Maxwell Hutchinson

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is an architect. He wanted to be a rock musician, but instead followed in his father's footsteps and set up his own architectural practice. Some of the attributes of rock have not, however, deserted him. He likes to make a noise and is not afraid of being controversial. He was the youngest president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an office he used to counterattack Prince Charles' criticisms of the profession.

Presenter0:54

These days, though, architecture forms only part of his life. He writes music, both serious and pop, wants to organise a few rock festivals, run the marathon, and write a number one hit. He is Maxwell Hutchinson.

Presenter1:07

All of which seems to indicate, Max, that you're a man of many parts. Now, which is the more important part for you, the architectural or the musical?

Maxwell Hutchinson1:16

I don't think I balance them up like that in some sort of enormous intellectual equation. I take every part of my life as it comes, and each part contributes to who I am and how I feel at any one time. I wouldn't be the architect I was without the music, or the musician I am without the buildings.

Presenter1:31

And you're passionate about both? Yeah, absolutely. Of course, it's not simply rock music that you're interested in, is it? You wrote a Requiem Mass not long ago, didn't you?

Maxwell Hutchinson1:38

Yes, I I started writing serious music comparatively recently because I used to write music for the theatre. And that's really when the choice came. I wrote three musicals and that at one point I had a show at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and Mel Smith directed one of my shows at The Crucible in Sheffield. And at the point that show business and the theatre started to suck me in, I had a big choice to make. But I had people working in an office in Islington and we had jobs to do.

Maxwell Hutchinson2:04

It was a very difficult decision, and it remains so.

Presenter2:07

And has the Requiem Mass itself been performed?

Maxwell Hutchinson2:09

Oh yes, on several occasions it was performed by the village choir, the village I live in in Rutland, which is absolutely magic, because these people who had never, never read music in their lives before, never sung in a choir, certainly never sung in Latin, come together at my behest and sing the music I write for. They sang the first performance in Christmas about three years ago. They then came down to London some of them had never been to London before, believe it or not, and they sang it in St George's Church in Bloomsbury, the Hawksmoor Church behind the British Museum, where I live. And then they sang it in Peterborough Cathedral on the occasion of the 750th anniversary, and that was just magic.

Presenter2:42

And what do you do in all this? Do you conduct it or say that?

Maxwell Hutchinson2:44

No, I just sit there weeping.

Maxwell Hutchinson2:47

You don't sing. Hearing my own music performed is an enormously emotional experience. It's like seeing one's own buildings built and then walking around them. It's the same sort of feeling. The feeling that how did I do it? It makes me feel very humble and and enormously moved.

Presenter3:03

So with the kind of eclectic taste that you have in music, presumably choosing eight records, boiling it down to eight was almost impossible.

Maxwell Hutchinson3:11

For goodness me, I've been doing it for forty-two years.

Presenter3:14

And what's the result? What's the first one?

Maxwell Hutchinson3:16

Well, I've chosen my favourite composer of all time, Sir Edward Elgar, who was self-taught as a musician, as I am, was an English eccentric, was a Catholic, was an enormously powerful composer, I think this country's greatest composer. And I've chosen his first symphony and a tiny bit of it, which is is all to do with descending sevenths and a vision of

Maxwell Hutchinson3:40

Some sort of Catholic vision that he had at the time, whether it was a true Catholic vision or an induced Catholic vision. It's the bit about which Jaeger wrote that we are brought nearer to heaven.

Presenter4:48

Part of the slow movement of Elgar's first symphony in A flat major, played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles MacKerris. How early in your life, Max, were you aware that music was important to you?

Maxwell Hutchinson5:00

My mother was a self-taught pianist, and I remember her playing the Dambusters March and things like that. And she could sit at the piano she'd never been trained, said the piano and play all afternoon, and I remember summer days when the piano was sort of wafting out of the window, that's when it really struck me. And then I could sit down and do it after her, which was a a strange sort of metaphysical process that no one had taught me what to do, but I could go to the piano and lift the lid and sit down and do what she had done.

Presenter5:24

But who was the greatest influence as time went on?

