happening upon a Finding Nemo water pistol lying on the ground within squirting range of a seagull sitting on a wooden post in the lake of a London park. On this occasion, the experiment establishes beyond peradventure that seagulls are designed to get wet. The bird sets up an ugly squawking when Eno stops spraying water at it.

“Yes, all right mate, we got you,” he ripostes. We turn our backs on the abrasive seafowl and set off on the next leg of our hike.

Our route follows that of a daily walk that he did for 18 years with a friend who moved to Ireland in the summer. “A key point in my day. I haven’t really replaced it yet,” he says. Traffic hums in the distance, which Eno likens to an ocean. There are piercing cries from parakeets flying overhead and passing fragments of other people’s conversations. Workers cut the grass with noisy strimmers and mowers.

“Something I learned from John Cage, that hero of music, was this idea that all the world is musical if you choose to listen to it that way,” Eno says. As a child in Woodbridge, Suffolk, the son of a postman, he was particularly drawn to the sound of the mail train at night. “The sound of that train, it always blew its whistle as it rounded the curve. It’s very evocative for me.” The harmonics of the local church bells are also scored into his acoustic memory.

“One of the first ideas in ambient music was to try to blur the boundary of what’s in the music and what isn’t,” he says. He has always been interested in distortion, pushing pure resonances towards noise. He scuffs his shoe soles on the ground to illustrate. “These kinds of noises. Thumps, chains. I used those quite a lot once. Just to make a kind of boundary-less music that could bleed into the world around you.” 

ForeverAndEverNoMore features him singing, a role that caused him unease in the past. “The problem with writing words is that they automatically get seen as being what the music is about,” he says. “Critics love words because it puts music into the language that they can talk. So critics often write more about words and that used to drive me so crazy. That’s why I stopped writing words, basically.” 

Why, then, choose to include voices so prominently on his new songs? “I think it’s because I wanted to sing again,” he says with a laugh. He has an a cappella group that meets each week at his studio to sing old songs: gospel, doo-wop, country and western — whatever. “I thought: I want some humans in the [musical] landscape,” he adds.

The relationship of people to the natural world is central to ForeverAndEverNoMore. Its music is sombre and imposing. There is a striking array of electronic textures, some beautiful, others foreboding. Sounds of birdsong are accompanied by Eno intoning apocalyptic verses about “storms and floods of blood”. The vocals are a funereal chant, a register of loss and sorrow. It is a style that he first unveiled on his 2016 album The Ship, which was about the Titanic, that enduring symbol of technological hubris.

Eno’s daughter Darla and niece Cecily are guest vocalists on the album. His musician brother Roger also appears on it. Two tracks were debuted by the sibling pair (Brian is older) during a concert at the Acropolis last year while forest fires raged in the outskirts of Athens.

“You could see the sky lit up, and occasionally bits of ash would float down on the stage,” Eno remembers. He wears a green badge on his jacket with the insignia of the environmental activist movement Extinction ​​Rebellion. “I thought: we’re mad, really, why aren’t we doing something? Why are we standing here on stage doing this, as though: ‘Oh it’s not here yet, we can carry on’?” 

When I interviewed him in 2011, he described himself as an optimist. Now he strikes a less positive note. “In the short term, I’m pessimistic. In the long term, I’m optimistic,” he says. By that he means a hundred years or so. “Long after I’ve gone. I think we’re facing a very radical civilisational transformation. I can’t help but think it will be pretty disruptive.” 

We tramp back up the north side of Hyde Park towards Kensington Gardens. “Michael!” he calls out to a bespectacled passer-by. The distinguished composer Michael Nyman looks over and returns Eno’s greeting. They have known each other since 1969.

Another old friend has been in touch recently. Roxy Music’s guitarist Phil Manzanera emailed to invite him to the band’s 50th anniversary reunion show in London. Eno thinks he is unlikely to go and laughs when I tell him that it is the same day that his new album comes out. “I just have this anti-nostalgia gene, very strongly,” he says. Our circular walk ends back at the beginning; but Eno’s work marches on.

‘ForeverAndEverNoMore’ is out now on Opal Music/UMC

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