 Good evening and welcome to tonight's discussion of Words and Music with David Mitchell and Brian Eno chaired by Kieran Yates. I'm Molly Rosenberg, I'm director of the Royal Society of Literature and it's my pleasure to open the second Literature Matters RSL 200 event, celebrating 200 years of the Royal Society of Literature. This series brings together some of the world's best known writers and thinkers for unique explorations of the impact of writing on their lives. We're very pleased this evening to be sharing this with our co-host, the British Library and while we aren't able to be together at the British Library or anywhere at all for that at the moment, everyone watching can send questions for David and Brian online. You can do this at the bottom of your screen, if you scroll down a little bit you'll see a box that you can type into and we'll get through as many of those questions at the end of David and Brian's conversation as we possibly can. At the top of your screen you will also see a button for the British Library's online bookshop where you can buy David and Brian's most recent books and I have David's beautiful book just here with me, perfect prop. Any introduction of our speakers this evening will feel partial but as a taster, writer David Mitchell has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has won the John Llewellyn Rees, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank show Literature Prizes among many others and was named a grantor best young novelist. In 2018 he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2013. Brian Eno, musician, producer, visual artist and activist, first came to prominence as a founding member of Roxy Music. His visionary production includes albums with Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Laurie Anderson and Coldplay while his list of collaborations include recordings with David Bowie, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Carl Hyde and James Blake. His visual experiments with light and video continue to parallel his musical career with exhibitions all over the globe. Charing their conversation this evening is Kieran Yates, a freelance journalist, broadcaster and documentary maker with a focus on current affairs, culture and politics. So I think she's the perfect person to guide us through tonight's conversation. I'll pass it over to you now Kieran. Thank you. Thank you Molly. Well yeah, I mean it's my absolute pleasure to be here hosting this conversation with the legendary Brian Eno and equally legendary David Mitchell. And I think there's lots of interesting kind of directions to speak in but I think a good place to start is to really feel very, for me anyway, I feel very privileged to be having a conversation about sound and music in a moment in history where the world has got quieter. I think seismologists and data scientists are calling this a period of Anthropause. Have you heard that term? Anthropause. Well it basically refers to a kind of a global reduction in human activity. So it means that based on vibrations and the amount of noise that humans make we're in a period of quiet. So maybe an obvious place to start is to see whether that is reflected in your personal worlds and if not how are you feeling your personal worlds with sound and music? I'll cede the floor to Brian first. You're the music man sir. Thank you. Well lockdown started for me a little bit earlier than other people because I came down to my residence in Norfolk with the intention of tidying things up for the summer, switching the heating off and so on and then I just stayed here and I'd been here for over seven months now and during that time I haven't actually left this village really. I made one journey to Norwich which is 17 miles away my big day out and of course what happened to me happened to a lot of other people that everything in my calendar just disappeared so suddenly I had this complete stop and I haven't had anything like that happen for 40 years at least where suddenly there was nothing that I had to do and I thought oh my gosh this must be what retirement is like and I then started thinking have I actually retired and I thought well I'll act as if I have I'll just wait until I can't resist doing something so I won't feel any pressure to do anything in particular but if something comes up and it won't let me rest I'll do it and for about three months I was quite capable of doing nothing much at all or seeing anybody or it was a strange time but then I went back to work and actually what I noticed is in those three months I'd really started listening to things again I had found this really fantastic app which is called Radio Garden which I really recommend to everybody Radio Garden is just yes good write it down Radio Garden presents you with a map of the globe and there are little tiny little green dots all over it like stars but each green dot is a radio station and if you if you hit on the dot you are on that station live with what they're playing at this instant and I suddenly I started walking around this quite deserted part of Norfolk listening to Russian Orthodox Chants there's one station that plays nothing else 24-7 that's all they play is Orthodox Chants and there's no no announcements or anything you don't hear a human voice other than a singing voice and I for the first time for a long time I started really really listening to music you know as a listener rather than as a maker you know there's a difference between those two things when you're a maker like I am when I'm in the studio you're always thinking what can I do with this how can I change it what what can I how can I control it in some way but when you're a listener you you're surrendering basically you're letting something happen to you and I kind of realized that I hadn't been doing that very much for quite a long time I'd always been listening as a maker as somebody who was sort of tinkering with it in my mind thinking what if you did that and could you change that what would it be like if you did this so that was a very useful time for me that short period almost exactly the same but not with listening but with reading I've read more since the beginning of lockdown than I think I've read in the last three or four years not this this sounds almost slavishly identical to Ryan's words just now but uh not as a writer but as a reader not as someone thinking oh that's clever now I can use that all yeah that's that's great I'll have a bit of that and just surrendering myself to other writer's narratives as a reader and not just enjoying the magic tricks and not being a magician trying to analyze the magic tricks it's been great um um