Maxwell Hutchinson5:26

Well, the first influence was an unlikely character in a rock and roll band called Hank B. Marvin, because there was this rather gauche-looking man with glasses. And I've worn glasses since I was born. Some people say that those pink National Health glasses were invented by me. And there was this man standing on a stage playing an article called Offender Stratocaster, which is an electric guitar, looking a little bit like me. And suddenly there was this charismatic figure who could change the world through the neck of an electric guitar. And that was the real starting point.

Presenter5:56

You've collected guitars on the side.

Maxwell Hutchinson5:58

Yes, I've got about 14 or 15 electric guitars.

Presenter6:00

Tell me a bit more about your parents. Were they very strict?

Maxwell Hutchinson6:03

Yes, they were. I always talk about my father in one of the columns I write, the Technical Press. I call him the Great FH. His name was Frank Hutchinson, because he was the last, in in my life, the last of the great Edwardians. He was born in Thursow in the north of Scotland. He was trained at Aberdeen. He went away to fight the war in the Second World War. He was very strict. Not turning up for drinks at twelve o'clock before lunch on Sunday was an absolutely capital sin. He was a very good architect. He was very well disciplined. My mother was a great romantic woman. I suppose that music came into that as well. She too was a Scotch. She came from Motherwell.

Presenter6:35

And you were an only child, so you were an only child.

Maxwell Hutchinson6:36

I was an only child. I am an only child, it's not past tense. It doesn't change, you know.

Presenter6:40

You were only so you were very spoilt, eh?

Maxwell Hutchinson6:42

No, I don't think I was spoilt. No. Edwardians never spoilt their children. I was taught to be disciplined, hard working.

Maxwell Hutchinson6:49

resolute, opinionated, clear, and I think that stood me in very good stead.

Presenter6:54

And where was this childhood? Where were you born?

Maxwell Hutchinson6:56

Well, I was born in Grantham, in Lincolnshire. I always say that with a tremendous hesitation and poise.

Presenter7:01

Because people then say did the Hutchinsons know the Thatchers?

Maxwell Hutchinson7:03

Well, no, they didn't, but Maxwell Hutchinson bought sweets from mister Roberts, and that's absolutely true.

Presenter7:08

Wait, wait.

Speaker 47:08

See?

Maxwell Hutchinson7:09

Yeah. I remember him in a in one of those brown warehouse coats in the sub post office on the corner of North Parade near Little Gunnaby School. And I didn't make it up, but whether she was sitting upstairs reading Maynard Keynes or not, I don't really know.

Presenter7:09

And behind the

Speaker 47:09

Yeah.

Presenter7:09

Uh

Presenter7:23

Shall we have your second record?

Maxwell Hutchinson7:24

Yeah, I've I've chosen a Requiem because when I decided to start writing again after quite a long gap, I didn't know what to write and I looked at all the composers and they all write a Requiem Mass. So I spent the most sepulchral year of my life listening to everyone's Requiem, from Brahms' German Requiem to everything you can imagine. And the one that I would take with me to the sand and the palm trees is Foray's Requiem.

Speaker 47:53

Uh

Speaker 47:55

One may be stormy.

Speaker 48:37

Extrudes that share.

Presenter8:46

Part of the opening of Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Philip Ledger.

Presenter8:55

Um, you got away from Grantham, Max Hutchinson, quite quickly, went off to University in Aberdeen. It's a long way away.

Maxwell Hutchinson9:00

Yes, about as far away as I could possibly get from home.

Maxwell Hutchinson9:03

For two reasons. One, because as an only child, it was about time I flew the nest. And my father had been to Aberdeen. And when I started to think seriously about architecture, which I didn't do until the end of my school days, really, everybody wanted me to become an engineer or a scientist or go and read classics. Because somehow the school I went to, which was Aundel in Northamptonshire, had a very purist idea about a professional life. First of all, you had to go to a decent university and read a decent degree in a classical subject of some sort or another, then afterwards go away and be something superfluous like architect or a barrister or something like that. But my father got very, very angry. He was paying the fees after all. And so the decision was eventually made. And then we started saying, well, we'd like to go to Leicester or Nottingham or Sheffield or somewhere terribly sensible. So I went to Aberdeen, which was a devastatingly good choice.

