Surrender. It's Brian Eno
Britain's great cultural chameleon Brian Eno wants us all to slow down, relax, and be swept away by art. And the revolution starts in Brighton this weekend
Stuart Jeffries
Wednesday 28 April 2010

'I know this is all going to sound terrible," says Brian Eno over tea at his Notting Hill studio. "This article is going to come out and people are going to say, 'Another fucking hippie. Why don't they die, these people?'" Eno takes a rueful sip of his Flor de Jamaica hibiscus tea – a choice of beverage that might seem to confirm his point.

The artist christened Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno in Suffolk 61 years ago is, fingers crossed, wrong. In an age in which we venerate the idea of the lonely artist toiling in a garret before coming down to present the Great Work, Eno wants to suggest alternative visions of how art is made, how it works, and why we need it. Admittedly, if he was an ordinary mortal, you wouldn't give two hoots, but Eno is one of the most consistently diverting creative presences in Britain: godfather of ambient music, visual artist, Prospect magazine columnist, one-time bemulletted techno-whizz at Roxy Music's keyboards, and the record producer who made U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and even Coldplay sound so compelling.

Eno moves his mug and draws me a diagram. This, it transpires, isn't so much an interview as a gentle lecture by a widely read, reflective gent. Over the course of a couple of hours, he will threaten me with violence, teach me about shipbuilding, chat about surfing, and explain why religion is similar to sex and drugs. I've been in worse situations.

On one side of Eno's scale diagram, he writes "control"; on the other "surrender". "We've tended to dignify the controlling end of the spectrum," he says. "We have Nobel prizes for that end." His idea is that control is what we generally believe the greats – Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, Wagner – were about. Such people, the argument goes, controlled their chosen fields, working in isolation, never needing any creative input from others. As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it's come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius. "We've tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you've done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I'm saying that's all wrong."

He pauses, then asks: "I don't know if you've ever read much about the history of shipbuilding?" Not a word. "Old wooden ships had to be constantly caulked up because they leaked. When technology improved, and they could make stiffer ships because of a different way of holding boards together, they broke up. So they went back to making ships that didn't fit together properly, ships that had flexion. The best vessels surrendered: they allowed themselves to be moved by the circumstances.

"Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part." Eno considers all his recent art to be a rebuttal to this attitude. "I want to rethink surrender as an active verb," he says. "It's not just you being escapist; it's an active choice. I'm not saying we've got to stop being such controlling beings. I'm not saying we've got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I'm saying something more complex." ...



Ta much, dear Edosan

After four decades spent standing guard over one of the most secretive and enigmatic bands on the planet, it seems that Ralf Hütter is loosening up. Kraftwerk, the German quartet who mapped the digital pop future long before digital technology existed, may have gradually retreated behind their carefully contrived anti-image as faceless musical robots, but Hütter is in unusually cheery and chatty mood when we meet.

Still boyish at 62, with a neat crown of wavy brown hair, his face oddly reminiscent of the actor Peter Fonda, Hütter enthuses about Kraftwerk’s latest global adventures: roadtesting their new 3-D video screens and nightclubbing in Chile with Radiohead in March, as well as performing alongside the British Olympic cycling team at the Manchester Velodrome in July. A longtime cycling obsessive, Hütter even managed to secure a spin around the velodrome track the morning after the concert.

He also jokes about Kraftwerk’s plans to enter next year’s Eurovision Song Contest. “Yes, totally naked,” he grins. “That is the only way to do it.” This is Kraftwerk Humour. We both laugh for precisely 4.2 seconds. ...