JD: I’m just going to ask you questions I’ve always wanted to ask you.
BE: [laughs] Well, okay, that’s all right.
JD: But they do relate to art and music.
BE: Okay.
JD: Inevitably.
BE: [laughs]
JD: Okay right, I’m quite interested in your art education.
BE: Oh yes. Do you know anything about it? Have you ever read it?
JD: I know a bit about it.
BE: It was this course, invented by this guy called Roy Ascott who’d been the student of, um, Richard Hamilton.
JD: Right.
BE: So he was Richard Hamilton’s star student, um, and Roy Ascott decided that the whole of art education needed rethinking. Richard Hamilton had started to do that at Newcastle University. And Roy decided to continue that and he invented this thing called Groundcourse. Which was really, really, really different from anything that happened at any other art school, I think. And it still stands unchallenged as a kind of radical art course.
So this was in a little provincial art school, Ipswich School of Art, when I was there, but it had previously been in Ealing Art College where Pete Townshend was a student. So he ... this Groundcourse was done for two years in Ealing and then it was shut down, because it was too ... too mad for the education committee to take. But then he got a job in Ipswich and many of the same staff came with him. And the staff were unusual people because quite a few of them weren’t artists. Which is unusual for an art school. There was a cybernetician, um, there was a gallerist, which I thought was interesting: to have somebody who was involved in the commercial art world as a teacher. You know, it makes complete sense in some ways, but it was sort of anathema. At that time it was still very much, ‘Oh we don’t think about the business at all,’ you know? Art schools just didn’t do that.
But anyway, the main point of the course seemed to be to start off by completely deconstructing any ideas you had about what art school would be, and then building up something new. I was only 16 when I went there.
JD: Wow! That’s so young.
BE: [laughs] Yeah.
JD: That’s amazing.
BE: Yeah. I went up to fifth form at school and then left–
JD: Is that because you were very good at it?
BE: Um, it wasn’t sort of standard for people to go into higher education at that time. So a lot of people left school after the fifth form. If you went into the sixth form, it was because you wanted to go to university or something else, you know. So I left at 16 and went to a two-year foundation course. Which was what was going on at Ipswich. Diploma in Art and Design, DIPAD it was called, and one of the things that Ipswich was doing was trying to become a degree college instead of just a diploma college, because a diploma wasn’t seen as having the same status as a university degree.
So that was sort of why the education committee called in Roy Ascott [laughs] who, to their horror, didn’t do many things that made it more likely to get, uh ... recognized as a proper art school.
JD: It’s like what they do in the army though isn’t it ... They break you down and rebuild you as a sort of, uh, different kind of human being.
BE: That’s sort of what they did, yeah. So if I just describe the first term: we all turned up with our little boxes of paint, and everyone was about the same age as me. I was one of the youngest people there but they were all pretty young. Um, and I remember one of the first things the tutor said, looking at my box of paints, was, well, ‘Put those away’! And indeed we did. And they didn’t re-emerge for quite a long time.
So, the very first project, there were only I think 36 of us on the course, and we were randomly divided into 18 pairs. So you’re just stuck with somebody who you didn’t know. What we were all told to do is each pair had to design either a game or a questionnaire or, uh ... some kind of challenge that every other pair had to go through, every other student had to go through. And the point of these things was to try to assess somebody’s personality from how they behaved under the circumstances.
[...]
JD: So you’re almost– I mean, weirdly, you’re almost like the person running the art school and these are the students and you’re trying to get the best out of them or trying to exaggerate them or do something to them.
BE: Yes, yes.
JD: Or stretch them, in a way.
BE: I think that experience was very important in then going on to become a producer, actually. It taught me all about group dynamics, because nearly everything we did in those two years was done in groups. There wasn’t that much solo work, people did some, but ... but the emphasis was on how you make group decisions and how you reach consensus, or what you do if you can’t reach consensus.
And the staff quite deliberately put us in very disorientating situations. I remember one day everybody was there in the morning and there were these signs up around the college saying, ‘Please assemble in the quadrangle at nine o’clock’. The college was tiny, you know, it wasn’t a big space. It was an old Victorian school built around a quadrangle, and not a very large one. So there we all are, there’s 30-odd students, standing there thinking, What’s happening? And gradually, one-by-one, the staff appeared on the roof of this Victorian building sort of looking down at us, nobody saying anything.