Presenter9:51

And there you you grew your hair long, you sprouted a beard, you bought a duffel coat, and generally conformed, uh

Maxwell Hutchinson9:57

Yes, but the the magic moment, and I suppose the guitar comes into it again, where there was this tiny little Englishman surrounded by huge Scotsmen, most of whom came from a line north of Aberdeen, who didn't want to know me, didn't want to talk to me. And I remember on one wonderful evening in a pub in Aberdeen where I felt very lonely and dejected, and there was a band playing, and I knew the one thing that I could do to speak to these people, so I went and picked up and I played, and that's what opened the whole gates, and from then on I enjoyed it enormously.

Presenter10:21

Didn't you end up on the stage somewhere with The Who, no less?

Maxwell Hutchinson10:24

Yes, that was quite a long time later. That was nineteen sixty nine. I did my first degree at Aberdeen. I came down to London because the architectural uh training is divided into two halves, like a sandwich you do a bit in an office afterwards. I came down to London in nineteen sixty nine.

Maxwell Hutchinson10:38

And I played at an open air pop festival at Plumpton Race Course, which was the the occasion, the first occasion on which The Who played Tommy live for the first time. And it was one of those occasions. But then it got cold and the flowers died, and you couldn't walk around the streets of West Hampstead any more in bare feet.

Presenter10:53

But the way you looked then with the beard was offensive to your parents, wasn't it?

Maxwell Hutchinson10:57

Yes, my father took exception to it wasn't just me, I think, I think he took a grave exception to the whole liberalization of of morality. I remember walking down Carnaby Street with him in 1967, 66, and a television crew stopped him and uh asked him what he thought about all of this liberalism and promiscuity, and he was very, very against it all. So when I became on his doorstep the apotheosis of everything that he thought was the degradation of civilization as he had known it and fought for, he didn't like it very much.

Presenter11:25

So did you fall out?

Maxwell Hutchinson11:26

Yeah, we did. Yes. We didn't talk for quite a long time.

Presenter11:28

Did he cut you off?

Maxwell Hutchinson11:29

Yeah, he cut me off, yes.

Presenter11:30

Uh

Maxwell Hutchinson11:31

They didn't really matter, actually, now.

Presenter11:31

Compared to Ready

Maxwell Hutchinson11:33

Thinking about it.

Presenter11:34

But how did you live? Where did you get your money from?

Maxwell Hutchinson11:36

Well, I had to somehow by now I was at the Architectural Association, which is a private school of architecture in Bedford Square, the best school of architecture in the world, and it still is, and I'm very proud to have been there. And I somehow had to pay the rent for the one-room flat in Kentish Town and pay the fees at the AA. So I started teaching music. And I suppose my most celebrated pupil was George Melly. I taught George Melley to play the blues for about three years. It was wonderful.

Presenter11:59

How was it then that on leaving architecture school you could immediately afford to set up in your own practice, which is what you did?

Maxwell Hutchinson12:05

Well, it was the tail end of the property boom at the end of the nineteen sixties, and I'd had to work at architecture as well as music when I was at the AA. And I had a lot of contacts who had properties, and I lived at the junction of Southgate Road and the Balls Pond Road in Islington, and there was the great start of the gentrification of Islington, and I was there and I was doing it, so I just somehow fell into it. I do wish I hadn't, however.

Speaker 312:28

Why?

Maxwell Hutchinson12:29

Well most of my contemporaries packed their T-Square and their repeater graphs and went off round the world and worked for famous architects and went to America and went to Australia. Meanwhile I was trucking away at the drawing board in the Balls Pond Road. And I regret it really. It was a chunk of my life that I think I missed out on. Let's have some more music. Well I've chosen for my third choice Thelonius Monk playing the piano solo and he's going to play Round Midnight which amongst my favourite of all jazz compositions was of course the theme tune from the film about the life of Lester Young in Paris. I mean the real jazz life where Dexter Gordon played Lester Young. And Felonius Monk really is how I play the piano when I'm feeling confident.

Presenter13:38

Thelonious Monk playing round midnight.

Presenter13:41

The development which which really brought your firm to uh the public's attention was the Skylines office blocks, weren't they? The the first office blocks to be built in London's Docklands.

Maxwell Hutchinson13:50

Yes, they were amongst the first buildings to be built on the Enterprise Zone on the Isle of Dogs.

Presenter13:54

Can you describe it?