I've been busy uh the book came out in July it was due to be out in June um and all of a sudden my publicists and publicists and publishers were in a position of having to build this airplane as they were flying it how do you release a book how do you line everything up so all the free orders and all the sales happen in the one crucial week it's a bit like the opening weekend of a hollywood film to get you into the charts etc etc um they were having to make it up as they went along and invent the digital the virtual book tour so I've been busy doing that and also I don't know if it's the same for Brian but um with collaborations which in the case of a novelist means screen work um things that are that I and friends have been idly thinking of working on together for years in some cases but which we never could because one or both of us or is busy all of a sudden we're actually free we're at the same time especially the filmmakers uh they're all what were on furlough and um so I've got a path I I'm reluctant to say how many things I'm actually working on because my agent will be watching this and I haven't told him yet and he'll murder me if he knows the true number of things I'm working on so uh let's quickly move on okay well David I mean I I don't want I don't want to embarrass you too much when I say this but I think I might do by saying that I actually I we had a conversation before this discussion and you described being a fan of Brian as like being a fan of oxygen and I I suspect that that's not just because it's it's a given but it's also because you know the work exists around us in every day from like you know a top boy score to the starting screen of a windows 95 startup screen um how present was has he been in the writing of the book well I can embarrass you back because you said the same thing pretty much nothing really starts off a writing session as well as putting on music for airports or or or indeed uh the ship uh from 2016 uh yes I am a fan um I also said that fans not quite the right word for Brian it's um and and I still haven't worked it out the kids these say say a stan rather than the fan which is a new one have you heard that Brian so yeah so I'm stanning you would be I'm not sure that a fan is a very complimentary term is it um come to an M song about the guy who obsessed about M&M and followed Brian you said more than me um but you but you were sort of you were listening to the albums while you were writing this and and Cloud Atlas or oh um uh I listened to Brian every week uh I probably can't say every day but it's and I mentioned this in a conversation I had my email with Brian 10 years ago but uh Brian um there's there's just something in his music it's stimulating and nourishing enough to kind of drive you to the picnic area where good stuff happens but it isn't um it it isn't hot clay done it doesn't insist it doesn't nag it doesn't say oi oi oi listen to me listen to me come here come here come here uh it's it's it's it's this beautiful uh it's a third thing uh it's it's um it's perfect music to write to uh Brian's work and and and and other composers in the area that he largely created uh and it's a quality that I find Bavoc music also has so two types of music I can universally work to yeah Bavoc music uh and I don't know if it if it's a word that Brian's happy with or has become resigned to but ambient music uh just it's and I'm not the only writer who says this I've had conversations now which should be well into the double figures when writers convene and talk about what music you work to your name always comes up Brian so from behalf of my five thank you well this is the thing Brian it's like you know it's it's true that a lot of writers do um kind of use you as as part of their process of making or working and I don't know if that's necessarily your intention but I suppose the the obvious question is you know how do you then balance that middle space between you know being just enough to sort of rouse you but also not too overpowering that it distracts you you know this this whole thing started out with me wanting to make the music that I wanted to hear which is where most most of the music I do comes from it's it's not because I go out with the intention of doing something kind for other people really it's because I imagine a music and it it doesn't quite exist so sometimes you think well I could I could imagine what it would be like it would be long and kind of fairly homogenous but ever-changing and you sort of sketch out the territory in your mind and I started out by looking for that music in the world you know the I remember at one point I had a cassette tape that I listened to a lot which was all of the slow movements of the late heightened string quartets so none of the athletic acrobatic stuff just the slow movements which have a really common quality to them they they fit together very well and for a while that was a very satisfying way of listening to me but I wanted more I didn't I didn't really want to be listening to the heightened string quartets so so then I started trying to imagine what how I could make this other kind of music and it's partly actually because I have exactly the same issue that David has which is that I want music that doesn't insist I want music to be there but I don't want it to be constantly grabbing my attention I want it to be like a painting in the room you know if you have a painting in the room you don't sit there all day staring at it do you you look at it sometimes you it's there when you need it sort of thing when you want it and then the rest of the time you get on with what you're doing so it was it was sort of a surprise to me that this worked for other people as well and it was a very nice surprise actually and the first inkling I had of that was the first sort of record I made of this kind was discrete music which is a long slow instrumental piece and that was released to catastrophic reviews actually I shouldn't laugh but I've had one or two myself they're great aren't they I would like to say that I just you know shake them off like the water off the back but they're quite pressing when you're like if you have a baby and you're out and it's in the push chair and someone looks in and says glimey that's an ugly one what a nose and you you naturally feel sensitive about it you know it's something that you're quite if it's new for you as well it's you're quite vulnerable about it yeah yeah if if you don't feel that way you're probably not quite doing the work you should be doing you know if if you don't feel a little bit nervous about it a little bit vulnerable about it then you perhaps should be doing