[...]
JD: [laughs] Sort of like denunciation. Sort of Maoist.
BE: [laughs] Yeah, yeah it was quite Maoist! And of course it was exactly that time of–
JD: –I was gonna say, yeah, cultural revolution! Yeah, sort of late-1960s presumably? Around that time.
BE: And I think the other thing was it was very ... it was very un-goal orientated, in that nobody knew what the outcome of everything was supposed to be. Nobody ever said, ‘So what painting have you been doing?’ It was like, as I said, we didn’t have the paint boxes out for about a year.
JD: [laughs] So you had nothing to show for what you did for two years, basically. There’s no work as such, just these experiences.
BE: There wasn’t very much work resulting from it...
JD: No.
BE: But there was a lot of experiential work, you know, in that. We’d all done things together that were really quite extreme sometimes. There was a lot of emotional stuff involved. Um, I remember we had one girl there who had come from Summerhill School.
JD: Summerhill as in the, uh, experimental sort of school?
BE: Yeah, which was in Suffolk of course, so quite nearby. She had come from this free school background but absolutely collapsed under this. She just couldn’t take it at all.
JD: It’s interesting, they’re two very different forms of education, aren’t they?
BE: Yes, yes.
JD: But they’re sort of related because they’re very free and unorthodox, but actually one is...
BE: This was quite disciplinarian.
JD: Yeah...
BE: It was unorthodox, definitely in terms of art education, but it was much, much stricter in some ways than ordinary art school, because people were really interrogating you about why you did what you did, and they expected decent answers. I remember one project, to give you an example—one day this enormous roll of newsprint turned up. Do you remember the newsprint that used to come on the rolls?
JD: Yeah, yes.
BE: And they were [gestures outwards] that big. This fucking great roll turned up. And it was the size of a broadsheet newspaper, that was the width of it. And the staff started stretching it all around the walls of the building, and the project was to get every newspaper and periodical that was out at that moment. So there was this great big pile of things from Farmer’s Weekly to Railway Trains Annual...
JD: There would’ve been loads then as well.
BE: There were loads and loads and loads, plus all the daily papers. And so the first question was, ‘Find a common theme in all of these.’ Find any common theme and then discuss and compare only in visual terms.
JD: [laughs] Wow.
BE: [laughs] How do you do that?! Nobody had any idea. And nobody told us how to do it. And then when they started coming around looking, they were very critical of what everybody had done. So it’d be like, ‘What’s the point of that?’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘Why are you so... you know, why did you do that?’ You couldn’t bluff it.
JD: Hmm.
BE: Um, and it was... it was challenging. It was great though too.
JD: Yeah. Hmm, that sounds amazing actually.
BE: It was really, really great.
JD: Absolutely forbidden now to do anything like that—
BE: Yeah, I know.
JD: With young people now... It wouldn’t be allowed. You’d get put in prison, probably. It’s torturing them in essence—
BE: [laughs] Yeah! Torturing them! Well, that thing with the quadrangle that I told you, that was... I mean, it was stressful, but it wasn’t awful, you know. But that’s the kind of thing now that no student would allow.
JD: No!
BE: [puts on an American accent] “You’re triggering me!”
JD: Yep. [laughs] So, you’ve made art throughout your career, haven’t you?
BE: Yes.
JD: From art school onwards?
BE: Yeah. Yeah, there was a period when we were touring as Roxy Music, which was... say from 1972 to—for me—from ’72 to ’74. That was the only time really that I wasn’t making. I mean, if I showed you my notebooks from that time—I was still... I was looking at some yesterday actually—I was still busy scribbling away on things that I wanted to make, I just didn’t have the time to make them then.
JD: Do the notebooks seem sort of frustrated?
BE: Yeah.
JD: But what you were doing with that, the music, you didn’t see it as art? Or it was part of an art thing? Was it related at all to art college? Being with these people, very different personalities maybe?
BE: Yeah, it felt... it felt quite a comfortable extension.
JD: Right.