Maxwell Hutchinson13:55

Well, they seem to become an emblem of Docklands. They've got very steeply pitched roofs and they've got diagonal steel bracing, wind bracing, on the outside of the windows. I designed them with Christopher Libby and Peter Wallace. Very exciting times. It was the times when, for the first time, Michael Heseltine flew in by helicopter to the whole desert of the Isle of Dogs. And the dictum was nothing on the Isle of Dogs will be more than four stories in height. So we designed very steeply pitched roofs and sneaked some mezzanine floors into the extra bit of roof.

Maxwell Hutchinson14:27

And it was important and it got photographed a lot. By the time it was finished it was worth twice as much as the estate agents said it was going to be worth and it it somehow started us people taking notice of what we were doing and what we were thinking. It was very exciting times.

Presenter14:39

And of course it got much criticised. Uh uh the most famous quotation I think about it is If this is modern architecture, God help us. How did you feel when people started saying things like that?

Maxwell Hutchinson14:49

Oh, I was glad that people were talking about architecture. I remember in the early part of my career, if I could get half a column inch in the Daily Telegraph about architecture, then I would have run up and down Portland Place waving a flag. And now we have coverage of architecture everywhere.

Presenter15:06

But you like the Tower block, don't you? You you go on defending them, you believe they are the future.

Maxwell Hutchinson15:13

Yes, I think they're part of the future. I think Centrepoint is one of the most important buildings in London and suddenly people start to agree with me. When I open my blinds in my kitchen in Bloomsbury, it's right in the middle of the kitchen window. And I think Richard Seifert's work on that building was much denigrated and he was much insulted by the establishment. And now it's somehow revered. It takes a very long time for architecture to mature.

Presenter15:36

It's become famous for being empty, that's why

Maxwell Hutchinson15:37

Well, it was, yes, that's a long time ago.

Presenter15:40

But uh the the problem is, really, isn't it, that architecture is about people and that although people don't mind working perhaps in in tower blocks, they don't actually like living in them very much.

Maxwell Hutchinson15:48

Oh, some of the people I know do.

Maxwell Hutchinson15:50

I think the great mistake was that in in building vast numbers of tower blocks we were we, not just the architectural profession, but society as a whole, were responding to a political mandate. These houses had to be built.

Maxwell Hutchinson16:04

The problem was a housing management problem. How could you put a a woman with three children on the fifteenth storey of a tower? Of course you can't. What you can do now is you can put a retired couple if the lifts work and the stairwells are cleaned. We can't dismiss them all just because of bad management and political manipulation.

Presenter16:22

But you prefer yourself to live in a seventeenth century cottage in Rutland.

Maxwell Hutchinson16:27

Yes, and a new flat in the middle of Bloomsbury, built only four years ago.

Presenter16:32

But it is it does highlight the old criticism, doesn't it, that many architects prefer traditional surroundings themselves, but they like to experiment with the lives of other people.

Maxwell Hutchinson16:40

I think that we should be absolutely truthful about where we want to live and how we want to live, and that.

Maxwell Hutchinson16:46

If I could live reasonably in a in a tower block which was accessible to me and and meant something to me, I'd do it. I'm not proud about where I live. Although the thatched cottage and yes, it is thatched is important to me. It's just a very nice place. If there was a tower block in the middle of Empingham, which is the village I live in, I think I'd probably live in there.

Presenter17:05

Record number four.

Maxwell Hutchinson17:06

Well, this is this next record is part of my own requiem, which is sung by the village choir I've talked about already. I don't sing in it, I don't play for it, I don't conduct it because I feel too stressed by the whole occasion. And I've chosen a tidy little bit, which is lacrimosa, which is all about crying. And remember the people that's singing it probably never read Latin before and can't read any music, and they're conducted by Valerie T, who's a lovely lady.

Presenter18:29

Black Rimosa from Requiem in a Village Church, composed by my Costaway Maxwell Hutchinson.

Presenter18:35

Why do you find it so difficult listening to your own music? I don't really know.

Maxwell Hutchinson18:38

Oh, because I don't know where it comes from.

Presenter18:38

Ooh.

Maxwell Hutchinson18:41

And when I hear it back afterwards, I think, good heavens, I've got no conception of how I was able to do that.

Presenter18:48

But are you a particularly religious man? I mean, you do compose church music.

Maxwell Hutchinson18:51

Church, yeah, always have been.