something where you are but anyway I remember one review which I I remember mentioning to David as well where somebody said and they weren't being complimentary they said this is music with no melody no chords no beat and no lyrics so one of the things I think you notice about when something is new what people notice is what's missing from it they don't kind of get quite what it's doing but they do see what it isn't doing and so yeah give it 40 years though and look back they weren't trying to be a complimentary but it some kind of reversal has happened some kind of inversion has happened and uh it wasn't meant in a positive uh it was meant as you say in a negative way but uh it's it's sort of it feels like a compliment now how visionary sort of how remarkable how how can you do that how could you make music and I would guarantee because I'm one of the more people who listen to discrete music now than are reading the words of the gentleman or lady who wrote that review you've kind of got the last laugh going but there's but there's a point to be made there about this relationship between you know the writer and and the musician when that you are and especially in both your work you're taking the everyday you know everyday language or everyday sounds and you know that might otherwise be banal and trying to create something beautiful or interesting or absorbing about them right so this is these are the constant challenges how do you how do you take those 20 you know the letters of the alphabet and how do you make something remarkable out of them after the last day well maybe a better question is um I would like to have a go and then bounce the question back to Brian as a writer uh it's uh you you have a uh cliche detector and the moment that goes off you know you're doing something wrong and the moment it's it's it's kind of like um do you remember at old time village fairs there was a thing you paid five p to do which was to maneuver a loop of wire around a kind of twisted wire thing and it was an electrical circuit and if you if your hand uh wobbled and the wire loop you won't remember any of this okay I read about this yeah you've read about it yeah uh but if your hand shook and you touched the wire with the loop thingy you were holding then it would go meh and you'd lost your five pence but if you got to the end um it's uh that's uh an improvised and a middley rather ropey metaphor for writing at least what happens what happens to your body when you detect a cliche either reading or writing one I may momentarily facially flinch I've seen you before yeah like of course of course the record manages a crook of course he fleeces the band of course the band has of course someone has a terminal drug problem of course they're always at 100 so it's of course they become about royalties of course the drummer as in spinal tap always dies uh so you just avoid those of courses and you try to not make it go meh and see how far you can get ideally all the way through to the end without uh without a cliche the etymology of cliche I just discovered the other day of course it's it's a french word but it's a french word from the printing world um early movable metal metal block printers in France used the word cliche for a regularly commonly occurring combination of letters all right uh is that cool uh so um that was that's a rabbit hole volume is there um did what I just say about um um yeah that makes complete sense to saying yes and I I hear it in songwriting where they're there are certain ways of ending a phrase which just drive me mad they actually make me feel a bit nauseous when I hear them and there's a certain um well I don't actually even know how you explain this in musical terms because I don't know enough music theory but at the end of a melody that goes no that's why did you do that why didn't you go somewhere else you started out so well and then you just threw away the chance I I hear that so often that there's really a bit of a great idea yeah and then some lazy piece of compromise at the end of it that suddenly you don't ever want to hear it again and it is I think that's a very good um phrase a cliche detector and and I have to say one of the things that I like so much about David's books is that they always turn corners that you don't expect they they sort of turn you kind of expect a corner to be turned but when you turn it there's something there that you didn't expect I just I just read for the third time the Thousand Automs oh thank you thank you Brian oh that's that's such a fabulous book and you know when when I um read your most recent book utopia avenue of course there are lots of references and connections to that other book yeah which I being a bit thick I discovered rather slowly I started thinking no no no it's not no no um I like the idea that uh some people won't read one or the other I like the idea that some people will only make the connections very slowly I like the idea that more hardcore readers who keep the kind of charts of hyperlinks and cross references that I don't actually do it uh I like the idea that they'll notice instantly so so so there's no one right way to read a book that does make me wonder if you refer to work musically from 20 years ago or 10 years ago are there echoes and resonances not only within a composition but between your compositions yes I I think so I mean I've actually been doing something odd the last few days I've just got a new kind of sampler a sampler is a way of taking a recording and using it as an instrument so once you've taken the recording that becomes the material that you can play on a keyboard you know all those things you hear people doing but this one is is kind of an interestingly different one and I've been taking a lot of my old work well I have a huge archive of stuff that I've never released either because I just didn't finish it or it didn't sound very good at the time or whatever I have about 6 000 pieces like that whoa so I was gonna I was gonna say I remember you doing an interview in 2014 where you said you had like 2800 unreleases unreleased pieces so that's just accumulated since then what I've been doing with this sampler is putting pieces in and seeing whether I can make turn them into something new and more interesting and and in doing that I've sort of started noticing that I have certain habits that I wasn't aware of compositional habits and they are very much to do with the cliche detector they're very much to do with me thinking now what would be an interesting surprise here what wouldn't you expect to happen in this landscape what but on at the same time you don't want random surprises obviously isn't