Hello, I'm Cresti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for

rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a rock musician.

As the flamboyant keyboard player of the group Roxy Music, he achieved huge popular success,

but at the height of his fame he gave up the world of Wigs, gigs and adoring fans to experiment

with electronic music.

Now widely admired for the way in which he revolutionised background music in airports and supermarkets,

and for his experiments with video art, he's become the intellectual guru of the rock

world.

Nor has innovation reduced his popularity as a collaborator with David Bowie and as producer

of the group U2.

He's made sure that his name has stayed in the mainstream too.

He is Brian Eno.

You are Brian almost impossible to pigeonhole for the purposes of an introduction like that.

I mean, is that something you take a delight in?

It's something I find difficult as well.

If people ask me what I do, I always say, well, I'm a chartered accountant.

Unless there's a lot of time to explain things, I tell them a lie.

And having explained, I mean, it can make you sound like a bit of a dabble, I can't

do it, a bit of a delitante.

Well, I am a delitante and it's only in England, I think, that delitantism is considered

...