Roger Eno – “I thrive on atmosphere”

EMMYLOU HARRIS
“Wrecking Ball” (from Wrecking Ball)
ELEKTRA, 1995
All my choices are about atmospheres. That’s what I thrive on. If something gives me a feeling, it doesn’t have to be a narrative, it just has to be something that presses the atmosphere button. When Danny (Lanois) produces, he puts this whole hinterland into a song. The first few times you hear it, you’re listening to Emmylou’s voice, which isn’t exactly shoddy, but subsequently what you hear is this beautiful tonal landscape supporting it. He gives you somewhere else to live for a few minutes. When Cecilie (Eno, Roger’s daughter) and I were touring The skies, they shift like chords, I gave Danny a ring and he played with us in Los Angeles, where he lives. He’s a genius lap steel player.

JOAN BLONDELL & ETTA MOTEN
Remember My Forgotten Man (from Gold Diggers Of 1933 OST)
DIR. MERVYN LEROY, 1933
This film is an amazing piece of work with some really good songs, but right at the end, out of the blue, it hits you with this. It’s 1933, so it’s the Depression, and there are all these veterans that were, I wouldn’t say willing to die for their country, but expected to, and now they’re back in the States being treated like human detritus. It tears your heart out, but partly because the song’s completely unexpected. It’s like reading a novel that’s a comedy until, right at the end, this awful murder happens for no apparent reason. Being a socialist, it’s not difficult to see why I got it.

WILLIAM TREVOR
After Rain (from After Rain: Stories)
VIKING, 1996
I named the last song on my new album after this. On the cover there’s a painting of the annunciaton by Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli, and in virtually every picture of that moment – when the angel Gabriel comes to a young girl to say “God’s just told me you’re going to be the mother of his son” – the angel is supplicant and the mortal is upright. So Trevor’s story is about lost love, and this woman goes to a hotel she and her husband used to visit in Italy. She’s looking out of the window just after it’s rained and points out this is the exact moment these pictures are painted. The thought of that completely alters the feeling. You know when you smell petrichor and there’s the first rain for weeks, then suddenly it’s calm and beautiful? You’ve got this freshness in the world. His writing is exquisitely understated.

AMI RONNBERG (EDITOR)
The Book of Symbols
TASCHEN, 2010
It’s a reference book, so it goes on about the Hand of Fatima, or the hand as a symbol, the foot, the eye. You can idly open it at any point and you’re suddenly reading about what the deer meant in mediaeval Europe, for example. I’m very much interested in the arcane. I’ve still got packs of Tarot cards lying around, although I don’t read them very often now. But I like the idea that what’s actually happening is you’re revealing yourself to yourself. It’s not as though there’s anything inherently magic about the cards, but you’re allowing yourself to get kind of transcendental for a moment. It’s a way of figuring things out.

RENÉ MAGRITTE
The Empire of Light
1953-1954
He did a lot of these and my particular favourite is the 1953-54 one, but all of them are beautiful. You look at this and you see a house and a tree, but you think, hang on, there’s something a bit strange. Then you realise the trick that he’s done with the light, which is utter genius, because you don’t instantly twig it’s a day sky behind a night scene. There’s something that really throws you and I love it. I love the atmosphere of silence. It’s still and lonely. You can actually see the world like that, but there’s only a particular time, when there’s still quite a light sky but it’s dark.

W.H. AUDEN
Musee des Beaux Arts (from Another Time)
RANDOM HOUSE, 1940
It’s about the ignorance of this awful event that happens to Icarus, which is him falling out of the sky because he was a dick and went too close to the sun. Who would have thought it!? So its big theme is human ignorance to others’ situations. It goes on about the bloke’s horse scratching its rump against a tree, the boat floating away because it has somewhere to get to, and all the time this suffering, this individual suffering… I often find the world a complete tragedy, how people can be so nasty to each other, and this poem exemplifies that. The rest of the world actually doesn’t give a damn. It’s going to get on doing what it does. I’ve got a poetry shelf here stacked full and I constantly go back to this.

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
1562
I went to the Musee de Beaux Art (now the Oldmasters Museum) in Brussels to see the Bruegel painting in Auden’s poem (Landscape With The Fall of Icarus). But then I saw ‘The Rebel Angels’ and there happened to be a seat in front of it, so I sat down and I was absolutely enchanted by the route this picture takes your eye. All these demons are linked and twisted together, so you start somewhere and it’s like a maze you can’t escape. It’s a great picture, full of detail. I don’t know how long I was there, just following this battle. It’s completely different to everything else I’ve picked..!

Dannie Abse
Scent
SPEAK, OLD PARROT, 2010
I came across this by chance. Something popped up where he was reciting it and he seemed such a charming bloke. He was a doctor and a poet, so you put those two together and think his heart’s probably in the right place. This poem is based in abject tragedy. He’d been married 60 years to his wife and they were in a car accident together that he walked away from but she died in. So this poem is about a plant in their garden that she’d planted a few years before, but it hadn’t flourished, it hadn’t taken root after her death. Then it starts to grow and bloom, and it’s about him getting a scent of this flower and thus a scent of her. It’s the most beautiful poem. I’ve got a couple of volumes by him. This one hits you in the heart.

Roger Eno’s album Without Wind / Without Air is released on October 31 by Deutsche Grammophon

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