it shouldn't be just anything if you want if you want pure random then it's kind of meaningless so there has to be some sort of setting up of expectations in the composition and then some twists some you either disappoint those expectations or replace them with something else or exceed them but this this is the kind of limit of randomness because a lot of people think oh random will be great because you know just anything could happen so it's bound to be interesting but it isn't actually we we aren't interested in just anything we're interested in things that connect in in unexpected ways but they do have to connect I think this is John Cage the territory you seem to be talking about here he really pushed the limit pushed the limits of um he there's a word for random that's escaped me it's alliotaric alliotaric yeah alliotaric thank you uh the true wordsmith of the zoom session here um uh but uh it does seem to be true that um just a sort of Spotify level um his compote his um written the compositions like in a landscape would be much more listened to and loved than the completely alliotaric yeah the compositions well with cage it was cage is kind of interesting because he was so sort of evangelical about his approach to music it was it was a practice for him it was part of being a zen Buddhist and what mattered to him was the practice rather than the result and that inspired me a lot when I was a young musician or a young composer yeah and but over time I started to realize it was quite a limiting philosophy because it sort of said stop behaving as a composer let just let the thing happen let the thing turn out as it will the universe will arrange it for you and and I realized that this is a kind of a connection to a political philosophy that has got us into a lot of fucking trouble sorry sorry about swearing you know I I've come up with this new word called called inevitableism and I think the philosophy that has dominated the last 40 or 50 years is really this idea that somehow how human evolution is in certain ways inevitable for instance the a good example is that Francis Fukuyama book the history yeah which is sort of this idea that all societies will eventually turn into capitalist democracies because that is the natural order of things and of course see look what happened I don't think President Xi has read that book Can I just take take you back to just that point about form and dismantling form because I think it's so interesting for both of you just you know I know that I know that you talk about what I think you're talking about multi-track technologies when you said this Brian but I think it applies here when you're talking about knowing learning how to know how to fuck something up so you know you you learn the forms and then you kind of are able to go back in and you know both of you are doing that maybe maybe Brian's doing it via a reverb or logic pro maybe David is doing it through your structure but you know how do you think that that thinking has evolved now you know as you as we find ourselves in a sort of political and social moment where not everybody has had you know the benefit of great arts educations that's taught them these forms to learn to dismantle them do you think that we need a heady mix of both that we can you know we've learned the forms and dismantle them or can we just go and kind of do that sort of here's a chord here's another now make a band David what do you think if I ever was sort of surfing on the zeitgeist of popular culture uh slash intellectual culture it's been a long time since I fell off the surfboard and washed up in the wilds of west cork so can I really speak for novels I can really speak for my home form which is the novel and I would say that um there's a huge generalization here I guess but uh it's that kind of conversation so why not um I think the phrase experimental novel was a deathly thing that maybe justly led with postmodernism down a rather sterile cul-de-sac nonetheless uh its ghost kind of has reincarnated in the 21st century in the novel in the form of a kind of meta-awareness of the of what a novel is made of plot character style themes or ideas and fifth structure uh and I think an understanding that structure is a relatively it's relatively sort of an explored or little mind in the 300 year history of the form the other things uh style moves at the speed of the evolution of language um characters move at the speed of changing the world well Jane Austen couldn't have written a data analyst or a sampler inventor but we can now but you can't really go faster than that unless you move into science fiction uh plot plot again um it's the world or it's what a dreamer dreams or anything in between uh there's something fixed about that however structure um I think there's uh there's an understanding that well maybe I'm simply talking about myself and to try to impose this on other novelists isn't completely authentic but I feel uh and a do-spot that I'm not the only one that uh there are you have a reasonable shout at doing something pretty grand new in structure something that hasn't been done before with the other components of the novel good luck I mean you you might maybe you can especially if you're say uh jg ballard or uh William Gibson uh kind of zeitgeist surfer I suppose we could say that uh however that's really not how I'm kind of made uh and and it's hard to find something sort of pretty awesomely original um that takes you beyond the compass of merely where your cliche director will uh detectable shine a light on however in structure maybe you can in structure you possibly can think down I know because I've done it once or twice and thought of a new structure for a novel and you think actually has has anyone written a novel with that structure before and you're trying to think that it actually may be not I wonder I wonder why is it because it really won't work or is it because maybe no one's thought of it before so that's what I have to say about structure uh I've been talking about that that's a really good point that that genres move at the speed of language because then of course someone would you know might attach your work with the language that they use like magical realism or something and you might read that and think well actually that doesn't quite that doesn't quite describe what I was doing which is which is why sorry I was going to say which is why I also really like how Genesis cited uh Brian Enos workers enosification on their credit what a great word the language hadn't quite developed yet to sort of adequately describe what that was and I think that you're absolutely right and it's it's an interesting