Brian Eno Wants To Know If You’re Listening

The first time Eno deliberately broke a rule, he was eight.

He was born in 1948 in Woodbridge, a town of a few thousand in Suffolk, not far from the North Sea. He came from a long line of workaday celebrities—local postmen. His great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and two uncles had all served in that role, and his father, William, was especially devoted. He began the job when he was 13 and took three days of sick leave in nearly 50 years. (Eno, too, “did the post” during a few holidays.) “He’d often pick up things for the old or sick people on his rounds, or use his post van as a way for farmers to exchange things between each other,” Eno told me. “He was doing a useful job, and his kindness and diligence were well-known.”

Eno should have known better, then, than to steal. He and his pal, David Whittaker, planned the heist at the local Woolworth’s. While David bantered with the shopkeeper, Eno would lean over the counter and slide a tobacco pipe, which he didn’t even want, into the oversized sleeves of his duffle coat. They got away with it, too, Eno burying the pipe in a little wooden box until they figured out how to use it. He tossed and turned all night, however, disinterring the pipe the next morning and trying to sneak it back into the shop. The shopkeeper spotted him.

“In my little town, he knew my parents, of course. I was breaking down, in tears, because I felt so bad having stolen something,” says Eno, taking his time to unpack the story, like something he hasn’t considered in decades. “He never told my parents. He must have been a decent man, because he could see I was in a terrible state.”

Eno was a dichotomous kid. He was the firstborn of William, a World War II veteran, and Maria, a Flemish woman who had built German bombers as a concentration-camp prisoner. He had a much older half-sister, Rita, who introduced him to rock and roll when it was still in its infancy. He became obsessed with the notion of taping sound. “I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape,” he once told Lester Bangs, “and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards.”

In school, he was a very smart prankster. He would study Pears’ Cyclopedia—a guide to “everything you need to know,” published by a soap company—and spout out what he’d read during class, impressing his teachers. He indulged his own curiosities. “The greatest gift his parents bestowed on him was to leave him almost entirely alone for long stretches of time,” David Sheppard wrote in his excellent Eno biography, On Some Faraway Beach.

An uncle, though, taught him two crucial lessons when he was 11. After an army accident, the uncle lived in India for a while, becoming engrossed in its culture and philosophy. Back home, he became a gardener and a fabulist, always telling stories that rode the edge of disbelief. “He said, ‘Brian, it is time I taught you how to lie,’” Eno recalled earlier this year, during an online lecture for the music-education platform School of Song. He said this was one of the most important things anyone ever said to him. “The sort of basic message was, if you want to lie, the way you do it is by imagining what the world would be like if what you were saying was true. Lying is a way of creating another world and then living in it.”