BE: In fact, I had met Andy Mackay, who was in Roxy Music, while I was at art college. I had started developing this thing of going around art colleges doing performances with my tape recorders. I’d set them up with tapes connecting and so on, and I did that in quite a few art colleges. And that’s how I met Andy Mackay, and that’s how I subsequently heard about Roxy Music. I bumped into him after leaving art college, on a train, and he said, “Oh, have you still got any of those tape recorders? Because I’ve joined this band and we want some recording done.” So I joined initially as the ‘recordist,’ but they happened to have a synthesiser which he’d stolen [laughs] from Reading University—
JD: That probably cost about three thousand quid as well!
BE: I know! And nobody knew how to use it, and I’d been experimenting with electronic stuff, building a few basic things. So I just joined the band. But of course, the band I joined had been started by Bryan Ferry, who was a student of that same Richard Hamilton.
JD: That’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? Hamilton’s influence. So amazing. I think growing up in that era, for me, music was a very visual thing.
BE: Yes.
JD: More than just how it sounded.
BE: Yes.
JD: It’s how it looked. That was really, really important. Colour television had just come in, so it was just, like, a visual feast. A real treat!
BE: Yes.
JD: And in a way, that’s what’s happening here for me, I think. [gestures towards Turntable II (2024).]
BE: Yep.
JD: Did you always think about the appearance of music when you were making it? Or while making sound even—was that something that was important to you?
BE: Well, certainly in Roxy Music that was a big part of it, because one of the things that motivated us in Roxy was to get away from this thing that had been happening, where people just sort of stood on stage looking at their toes doing sort of... [mimes monotonous strumming].
JD: Playing blues.
BE: So we, yeah, we absolutely hated that. And we’d all grown up... we were older than most bands, actually. Not by a lot, but you know, a couple of years counts when you’re that age. And we were, we were sort of, I guess, more formed in our feelings about what we wanted to do. You have to remember—it's 1971 here. Rock and roll was only, like, eleven years old or something like that. [laughs] Our older brothers musically were Little Richard and, you know, things like that. It wasn’t long before. The Velvet Underground were already, to us, sort of historic figures. The Velvet Underground & Nico came out in 1967, and this was 1971 when we started Roxy. That was a long enough gap for us to think of it as a sort of classic album.
JD: It’s amazing, isn’t it? The way history was compacted in that decade. All that happened—
BE: So much happened, yes.
JD: So quickly.
BE: Yeah. And so we were looking... we just didn’t want to be one of those—what do they call them? Shoe stare?
JD: Shoegaze! Shoegaze. That’s later though. But it was definitely that sort of... long hair and playing blues very fast—
BE: With your back to the audience.
JD: With guitar solos and sort of... musically quite advanced maybe, because you’re very good at playing your instrument, but what you’re playing is terrible.
BE: [laughs] Yeah!
JD: You know, that’s the thing, isn’t it?
BE: [laughs] Nobody really wants to hear it!
JD: No, no.
BE: And you have an endless grudge that you haven’t made successful records. Yeah, so we wanted to be a spectacle as well. And we were a spectacle, you know—when I look at pictures of us and the other bands that were around at that time, it was pretty amazing, the difference. And it was quite controversial.
JD: It’s how the music looks on the turntable.
BE: Yes.
JD: Did you always think about the appearance of music when you were making it?
BE: Well, certainly in Roxy Music, that was a big part of it. I remember Bob Harris, who ran this show called The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2—do you remember him?
JD: Yeah, yeah.
BE: He really, really hated us. He had us on the bloody show and then he said—I forget what he said, but it was really rude what he said about us.
JD: No, I remember. He said something similar about the New York Dolls as well. He didn’t like them—he called them ‘mock rock.’
BE: Oh, did he? Yeah.
JD: Which actually sounds great! [both laugh] But I mean, yeah, I’m sure he probably said something snide about you.
BE: Yeah.
JD: Did you see a difference between music and art, or was it all part of the same big stew that you could take from?
BE: That was the question for me. Because I really, really loved painting, and I really loved the world around painting. And I thought, I’ve gotta make a choice. This is what I thought then... I thought, I’m either going to go into that, or I’m gonna go into that.
JD: You mean being a painter and—
BE: Being a painter, yeah. Being an artist. Whatever that meant. In my head, there was serious art, and then there was pop music. And I... I really couldn’t decide between them. Gradually, the distinction sort of wore away, and I stopped noticing the difference.
JD: How long did that take?
BE: It took quite a long while.
JD: From when to when?