thought I'd like to bounce this to Brian I mean I think innovation certainly in the novel actually comes from outside the novel it comes from say film it comes right now right now it's coming from well it's coming from Netflix it's coming from the streamed show it's coming from long form small screen drama which I think of a show like um I've been hooked on it over lockdown so is it the fourth so it's at the forefront of my mind a better called soul which is uh which is kind of the fall flash before Breaking Bad uh and and I love how it plays with time uh traditionally it's sort of creative writing class level you only resort to a backflash when you've got no other way when there's nothing else to do half of Breaking Well a third of Breaking Bad is in the form of a backflash there's a strand of backflash which you think is a backflash but then you realise it's it's actually in the future it's after the show ends it's uh and the whole sorry sorry are you saying that in creative writing you might have been taught that a flashback was an amateur device yes yes I am uh and here's Breaking Bad saying oh no it isn't this is absolutely this is beautiful stuff uh how about the backflash which you don't even declare as a backflash uh I see that I think um well uh since I'm the um only person who hasn't used the f-word yet I think that's fucking amazing I want to do that uh so um so I think um clearly my home form the novel does evolve that's why we still don't write like small it or any of the 18th century true why does it evolve because the world changes and um other art forms um make inroads or not inroads but uh but they feed my home form stuff which is now well about to be vying in and see if this is applicable to music well um yes absolutely the what what is obviously happening in novels is has a lot to do with editing in films as well where suddenly you're you're moving between places and times very very quickly and um I've noticed that the speed of that happening has gone up in tandem with the speed that happens in films actually yeah we're quite used now to the idea of being back in time forward in time at another place in someone's mind in someone's sort of counterfactual other reality in reality um but in in music I think one thing that really drives musical evolution is the fact that we are all incredibly literate musically if you think of how much music we all hear all of the time I mean I don't think in the history of humankind has there been this level of saturation of one art form in a culture just think of you know radio for instance we've all got radios we've all got phones that carry music um I would say that most people probably listen in some semi-conscious or conscious way to music I don't know maybe four hours a day at least and some people a lot more than that um so when we're listening to things what we're doing I think is constantly making comparisons with we're saying oh I like this because it's different in a particular way from everything that I've ever heard before so we never listen to any or we never read anything with with a clear untroubled mind we we're always looking and listening to things with the whole history of our listening and looking at the back of it you know so it's like I always think the newest thing you hear is like the punchline to a to a very long shaggy dog story you know it's just the it's the latest sentence in this long conversation you've been having and in music a lot of that conversation is actually to do with something that I think art does for us which is which I put into this little proverb I have which is that science discovers but art digests so science is constantly producing new material about the world new ways of understanding it new ways of dealing with it and controlling it and so on what it doesn't produce is any sense of the value of all of those things it just tells you that they're there but it doesn't tell you what it does to you or what you can do with it or what you should do with it or what is worth doing with it and I think what happens with art is that people take all of that stuff and start making things with it and they're sort of saying this is what you can do with this this is how you can feel about this this could be exciting we don't like this part if you think of the relationship between technology and music in particular I can tell you that there's an exponential increase in the number of options that a composer now has it doubles about every week as far as I can see you know I get emails every single day from manufacturers saying we've got this new product that can do this and a lot of it is repetitive but a lot of it isn't as well there there are genuinely new inventions being made all the time in in software and of course the question is what do you do with it what can you do with all of this and what can you now do that you could never do before that's sort of an interesting question and what is the value of any of it so if you listen to well I won't go too far into this rabbit hole because I could talk about this for a long time but if you listen to what has happened to the actual texture of music in the last 15 years where you have the one extreme really extreme gloss of the big production R&B ballads which are incredibly carefully crafted and made with such extraordinary attention you know there are people who just specialize in getting a kick drum sound that's their job they come up with kick drum sounds and they spend hours and hours working with tech that will produce this kick drum sound that cuts through but on the other hand you then have people who make records like Stormzy for example with what seems like just a rough piece of found music not even found on a record but found on a cassette or something like or off the radio and this span of here's the techiest the star trek of music and here's the graffiti artist of music sort of thing is I think is very a very interesting comment about what music is saying we we are allowed to do now and we we're allowed to include okay just quickly just two more things I just want to explore one thing that I think is very interesting that you said there is about a kind of a musical digital archive and one of the things that I was thinking about when I was reading Utopia Avenue actually was about the British Library's extraordinary sound archive which if you haven't visited you absolutely should which of course is beautiful because it takes you you know it's sort of you can hear and I'm talking outside of just song selection you can hear what Brixton High Road sounded like in 1971 and so you sort of you get this textural city sounds of traffic and chaos and