‘Singers don’t need to bare their souls’

Brian Eno is Britain’s favourite cultural polymath. He contributed a chime for a clock that will ring once every 10,000 years. He wrote a soundtrack for an experimental video that would only work if you turned your TV on its side. In fact, such is his currency as an offbeat national treasure that he was once the subject of an April Fools’ hoax which declared he had been commissioned to write a new ambient theme tune to The Archers.

Indeed, Eno has followed an eclectic path ever since he left glam-rock band Roxy Music in the Seventies. He’s worked as a composer and producer alongside David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2. As well as several gloriously odd side projects (as above), he’s a serious ambient pioneer, best encapsulated by such albums as Discreet Music (1975).

He’s also described himself as a non-musician, a term which has been called into question with his new album The Ship, in which he returns to singing for the first time in a decade. “I found that I was able to put together two strands of work that have been separate for a long time,” says Eno. “Which is the sort of atmospheric, filmic, scenic stuff, but with singing. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but I tried it and went, ‘Bloody hell, it works!’”

For Eno, the vocals come last. He says it’s not unusual, that many artists he has worked with felt this way, too. It was certanly the case with David Bowie, a great friend with whom he collaborated on the much-lauded “Berlin trilogy” of the late Seventies, as well as 1995’s 1. Outside: “David would have an identity in mind. He’d know who the person singing it was, and their attitude. And when he was singing, he’d take the pose. It might be this [Eno puts his hands on his hips and gives an air of loucheness] or sometimes it was another kind of person [he buries his chin in his neck in a stiff manner]. I remember him recording I’m Afraid of Americans and saying, after one of the early takes, ‘No, he’s got to be more self-doubting than that.’ His feelings about who this person was were quite specific. And he was quite clear about what difference that would make to how this voice should be. This is something that good singer-songwriters understand.”

In the past, Eno has been scathing about singers who try and project themselves through their music. He once said: “It’s that ridiculous teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it. This is my problem with Tracey Emin. Who f****** cares.”

Now he tells me: “A lot of people think that singers should always be sincere, that it has to be their own soul coming out. That’s b-- -----. What you’re really doing is working like a playwright. You’re making little plays and the singer is the lead character.”

The Ship is informed by the First World War and the sinking of the Titanic – two events that set the tone for what he calls the “hubris and paranoia” of the last century, while also serving as a pre-echo of the current one. It feels like classic Eno, rich with rolling ambience, treated sounds and fascinating detail. It’s also his highest-charting solo album since his 1973 debut,

Musical renaissance man Brian Eno talks to Rob Hughes about David Bowie and the arrogance of pop stars ‘Children learn through play, adults play through art’