BE: I would say—
JD: What’s the sort of... graph?
BE: I’d say from 1968 to 1973, something like that?
JD: Okay.
BE: So it was a process that took around five years.
JD: Yeah, but not many other people were probably thinking about that, were they? I suppose you were... because you love pop music, and I love pop music. You totally get it, but you’re also experimental and interested in avant-garde ideas and so on—that’s what’s interesting about the way you work, I think. But yeah, to wrestle with that, those two art forms coming together, I think is really important.
BE: Well, what really helped was when I started working with light, which sort of seemed outside of both of those mediums in a way. I didn’t know anybody else who was working with light at all. I mean, I’d heard about Dan Flavin, but that was it. And then of course there were a few experiments in Russian twentieth-century painting, people like Vladimir Tatlin, I think, worked with light, but there was no technology for it. It was a very clumsy medium to work in. And at college, the last thing I had made was this little light piece. It was very ingenious, very simple, very cheap, and very clever. And it relied on certain random factors in the manufacturing of light bulbs. It’s too long to explain it, but it was a really good idea. And I kept that in my mind and I didn’t really know where it belonged in the scheme of things, because I had never seen anything like that shown. So I patented it!
JD: Wow!
BE: [laughs] I couldn’t think of what else to do with it! And then I guess in about 1974, I started... I picked up playing with light again and I started making little light machines, all forerunners to these things [gestures towards a light box, untitled (2022)], you know, but incredibly clumsily made. Partly because I'm not very good at making things, but also because I had to do everything from scratch. And then I went to New York and somebody ran into the studio one day when I was working with Talking Heads, with this video camera and said, “Does anyone want to buy this?” And, obviously, it had been nicked from somewhere. [laughs]
JD: [laughs]
BE: And I’d never done anything with video at all; I wasn’t interested actually. There was a thing called ‘video art’, which was so hideously dull...
JD: [laughs]
BE: I mean it was just awful. So I bought this camera. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, but I could plug it straight into my TV, which I had in the loft I was living in. And it didn’t have a stand and it wouldn’t stand up on its own. It had a slightly curved bottom, so I just put it on its side on the windowsill and then, of course, I had to turn the TV on its side as well. And so the picture was in portrait, and I thought, Wow, that’s the best thing I’ve seen on television! It was just looking across the roofs of New York. In fact, funnily enough, I had somebody here yesterday who wanted to see those. I played her one – there’s some on YouTube. They look shit because they’ve somehow been compressed for YouTube, but nonetheless. I thought you could use video as a painting, as a way of making a painting. And suddenly everything came together then, and I thought, I’ve got the music to go with it.
JD: So that pulled the two together?
BE: Yep.
JD: It’s also interesting now that, with phones, everything’s in portrait, isn’t it?
BE: Yep. That’s right. At that time, of course, it was very clumsy [laughs], because you had to turn these huge TVs...
JD: Well, just putting your TV on its side is almost a revolutionary act, because it's like, what are you doing? It’s just like absolutely how it shouldn’t be.
BE: Well, it sort of makes it like theatre, like the proscenium to the painting – taking it from narrative to pure picture. And I couldn't stick television. I hated it because it was all stupid stories. But as soon as you turned it on its side... and it was so weird; I used to have people come round with my TV there and the camera looking downtown, to the World Trade Center actually. That was my view: down the bottom of Manhattan, and everybody would sit watching the television rather than the actual view. There was nothing going on really, but I could dramatise the colours a bit with the controls.
JD: Also, all those views in New York are like [makes a vertical rectangle with his fingers].
BE: They are that shape, exactly.
JD: You're looking down.
BE: Yeah, that’s right.
JD: And again it’s all the light, isn’t it? Basically, what’s coming out is potentially sort of abstract, depending on how you’re looking at it... out of focus or whatever.
BE: But it was interesting to me that if you put a frame around something, people are much more interested in looking at that than the object itself. You know, you only had to look out the window and there was downtown Manhattan. But everybody sat looking at the screen, and it was sort of intriguing, because you’d see the movement of clouds, everything in real time, you know, and I thought this was very, very interesting. Human perception really wants to have a frame to relate to. It makes it so much easier when you have an edge around things.
JD: It's like a campfire, isn’t it?
BE: Yeah, that’s right.
JD: You’re staring at this thing.
