Brian Eno
Oil on canvas, 35.6 x 25.4 cm, 1984-85
NPG (59)

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The following is a transcript of an interview that appeared on BBC Radio 4 as part of Alyn Shipton's feature "Sex Drugs and Four Minutes of Silence." Originally airing on Thursday 26 April 2001, the feature chronicled the experimental music scene of the 1960's, including personalities such as John Cage, John Cale, Andy Warhol, and Frank Zappa.

In a discussion of Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, Alyn asked Tom Phillips to describe the backgrounds of fellow members of the Orchestra. Tom described Brian Eno, and a musical experiment the two undertook.

"Very few people had no musical background, even later on. I mean people who were in the second wave of that Scratch Orchestra world. Someone like Brian Eno, well, he couldn't read music, it's true. But his uncle was a clarinettist, and he [Brian] was obsessed by music.

"I remember, again it was in art school, I was Brian's teacher, and we devised this tennis game, which was called Piano Tennis. Ipswitch was the art school in question. We just drove around all the streets, rode around on bicycles, we rode around all the streets looking for second-hand pianos. We got them, stripped them, lined a whole hall with them, and played tennis.

"The scoring shots were the best noises. Now that seemed a paradigmatic example of what Scratch Orchestra was all about, you know, how do you make the best noises?

"The whole idea of art school is that they were a sort of very nice dustbin for anarchic elements of the population, where people without proper qualifications could go and study something and keep off the streets."

To hear the RealAudio of Tom's interview as provided by BBC Radio 4, click here.

To read the Web summary of Alyn Shipton's full feature, click here.

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