Brian Eno

Art school and Roxy Music

Brian Peter George Eno was born in Melton, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, on 15 May 1948. At Ipswich and Winchester art schools he studied under the experimental teacher Roy Ascott and the painter Tom Phillips, and he graduated in fine art in 1969 thinking of the tape recorder, not the guitar, as his instrument. He has always called himself a non-musician.

In 1971 a chance meeting with Andy Mackay led him into Roxy Music, where he played an EMS synthesizer, treated the band's sound through tape and effects, and dressed more outrageously than anyone in British rock. He left in mid-1973 after clashing with Bryan Ferry and the same year made (No Pussyfooting) with Robert Fripp, built from two tape recorders and a long delay. Two song albums followed in 1974, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Ambient

In January 1975 Eno was hit by a taxi. Recovering in bed, he was given a record of harp music, could not get up to turn it up, and heard it at the edge of audibility, mixing with the rain: music as part of the environment. That year he started his own label, Obscure, made Discreet Music, Another Green World and, with the painter Peter Schmidt, the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards of instructions for breaking creative deadlock, such as honour thy error as a hidden intention.

He named the idea in 1978. Ambient 1: Music for Airports, built from tape loops of different lengths, was meant, in his liner note, to be as ignorable as it is interesting. The ambient series that followed included The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl with Harold Budd, On Land, and Apollo, and in the 1990s he coined generative music for software that composes itself. His installations, from 77 Million Paintings to projections on the Sydney Opera House, extend the same thinking.

Songs and collaborations

Alongside the ambient work he kept making songs. Before and After Science (1977) took two years and more than a hundred songs to whittle down to ten, its second side gentle and pastoral, which he called ocean music; By This River was made in Cologne with the German duo Cluster. With David Byrne he made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), built around voices taken from radio, preachers and records, a landmark of sampling before samplers existed. He has since made albums with John Cale, Karl Hyde, Jon Hopkins, Fred again.. and his brother Roger Eno.

Producer

Eno's production work changed pop. He worked with David Bowie on Low, Heroes and Lodger; with Talking Heads on More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music and Remain in Light; with Daniel Lanois on U2's The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby; and on Coldplay's Viva la Vida, as well as records by Devo and James. He twice won the Brit award for British producer of the year. In 1994 he composed the six-second Windows 95 start-up sound, which entered the American National Recording Registry in 2025.

On stage and on screen

Eno has hardly ever toured. Rare concerts include a 2021 performance with Roger Eno at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, and Ships in 2023, an orchestral work commissioned by the Venice Biennale and played with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic in Venice, Berlin, Paris, Utrecht and London, where By This River became, for the first time, a song he sang in concert. Gary Hustwit's 2024 documentary Eno is itself generative, assembled differently by software at every screening.

Standing

He declined a CBE in 2007. He has received the Stephen Hawking Medal and been made a Royal Designer for Industry, and an asteroid and a spider are named after him. He co-founded the Long Now Foundation and the climate charity EarthPercent. David Sheppard's biography On Some Faraway Beach and Eno's own diary A Year with Swollen Appendices are the essential books; More Dark Than Shark, the fan archive named after his 1986 book with Russell Mills, has transcribed more than a thousand interviews.

as ignorable as it is interesting

Brian Eno, liner notes to Music for Airports, 1978