Brian Eno at Together For Palestine: "We can work together and enjoy our differences"

NME

After organising the Together For Palestine concert at Wembley Arena, the icon Brian Eno tells us about the impact of music on politics, how to have hope for change the power of coming together and "enjoying our differences, rather than being frightened by them"

Transcript

00:00Brian, what does A Night Like Tonight tell us about the relationship between culture, politics and change?

00:05That's a kind of act of hope, that there is a relationship.

00:09You know, I hope that culture is upstream of politics.

00:15I think it is.

00:16So I think the state of mind that culture creates in people

00:20encourages or provides a frame on which politicians,

00:26within which people can operate and politicians can operate.

00:29But I don't know that that's true.

00:32It's an act of faith.

00:33It sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't.

00:36And that's different from writing songs that tell you what to think.

00:41Propagandistic songs, that's not something I'm particularly interested in.

00:45But I think the terms of a culture, the nature of the media,

00:51for instance, does it make a difference to people to suddenly see on a stage

00:55a lot of people from different backgrounds together?

00:58I think it does.

01:00I think it sort of says, look, no problem.

01:03We can work together and we can enjoy our differences rather than be frightened by them.

01:08I hope that it's true.

01:10But this is all an act of faith.

01:12What would you say to music fans that are watching at home and feeling a bit hopeless?

01:15I don't blame you.

01:19You are helpless at the moment.

01:22Did you say helpless or hopeless?

01:23Well, both.

01:23Hopeless.

01:25No, don't be hopeless.

01:28You are in the middle of the biggest social movement in human history,

01:33the climate movement and all of these social justice movements.

01:36They're all part of the same thing.

01:37It's all part of people thinking the thing is really fucked up.

01:42We can do something about it.

01:44We have to do something about it.

01:45And they're doing that in the absence of political leadership.

01:49There just isn't very good political leadership at the moment.

01:52And people are just fighting over the most absurd issues.

01:57You know, the leader of the Conservative Party makes some absurd statement

02:02to an absurd misquotation from somebody else.

02:06And that becomes the issue for a few weeks.

02:09You know, really, it's so disappointing.

02:12The quality of the conversation is so disappointing.

02:16And the interesting conversations now are being had between people like you and me.

02:22People who aren't, strictly speaking, qualified.

02:25We are finding our way.

02:26But we're finding a different way from what those politicians found.

02:30Brian, thank you so much.

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