Brian Eno on final email from David Bowie: ‘I realise now he was saying goodbye’

The pair also had plans to work with each other again

Brian Eno has paid tribute to the late David Bowie and spoken about their last correspondence, which came in the form of an email last week.

Eno and Bowie worked together numerous times, most notably for Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’ of albums in the 1970s (‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’).

In a statement released publicly (via BBC News), Eno has said: “David’s death came as a complete surprise, as did nearly everything else about him. I feel a huge gap now. We knew each other for over 40 years, in a friendship that was always tinged by echoes of [comic characters] Pete and Dud.”

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“Over the last few years – with him living in New York and me in London – our connection was by email,” Eno continued. “We signed off with invented names: some of his were Mr Showbiz, Milton Keynes, Rhoda Borrocks and the Duke of Ear.”

“I received an email from him seven days ago. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: ‘Thank you for our good times, Brian. they will never rot’. And it was signed ‘Dawn’. I realise now he was saying goodbye.”

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Eno also stated that the pair had plans to work with each other again: “About a year ago we started talking about ‘Outside’ – the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.”

The news that Bowie has lost an 18-month battle with cancer was announced this morning with his son, film director Duncan Jones, among the first to shares his message of love for his late father. See tributes to Bowie from music stars around the world.

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