Presenter18:53

That's very important to you, isn't it?

Maxwell Hutchinson18:54

Oh, my religion is very important to me. I take it seriously. I'm a practising Christian. I worship round the corner from Broadcasting House at All Saints Margaret Street, behind London's Oxford Street when I'm in London. And when I was President of the RIBA, I'd pop off at the end of a busy day and go to Low Mass and go back again to the RIBA and get on with the evening's business. And I sing in the village choir at St Peter's as Empingham, and I take it all very seriously.

Presenter19:16

That's something that was in you f from childhood, is it?

Maxwell Hutchinson19:19

Yes, I I absolutely

Maxwell Hutchinson19:21

I took a break as an adolescent when I actually thought the Communist Manifesto and uh sexuality was much more important than religion, but not for a very long time. And I think it's going to become an increasingly important part of my life.

Presenter19:33

Now, that piece of music, among many others, was composed, was it not, in your cottage in Rutland i in your recording studio at the bottom of the garden?

Maxwell Hutchinson19:41

Well, I've got these marvellous outbuildings which were built by the Duke of Ancaster for the people of the village at some time in the past. I probably got all the details of that wrong. And it used to be a carzi, an earth closet, and we bricked it all up and filled it all in, and that's where the studio is. And I've got a marvellous eight-track studio and a MIDI control synthesizers and computers and everything. That's where I do it all.

Presenter20:03

And do you compose music on the computer too?

Maxwell Hutchinson20:05

Oh yes, yes. I've taught myself the computer through through music. I can control banks of synthesizers and stuff all through the computer. And that's how I learnt about computers.

Presenter20:12

And is it then the computer that's going to yield this number one hit that you have in mind?

Maxwell Hutchinson20:16

No, no, that comes sort of straight from the gut at one o'clock in the morning.

Presenter20:21

It hasn't come yet.

Maxwell Hutchinson20:21

No, no, I wish it would. That's the real thing I want to ride.

Presenter20:24

Next record.

Maxwell Hutchinson20:25

Well, I I cut the end of my finger off about two years ago, chopping sticks, when I'd been riding and I was very cold. And when I sat with the bit of my finger in Peterborough Hospital waiting for it to be stuck back on again, I vowed a great vow that if my finger ever came back again, which it has done, I would play the blues. So I've chosen

Maxwell Hutchinson20:43

Larry McRae, who's a young blues man, and that's important. He's twenty eight, he comes from Detroit, and he brings together in his guitar playing Albert King and Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy and B. B. King. And he's young, and he shows that the blues doesn't just have to come from blind Lemon Hutchinson, it can come from all over the place, and this is just magic.

Speaker 421:12

What did you decide?

Speaker 421:14

Pushing a pain

Speaker 421:19

Hold it by name, give it to love

Speaker 421:23

Put me on a plane

Presenter21:27

Larry McRae singing Ambition. Back to architecture, Max Hutchinson. And you took office as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1989, which of course enabled you to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Prince Charles. Not a bit.

Maxwell Hutchinson21:40

I've picked it up before, by the way. That's why I was elected, really. Because in 1984, His Royal Highness made the famous Carbuncle speech on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the RIBA in Wren's Court at Hampton Court Palace. And initially, the profession really did not know what to say, because the idea of criticising the monarchy, of joining in an argument with this devout institution, which we revere so much and are taught and brought up to respect, seemed to be beyond the profession. And I wrote a couple of articles for The Independent where I started to question the right of His Royal Highness to discuss architecture in this way and say these devastatingly damaging things about the profession.

Presenter22:23

So they elected you to defend them.

Maxwell Hutchinson22:24

Well I guess so, because I was elected by the council, which was the sort of official candidate who is normally challenged nationally and torn to shreds, and I wasn't challenged and I took office. And there's no doubt that the fact that I was prepared to articulate an alternative proposition and stand up for my profession, all 30,000 of them, in very difficult circumstances, is probably what did it.

Presenter22:48

And indeed you weren't at all reverential. You said that His Royal Highness had a museum mentality and that he was destructive. Nevertheless, he struck a chord, didn't he? He struck a chord with the man on the Clappamumni.

