John Peel Lecture

The fifth Peel lecture was introduced by Mark Radcliffe and delivered by musician Brian Eno during the Radio Academy's Radio Festival at the British Library on 27 September 2015. He commented: "(Peel) had a profound effect on my musical life and indeed my becoming a musician at all....His career as a non-musician who altered the course of music has been an inspiration to me and forms the basis of this talk." His lecture attempted a definition of art: "I want to talk about two questions tonight. The first one is, is art a luxury? Is it only a luxury or does it do something for us beyond that? And the second question is, is there a way that you can create a situation in which the arts flourish. If you think they’re important, perhaps you should be encouraging them in some way. So those are the two things I’m going to address: now to address those I have to come round it in quite a long way around. Essentially I think we need to rethink how we talk about culture: rethink what we think it does for us and what it actually is." It was broadcast on BBC 6 Music and BBC4.