all of that stuff surrounding it and it's you know it's things that both of you use in your work you know Brian obviously through sampling and reverb and and David through the pages so when you are exploring archive outside of the easy things to get like songs where are you sourcing that from and what part of the archive are you searching let's start with David yeah I didn't use that archive for Utopia Avenue I guess my archives are the minds of Brian's contemporaries and just slightly older contemporaries who were there in the 60s who luckily for me of the last 10-15 years have produced quite a steady stream of books Good the Bad and the Ugly some are excellent some some aren't but even the aren'ts are they will have little killer details like what I thought you'd say that like like bed sits where you went where you hide a room and there was a the legs of the bed were in sources of vinegar to stop things climbing up the beds legs and biting you for example or landlady's who would fix the meters so that you got less bang for your buck you got less um right you got less you're nodding as if you may have encountered one or two of these landlady's to self point since Brian introduced a neologism earlier uh inevitabilism uh I would like to introduce the IWATH, I-W-A-T-H which is an acronym of I was there and it's a it's a kind of a fact or an insight or just an experience which you can't get from Wikipedia you could only know it if you're an insider indeed just before the show or before we started Brian was talking about um the difference between venues where there's a long echo and venues where there's a short echo and when you play in a venue where there's a long echo and you play a duff note in hands for a long time as opposed to a smaller container now that is an IWATH uh unless you're a musician who's performed in these venues you wouldn't know that uh and so I research I hard so part of my job is to harvest IWATHs and you put about three in a scene three IWATHs in the scene and it will smack of authenticity one or two you feel a little bit like a novelist who's winging it and hasn't actually been there five six or seven then you feel like a novelist who's showing how much research he or she has done three is the Goldilocks just the right number uh the Goldilocks the IWATH Goldilocks the IWATH Goldilocks three yeah um that's excellent thank you um just one one last question before we open up to public questions um it's you know it's sort of is it's sort of related to what you're talking about about this relationship with technology but you know in the very specific worlds of you as as artists and I suppose you know a very simple outside of you might be that some of the challenges that you face are the you know there's no for David there's no sonic component to the page for Brian there's no sort of visual component to the speaker so what are the things that you'd like to see in technology that would limit these kinds of challenges that you have it's interesting uh you say there's no sonic component to a page nor visual component to music you're right and yet uh Brian's last uh uh or one of his more recent albums mixing colors is is is sort of about this uh we were talking about synesthesia when we had our email exchange some 10 years ago uh Brian and uh you said you weren't synesthetic uh and yet which is when you experience music in a sort of visual you can taste it and and see it and it's when two senses um hack into each other and you can see tastes or you can see um a color and taste strawberries or you can um or you see a word and you can smell fish but the word won't be fish and the color won't be red it's it's it's a sort of neuro sensory yes overlap yeah um so I think a part of the challenge well um clearly with utopia avenue I'm trying to do the famous aphorism that's variously attributed often to Frank zappa writing about music is like dancing about architecture uh and on the one hand you can't but then ingenuity is also about escapology it's about devious straight jackets that make it impossible to do something in the form and yet somehow finding some way of slipping that straight jacket off and finding some way to make text on a page somehow musical um I'd like to bounce this to Brian um you say you're not synesthetic yet you have 18 compositions all named after a color and I was listening to the Rose Quartz one and there is something pink about it uh how come I think I think you know the answer to this because you've you've written about it actually where you said um if you put two things together a piece of music and a word in this case your brain will do a lot of work to to make the connection between them and I I always think that that's very interesting to sort of hand some of the compositional work over to the brain of course that's what any artist who's any good is doing he's sort of putting in place some elements which are somehow provocative and react with each other and I use the word they have high valency so they they can connect with things valency valency yes like when things have very different valencies um and so so I think that it's particularly with um well with both of our works actually it's partly to do with knowing that the listeners or the reader's mind is wanting to make interesting connections and that they only need the material for that and they've got all the apparatus for that to happen this there's a whole machinery up there which is actually quite active it's not at all passive um I mean both both of our works I think depend on a fairly active actively engaged reader or listener active in the sense of not wanting to be led by the hand through every single part of the adventure you know being being sort of left slightly stranded in a way and enjoying the feeling of finding out where you are and looking around and thinking oh it could be this it could be that I mean I see I see this a lot in your work where there are there are often sort of false leads or connections that you think oh yes that that's probably connected to that and then it turns out it's not actually it's connected to that one over there you know um so there's a sort of um adventure going on in the reading of the thing as well as it contained in the um work itself and I I have to say that um the part of the reason for the cliche detector is to make those adventures interesting you know to to not have them go down familiar paths because actually nobody wants to read that yeah or I don't want to I'm gonna stop you there so we can so we can I I'd super rudely have to say Brian's famous for his collaborations as well as his solo work and from what he's just said I'm thinking now that his