Read the letter Brian Eno wrote to his 21-year-old self
Brian Eno, Roxy Music’s founding synth player and past collaborator of David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay, has been invited to partake in an intriguing project. Conjured by Reverend and the Makers in promotion of their forthcoming album, Heatwave in the Cold North, the project invites people to pen letters to their younger selves.
Marking the release of the band’s previewing single, ‘A Letter to My 21-Year-Old Self’, today, frontman Jon McClure has implored fans and friends to write reflective letters. Brian Eno, Mel C, Jeremy Corbyn, Carl Barat, Joey Barton, Helen Chamberlain, Steve Lamacq and Richard Hawley are among the notable names to have contributed so far.
On Thursday, March 23rd, Reverend and the Makers held a pop-up exhibition at the Fagans Pub in Sheffield to showcase some of the letters previously submitted by various icons.
Read Eno’s submission below.
Brian Eno’s letter for his 21-year-old self:
Dear Brian,
As clever as you think you are you could benefit from a little more humility. You hold very strong views but I suspect that this is often because you admire the other people who hold those views and hope that some of their worldliness will rub off onto you. Sometimes, you must admit, you haven’t thought those matters through very carefully, and yet you argue for them as though you’ve spent years thinking about them.
Although none of that is unusual in young men, it is unseemly in you. Your gift for absorbing information, and your good memory, make you able to chatter convincingly about lots of different things. That is amusing and people like you for it. What is not so good is the certainty with which you then communicate the mishmash of semi-random titbits you’ve gulped down. You would do well to listen a little more to others who have had lifetimes of experience – instead of a few evenings of reading books.
This is not to say book knowledge is to be sneered at – but neither is lived experience, of which, it must be said, you don’t really have much.
Have you ever asked your parents what their lives have been like, and what understandings they might have gathered on the way – having passed through, among other things, an economic depression and a world war? No – I thought not. They aren’t readers like you so you can’t understand what they might know, what kinds of things they might understand. If it isn’t written down you don’t think it counts. You might want to consider that most of the world, and most of history, has been populated by people who learned things in other ways.
So my advice is: a little more humility! Try it: you’ll like it. Stick to your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses.
Your old friend Brian (74)
Hear ‘We Let It In’ from Brian Eno’s 2022 album, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, below.
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