When Legends Collide
What do you get when legendary comics writer and warlock Alan Moore interviews legendary musical pioneer Brian Eno for a BBC radio show?
Something like this:
Alan Moore: In 1975 you had presentiments of doom, not for the first time, which culminated in an encounter with what Alan Ginsberg called The Taxi Cabs of Absolute Reality, I believe… On your way to hospital after this accident you felt quite strongly that you’d brought this on yourself. Which reminded me of William Burroughs’ sudden premonition on the day before he accidentally killed his wife where he was talking about being possessed by what he called the ‘ugly spirit’. Do you have any thoughts about these self destructive energies. I mean, what are they for?
Brian Eno: Yes, I do actually. I have a lot of thoughts about that. I started having a mid-life crisis when I was about eighteen… and it has continued ever since and one of the continuing narratives of that crisis is, “Is what I’m doing worth doing… at all? Is there any point in doing this?” And because I’m very interested in the sciences and I know a lot of scientists and I can see what they are doing and I can sort of understand the point of what they’re doing … I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. What does it do for us? What does it do for me? What does it do for anybody else? Could we do without it? Is it a useful job? Does it make any difference to the world?… those kinds of questions. Now, their answers quite directly affect me because I’m not intellectually dishonest enough to always answer in my own favour. So sometimes I come up with the answer… for several years at a time sometimes… where I say it really isn’t worth doing. There are better ways of spending your time… and this is a sort of crisis, because then I don’t know what to do and I think, “Well, the only way to find out is by trying it again and seeing if I can get somewhere different this time.” And if I find myself going down the same road again I think this is hopeless. I’m in such a privileged, luxury position I can do whatever I want and I’m doing the same thing as I did before.
For more fun of this sort, there is a transcript of the previous show where Moore himself was in the interview chair.
2 responses so far
I thought “warlock” meant oath-breaker and was falling rapidly out of favor as a label for male witches in the rise of that knowledge becoming more widespread.
Well, he isn’t a witch, more an aspiring magus. At any rate it is the term he uses for himself at the beginning of the interview.