BE: You know that everyone else is looking at the same thing.
JD: You’re mesmerised by this play of light and heat and whatever. It’s the same for me, when I sit in this room here, in your studio, and stare at the light boxes... it’s very easy to not listen to anyone and just become mesmerised by them...
BE: [laughs]
JD: And there’re people talking about all these very important things, and I’m just trying to work out what colour will come next and if I wait 30 seconds and I look back, what’s going to happen. It’s terrible! When you have them all on and I’m just like that [looks transfixed] in the room... just staring at them.
BE: Yeah, it’s probably not the best idea to have them on in meetings.
JD: I imagine children just love them.
BE: Yeah, children do like them. Though usually it’s a bit too slow for young children to notice, you know, they just don’t pick up on the fact that it’s changing at all.
JD: But it’s sort of magic though, when they look away for 40 seconds or whatever and it’s totally changed, they must think, like, How did that happen?!
BE: It can take people quite a long time to register that they’re changing colour sometimes. So, with light, then I thought I’d found a medium that I could really understand, plus not many other people had discovered it, you see. Which is quite helpful actually.
JD: It’s very helpful [laughs]. To have your thing!
BE: And you make the rules, really. When I discovered the synthesiser, I couldn’t play any other instruments. I wanted to do music, but I couldn’t play the guitar or anything. When the synthesiser came along, that was it. You know, nobody else knew how to play one, either – there were no rules for it [laughs]. You were just as confident as anybody else to play it.
JD: I love it when bands, like big funk bands, got hold of Moogs and they just made it into this incredible funky instrument. I used to love those bands and see all the Moogs and all the backing singers ...
BE: I remember going to see Parliament-Funkadelic at Madison Square Garden once when I lived in New York and it was when Mothership Connection (1975) came out. This spaceship thing landed on the stage and they came down and they all spilled out in their amazing weird costumes and there was this incredible amount of applause. I mean, it was deafening applause – I’d never heard applause like this – and then suddenly it cut, and what the applause was, was Bernie Worrell holding down a key on his Moog, which was just playing white noise, like CHHHHHHHHH. Really loud! And he just took his finger off and everything cut.
JD: And that’s the beauty of music and technology! I bet Robert Moog never thought that synth would be used in, like, a spaceship with these Black guys playing funk music... others maybe had this quite high art view of the Moog and what it was going to do, and then it ends up being this thing of people saying, ‘Right, we’ll have that and we’ll use it in our way, not your way.’
BE: One of the great things, of course, there had been a history... certainly it sort of accelerated in the '60s, but there had been a long history of Musique concrète, which was deliberately using sounds that weren’t musical. And the funny thing is that synthesisers weren’t meant to feed into that; synthesisers were meant to be good at imitating strings, or horns, or whatever. But, of course, the people who had the Musique concrète background or who were just completely mad, like Bernie Worrell, immediately got hold of this thing and took it somewhere else entirely.
JD: It’s the bits in between when you’re tuning something, isn’t it? Or trying to get to a sound. Those are the more interesting sounds than the actual sound itself... you know, the pure sound.
BE: Yeah, you’re quite right. When the Moog, and the DX7, and all those things, when they came out of the labs, they were sort of just supposed to be nice musical instruments. And all the interesting things that happened with them were by people who didn’t want it for that reason.
JD: I mean, a lot of the instruments that were used to make acid house dance music were originally machines meant for people in hotel lobbies who were just playing guitar to have backing – a bass line or a drum – but actually ended up being used for like these bacchanal raves, because people just said, ‘Actually, this is way better than what you can do with it. This very polite use of this instrument is not gonna work.’
BE: [laughs] Yeah! You put one of those through a big system and suddenly it’s ...
JD: ... Distorted! And then it becomes something entirely different. And I love those technological accidents, I mean it’s not so different from turning a telly on its side really, it’s the same thing. Actually we’re going to do it like THIS, not like THAT.
BE: I went to see a concert last night. A classical orchestra. And it was fucking atrocious!
JD: [laughs]
BE: It really pissed me off so much because I thought, This was exactly why pop music was necessary. Because you had this huge orchestra, I don’t know what it was, maybe an 80- or 100-piece orchestra, and it was like watching one of those stupid mechanical clocks where the little guy comes out with a hammer and goes ding and then goes back in again. You know, have you seen those things? That was what this orchestra was like, it was totally joyless, you didn’t get the sense that anybody was enjoying it and plus you had this one guy sitting in the far corner on the left sitting there all night ...