ultimate collaborator is actually always his listener that's a good point that's a nice thought yeah I guess I was also thinking about like in terms in terms as also I think I guess in terms of logistical technology you know I was thinking about two pieces which you might be interested in one was a book a texture of paper where when you put your human finger on the on the song title that's written on the text it plays the music through the page and another is a piece of AR technology which is sort of trying to take this an aesthetic relationship with music and replicate it as you put your your AR goggles on and I thought perhaps perhaps that's where things are going now anyway some uh some questions from the audience uh I'm gonna quickly I think we've got time for a couple um this is too short really isn't it yeah yes and if you're up for a series of these Brian then you know where to find me I feel like there's a long email thread coming from both of you um you've spoken about the relationship of time to your forms but do you both write with time in mind uh David do you always know an idea is going to be an extended fiction a longer novel and Brian do you always think in terms of an album or a track um the answer from my side is sometimes I sometimes know that uh something I put into one book will be erupting uh into the next one other times I don't uh I don't even know there will be an eruption until I get there um I'd also just like to make the point that uh the way that singular and pronouns work in our language encourages to think of many things as singular when they're actually plural time is one of them uh surely it would be much more accurate to be talking about times yeah keenly we have lifetime we have daytime we have geological time we have calendrical time we have uh we have astronomical time we have dream time we have so many times uh that um I can't quite say how this comes into my work but I think of time as a plural thing and um without being able to say exactly why I think this seeps into novel time over to Brian yes so um I suppose what what happens with me is that I start things rarely with a with a clear picture of how they're going to end up and um some of them just keep wanting to be longer um some of them I just want them to last a long time because I want to be in that place for a long time as other things don't sustain like that other things pay off quite quickly and they sort of show you what they are and then you've had enough of them um in fact sometimes I quite often find I'm cutting things back because I don't want to over over egg the pudding if you like but certain things I was working on a piece the other day that started out being about two and a half minutes long and by the end of the day was nearly 22 minutes long um because I was sitting in the sun outside my studio listening to it and it was just a lovely experience but it kept stopping and I had to keep getting up and so how do you know when something is finished or do you when I hit the deadline I know that's that's actually how I finish most things you know all that stuff I have in my archive is is sort of waiting for a deadline and so when something comes up you know for instance a film soundtrack for example I nearly always start by going to my archive and thinking oh yes this piece that could be that could be the piece that will work here and then I finish it so in a way I don't really care to finish things until I know where they what their job in the world is going to be is it a film soundtrack or is it something that I put on and sit in the sun and listen to so so I have lots and lots of beginnings basically yes I love I love the idea of a deadline as an editor that's great that's that's kind of true for me too um I know when something is finished when I do an edit and I change it back to how it was before the last edit that's when I know to stop fitting um have you done any video game work fine because some of the music on that is is art yes yes that's that's a very interesting area I did a game years ago called Spore which was um by oh I know it yeah I've got that okay good yeah so Spore I think is the first generative video game music you know what used to happen before Spore was that you just stored a lot of loops basically in the computer and then when you went to that scene that loop would play and you went to another scene that loop would play but um what um I did with my friend Peter Chilvers was we we made a little engine that had sets of rules so when you're in this part of the game you have this set of rules to make music by and then this other set so each time you go to a scene um you actually hear new music in that scene it's not it's not going to be identical to the last time you were there yeah but it will be of the same general feeling you know um so I think now that's how a lot of video games are done but that's the only one I've done one question from um Wendy in the audience uh she says uh as you talk of cliche detectors I turn over today's card from my oblique strategies deck I'm also a fan uh which says use an old idea which points towards the need to not always discard the often used in favor of the always new a cliche used well can startle and convince yeah she's completely right so I I think that there are many different kinds of innovation one of them is the obvious one of doing something that nobody has ever done before another is the less obvious one of leaving something out that nobody has ever left out before but another one is doing something again that somebody hasn't done for a long time um something that has sort of suddenly gained a new charge because it's once again unfamiliar you you hear this all the time in music where you know some somebody suddenly puts a Dixieland jazz band in a in a funk song or something like that it's fresh again you know it's it's suddenly in this new context you hear it anew so so yes that that use an old idea is really saying don't think that originality only consists in doing things that haven't happened before I would also agree that originality can sometimes lurk uh at the opposite end of the galaxy from the cliche but sometimes it can be hiding inside the cliche uh and you could take a familiar phrase of course I won't be able to think of a single example now I have to but you take a familiar phrase you've heard a hundred times five hundred times and change one word and suddenly it just sparkles with wit um headline writers do this really well oddly enough that's that's a part of their job isn't it yeah not to put too fine a pint on it um and and maybe a final question which is kind of a beautiful one and one I'm sure you're