Brian Eno's Another Green World Read Online Free

“plastic-soul” excursion, would show him running out of ideas and running on fumes. Marc Bolan of T. Rex was still alive, but he was practically a non-entity—about to exile himself to Monte Carlo in an attempt to escape the British tax system. By this point, all Eno seemed to have in common with his creatively exhausted glam compatriots was a lingering fondness for women’s makeup. He was at the peak of his creative powers, but he was tremendously critical of himself.

“Turn it upside down”
     
    Eno’s “mid-life crisis’’ probably had its start somewhere around 1964, when he enrolled in a small art school called Ipswich. It bears mentioning to the American reader that British art schools were a different animal compared to their US counterparts. Of course, every art school had its own unique approach, and Ipswich at the time was one of the most radical. But across the board, there were big differences between the US and UK schools—in terms of curriculum, structure, and method, and also in terms of the students themselves.
    British art schools were fast becoming a force in the music world. Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s 1987 book
Art into Pop
documented the grand tradition of UK art schools and popular music, enumerating alitany of rock stars who had done time in art school: Pete Townshend of The Who, Ray Davies of the Kinks, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, John Lennon of the Beatles, and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, for starters. Barring a few outliers—Mick Jagger, oddly enough, studied at the London School of Economics—it seemed as if the British art colleges were an incubator for the rock and roll leaders of tomorrow.
    A handful of American art-schoolers went on to achieve international fame in the rock circuit; David Byrne of the Talking Heads, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, is one example. But big-time American rockers who attended college tended to go to liberal arts schools, where they honed their budding lyrical skills while studying things like literature. Lou Reed, for instance, studied English at Syracuse University; Bob Dylan studied poetry before he dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year.
    If these American and British musicians had one thing in common, it was the fact that hardly any of them majored in music. With the exception of a few radical outposts like Mills College in California, which bred a whole generation of groundbreaking experimental composers, music programs were generally considered to be the staid preserve of the establishment. EvenJohn Cage, the household name of new American music, rarely taught at music schools; for a time, Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design, established by the legendary Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy.
    Ipswich Art College in the mid-1960s was ruled by Roy Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his aggressively offbeat teaching style. A few years earlier, Ascott had been the head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where Pete Townshend had been. “The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation,” Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. “We were set projects that we could not understand, criticized on bases that we did not even recognize as relevant.”
    One of Eno’s art teachers at Ipswich, Tom Phillips, quickly became one of his trusted allies. (
Another Green World
’s cover art is a detail from a painting by Phillips.) “When I went to teach at Ipswich in the Sixties it was quite a sleepy place,” Phillips recalled in an interview with
The Independent
in 1998:
[B]ut the art school had been taken over by a dynamic futurist called Roy Ascott who wanted to run it as a sort of experimental course. As one of a team ofquasi-progressives, the first thing I