JD: On stage or in the audience?
BE: On stage. And getting full musicians union rate, whatever that is. And he’s sitting there the whole time and finally his part comes and he’s been following the score all the way through and there’s this little rack of kind of goat bells, and he goes ding ding ding and knocks them around a little bit.
JD: [laughs]
BE: ‘Three-hundred quid please!’ And you can’t even hear them anyway, because, you know, being classical music, they don't use any microphones or anything like that.
JD: And the lighting is always ...
BE: The lighting is always killingly dull.
JD: Dull, yeah.
BE: And I thought, This is why pop music exists. To just get all this shit out of the way. It was awful, I mean it doesn't have to be that way, you know, there are great conductors like Teodor Currentzis who really bring it to life again, but this sort of [groans]... Oh my God, it’s people all doing their job so politely.
JD: But, again, it’s how it looks. It doesn’t look good so it doesn’t sound good as well. I’m sure the music itself is amazing. You went to hear great music, but it just looked bad. And also audiences at those concerts I find very stressful.
BE: Ugh that’s the other thing, this kind of dutiful coughing thing between movements, this dutiful [imitates exaggerated coughing], I think, Oh fuck off, you didn’t really need to cough, you were just given a chance to cough.
JD: [laughs]
BE: It’s your little contribution as the audience, to do a bit of coughing. It just made me sick.
JD: [laughs] That’s hilarious!
BE: We should talk more about your Turntable works. They’re a very explicit combination of art and music, right? I mean it couldn’t be made more clear, in a way, you’ve made an artwork for music to be played on.
BE: It’s a sort of joke as well.
JD: Oh that’s good to know, I like that, that it’s a joke! [laughs]
BE: You know, because especially the square one, Turntable (2021), that’s over there, I’ll plug that one in as well, because that looks exactly like a conventional record player in its shape, so it’s sort of an easier joke to get.
JD: They’re kind of visual equivalents of the abstract music you’ve made, maybe?
BE: Yeah, I think so.
JD: Obviously, that connection is already being made through performance, but these pieces are even more explicit.
BE: It sort of moves at the speed of the music, really. One of the things I became very aware of when I started making this junction between music and painting was I wanted paintings that change very slowly and I wanted music that changed slowly as well. So, I want them to be at the same pace. You usually expect a painting to be still and music to have a narrative structure with things developing, but I thought, I don’t want a narrative structure, actually.
JD: Musically?
BE: Musically. I want the music to be a still place that you can go to, so that once you get there, you know it’s going to reliably stay—not exactly the same, but the rate of change would not be like ordinary music.
JD: What’s classical like on this? Do you play much classical on these?
BE: I hardly play records at all to be perfectly honest [laughs]. I don’t use a record player. Reggae looks best on it. I’ll just get you a reggae single and you can see. It looks really nice on it. Where is it? [goes off to search for a record]
[BE comes back with a 7”; Life All Over (1976), by Dr. Alimantado]
BE: So, this turntable doesn’t have a centre in the back, but if I put the record there, I mean it just looks great, I think.
JD: I like the black on it as well, it’s a nice contrast.
BE: I can’t find the on-switch.
JD: Where are we?
BE: Oh, here we are.
JD: Are we on 45 rpm?
BE: Uh, I think so. Although that looks more like 33 rpm, doesn’t it?
JD: I love all the information on these labels, and the fact that the label is kind of not cut properly. It’s the photocopy quality of it – wow. When you turned the player off there, it still sort of has a bit of... it’s still sort of light once it turns off.
BE: Yeah, it’s because it’s transparent all the way through.
JD: So, it becomes kinetic.
BE: Yeah. It’s lovely, isn’t it? I love that particular record on there.
JD: So, when you would try to marry art and music together, and you had these separate things, was it really frustrating when you were trying to work out how to reconcile the two forms?
BE: Yeah, I just worried about it, and I didn’t want to let go of anything. I didn’t want to be doing one form and then ignoring the other one.
JD: Because you love them both so much.