asked all the time but what were the first pieces of music that you had that made you realise the fear the sheer visceral power of the art form that you fell in love with well why don't you answer that first um I will because the musician should have the last word on this one uh particularly yeah uh I do uh I remember really clearly my and I remember the radio uh it was it was a transistor radio that my mum had when she was a student that I had one as a small boy I kind of inherited it uh just a mono it was a hacker uh was the name of the radio and I remember the time of the place it was the back bedroom in the house over what I painted was to share there was a view of the fields and the modern hills and the sun was going down beautiful heartbreaking sky and uh I must have been about nine or ten and I twisted the dial and it was that time of day when on those old radios should for atmospheric reasons you'd get signals from the other side of the planet just bouncing off the cooling air and this utterly enchanting song just arrived uh and I'd never heard anything like it and I didn't know music could do that um and it took me some months or year I had a cassette recorder one of the box types that you had to play cassette uh you had to play record and play at the same time and I put the radio on it next to the mic about a third of the way through the song uh because it took me that long to find a cassette and it was so beautiful and some months or some years later I learned the name of the song was to cross the universe by the Beatles what was it that's a lovely song too isn't it what's yours Brian well I don't have such a clear sort of creation story as that one that's a very good one I I can remember the first thing I can remember really being sort of baffled and intrigued by was um that silhouette song called get a job which was a duop song from the late 50s I think it actually came out in 1957 or something like that and it's got um you know how duop sounds there's a bass it's it's all voices that there is some instruments in there but thought what is this where does this come from it sounded really to me like something from another civilization actually another another universe really speaking of across the universe and I can remember thinking wow music can be anything really you know and and I was so fascinated by this and then I started buying duop records and because we I grew up near some big American airbases so there were PX stores that you could go and buy records there and of course they there was a lot of southern R&B and stuff that you just never heard on the English radio and I built up quite a big collection of very young actually of um sort of duop songs and the other thing that I collected was Ray Conniff singers I don't know if you know who Ray Conniff is I'm afraid not it was he was the sort of 1950s version of the James Last Orchestra a real sound to it they had this making mixing strings and voices lovely soft melodies and it sounded like silk yeah and again it was it was where does this come from you know I was just fascinated by what world these things came from and it took me a long time to realize that all the duop stuff that I liked was actually black people I didn't know that because I didn't have any photographs of them I just had these records and the records had names on them but no idea who they were and I was about 14 before I realized that nearly everything in my record collection except the Ray Conniff singers was black music well it was a real surprise yeah that's great well thank you that's that thank you so much that was really beautiful and lovely to speak to you very thank you for being here I'm gonna pass it back over to Molly but it was my absolute pleasure and I'm sure this was this is the part where there would be a rousing applause in the live audience which I will do it yeah which you absolutely deserve so thank you so much thank you to Kevin and thanks to everyone at the British Library in the Royal Society of Literature for making this happen yeah thank you Brian good luck for the future yeah I think we'll need it yeah right thank you so much David Brian and Kieran ingenuity may be about escapology as David said but I think all of us listening and watching to you felt that we got ingenuity from being locked into your conversation so thank you all so much for that if you want to come to more events like these for free I mean who am I kidding what event is like this but we can try and please join the Royal Society of Literature membership starts at £40 and gives you free access to all the RSL's events publications and book groups which we're doing all online at the moment members will also have special access to the RSL's birthday announcements 200th birthday announcements at the end of November so please if you can join our mailing list join our membership through rsliterature.org then you'll get special access to all of those the RSL's next event is on Wednesday next week please join us for a conversation between writers and psychoanalysts about the relationship between writing and isolation with Lisa Epidionesi, Otega, Uwagba, Josh Cohen and Louise Doughty then at the end of October celebrate Zora Neale Hurston's enduring influence at our event in partnership with the British Library again and the Black Girls Book Club will have a book group which you can sign up for on the RSL's website which is going to be co-hosted by me and the Black Girls Book Club founders Natalie Carter and Melissa Cummings Quarry that will be followed the next day by a conversation between Scott's Macca, Jackie Kay and poet Selena Godden on Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance and what both say to readers now. If you want to tell us how much you've enjoyed this evening which I am certain you all have maybe not as much as I have but probably just as much as I have we'd be very happy to hear that from you so you can see at the top of your screen there's a button to give us feedback or you can let the RSL and British Library know on whatever social media takes your fancy. A reminder that you can buy David and Brian's latest books through the link that you can see just above this as well please go and buy them now you must support these fantastic artists they have given you so much this evening. A big thank you to everyone at the British Library my colleagues at the RSL and our producers, unique media for making tonight possible and to all of you for joining us this evening. Until next time a huge thank you and I will do an applause even on my own to our speakers to thank them for what they've given us tonight and a good night to all of you thank you.