BE: I just thought, I want to do both of them. So, that’s sort of where these things come from really, is trying to... When I started showing these things, they were never shown on their own as objects in a room. I used to build an installation.
JD: You have music in the exhibitions though, don’t you?
BE: Yeah, that’s right. So, that’s the thing... It wasn’t until I met Paul Stolper that I actually started making these as objects with a view to selling them. Previously, I would make an installation.
JD: That’s from your school days: you know, don’t monetise, create an experience.
BE: Yeah, that’s right. It wasn’t until I met Paul [laughs]. Paul actually changed my life. I have to say this because when he first came to look at these things, I had them in my room at the back there. I was quite proud of them and the first thing he said to me was, “They’re really badly made, aren’t they?!” [laughs] Which I was quite taken aback by, because I hadn’t thought about that aspect of them at all, because they were always made in dark rooms – the religious scene out of it and just leaves the spiritual aspect. The figurative becomes abstract.
BE: Well, it reminds me of that story about Wassily Kandinsky. Do you know Kandinsky didn’t actually start painting seriously until he was in his thirties, or something like that?
JD: Wow.
BE: He was quite old, he’d been a professor of jurisprudence. I mean – what a career shift! But anyway, he’d been out one evening and came back to the studio and saw this picture and went, “Wow, that’s really good,” and then he realised it was one of his own figurative pictures but sideways.
JD: No way.
BE: And that was the moment when he realised.
JD: It’s like you and your telly!
BE: It’s really like that. It’s just suddenly defigurising... defiguratising? Taking the recognisable out of something, taking the thing that anchors it in the real world and saying, “What happens if we just liberate it from that?” And I was at the same time making exactly the same transition in music because, you know, the central fact of music historically is of sonic events linked together in time. And I was just starting to think, “Well, what happens if you don’t link them together in time? What happens if you have a field of sonic events that each have their own program, as it were, and just cluster together in different ways?” So, that was what Discreet Music was, which I made in 1975; that was the first thing I did like that. Well, it wasn’t actually, there was an earlier one, but the first successful one I did, where I felt that I had made music by letting sounds have their own life. And not to be the controller of that and saying, “This one has to occur with that one and just after that one,” and so on.
JD: Just taking the narrative out.
BE: Taking the narrative out. But this for me was a very spiritual thing because it was a sort of acknowledgement that there was a world that had meaning without you having to put it there, you didn’t have to make it and put it into the thing.
JD: And you can’t even necessarily explain it. Which is sort of the spirit world, isn’t it? It’s beyond us, our understanding. It’s otherworldly.
BE: I’m just allowing something to happen. I’ve just created the situation where I’ve allowed this thing to happen and I don’t really know how it happens.
JD: Or what will happen.
BE: Or what will happen, yeah.
JD: For yourself.
BE: –for myself, really. And it didn’t matter, beyond.
JD: Because you couldn’t see it, that they were kind of held together by gaffer tape. I never intended them to be separate objects, but as soon as we started making them as separate objects, it completely changed how I thought about them.
JD: Did you take them more seriously?
BE: I thought this was a different thing from what I thought it was.
JD: Oh, can I just ask about the spiritual aspect of this work? I find it quite spiritual, there’s a sort of church-like quality, but not religious as such. You know, the idea of the church and the reverb and the sort of...
BE: Yeah, you know, that’s really a good point. I mean, I grew up Catholic, I spent my early childhood in churches quite a lot.
JD: I mean – talk about glam rock!
BE: [laughs] Yeah, that’s true! That’s absolutely true. But the other thing is, you know, what do you do in church when you’re young? Because it’s so boring. There are only two things to look forward to, one is the singing, and the other is the stained glass.
JD: And a bit of incense smoke.
BE: But it was only very recently that I realised these light boxes are sort of like stained glass windows. You know, that was the only thing worth looking at in church. Our church in Woodbridge was orientated so that in the morning the sun would come through the stained glass window, so a morning service there was pretty beautiful. It wasn’t a particularly good stained glass or anything, but I didn’t see anything like that anywhere else.
JD: It doesn’t have to be good though, does it, as long as it’s got the colours and they’re on people and they’re on surfaces? So you take what is a figure of a saint or whatever, but when you see the light go through it and onto the floor or wherever, you couldn’t tell what it’s supposed to depict. It’s just beautiful colours. It sort of... takes.