Maxwell Hutchinson22:59

And that's not difficult to do at all, is it? I mean Radio Two does it all the time. But we need to find better things and newer things and fresher things. I think we've been seduced by this peculiar advertising image of ourselves of beef eaters and funny taxis and policemen with strange hats. We need better than that.

Presenter23:15

But the problem is, isn't it, that architecture, unlike the other arts, if architecture is an art, is a is a very public thing. I mean, if you redesign Piccadilly Circus, you can't just please the people who like Georgian facades or postmodernism. You've got to please the man who's on Joe Soap on the Underground.

Maxwell Hutchinson23:32

But he always assumes that Joe Soap knows what he likes and why he likes it. We've already said that Centrepoint, which was decried and abused in the nineteen sixties, is now admired.

Presenter23:41

But people like brick and they like pitched roofs. They don't want your concrete and steel. They like warmth. They like tactile materials. They like traditional material.

Maxwell Hutchinson23:48

Well they like that, yes, they like warmth and tactile materials and and comfort, but concrete is actually quite a tactile material, and concrete can be quite warm. If I told you that that the concrete was actually made out of some rare aggregate of great value, then I think you'd like it more.

Presenter23:58

Can you find

Presenter24:04

People don't like the concrete of the National Theatre, for example, and find it cold and drab and alienating.

Maxwell Hutchinson24:07

I'll find it

Maxwell Hutchinson24:10

I don't. I think it's a wonderful backdrop to theatre. It's the first really egalitarian theatre in this country. It's a theatre you can go to in a tuxedo or Levi's and feel comfortable at home. It's one of the greatest buildings in this country. And it will stand there for centuries and people will enjoy it and admire it, long after we've forgotten the quotes about it looking like a nuclear power station.

Presenter24:29

I was going to say, when Prince Charles said it looked like a a nuclear reactor, I think he said, a lot of people agreed.

Maxwell Hutchinson24:35

Yeah, most people haven't seen a nuclear reactor and I'm surprised if he has.

Presenter24:39

Record number six.

Maxwell Hutchinson24:40

Well, I've chosen a piece of music sung by the choir of All Saints Margaret Street, the Butterfield Church that I worship at during the week. It's a piece of music which the choir would sing during the festival of All Saints. It's O Salutaris Hostia, written by Saint-Sans, and I've chosen it for another reason, because I go to a service called Benediction, which is a rare service. I'm not even sure it's authorised in the Church of England. And this is what the choir sings during this strange and very divine service.

Speaker 425:11

Uh

Speaker 425:15

Is it

Speaker 425:24

When child live is all still

Speaker 425:41

Look the sun with time is all as the earth.

Speaker 425:54

Preach the

Speaker 425:59

Taustin.

Presenter26:09

SANSAN'S O SALUTARIS HOSTIA, SUNG BY THE Choir of All Saints' Church, Margaret Street, in the West End of London.

Presenter26:16

Paint me your vision of the future, then, Max Hutchinson. What kind of offices will we be building and working in in ten or twenty years' time? What kind of urban housing?

Maxwell Hutchinson26:25

I think the most important new influence is an influence to do with the environment. There's no doubt that the green issues have changed everybody's appreciation of where they live and the environment that they want. The sick building syndrome, the fact that the BBC can spread Legionella over the west end of London from its air conditioning plant makes people suddenly think I want that to be comfortable, warm, cool, I want the colours around me to be right, and I want to enjoy in my home the same degree of technical innovation that I find at work. And I don't think that the younger generation, the generation out there in their MC Hammer trousers and their trainers, have got any hang-ups about the future at all. They want it and they want buckets of it and they want it to be shiny and crisp and fast and loud and exciting.

Presenter27:11

And what do they want it to look like from the outside? Is it big or squat or

Maxwell Hutchinson27:24

When I went out and played with my friends and the bicycle and the dog, they sit alone. They understand technology and they want the same values which they attach to their

Maxwell Hutchinson27:32

Amstrad, apply to their homes, their workplaces.

Presenter27:36

And what will you be doing in ten or twenty years' time, having risen to the top of your profession at aged forty two?

Maxwell Hutchinson27:42

Well, I'm very excited because the the Minister of the Arts, Timothy Rentons, recently appointed me chairman of one of the new regional arts boards. The Arts Council the Arts Council's authority is being devolved to the regions and all the old regional arts associations are being wound up. So I'm chairman of East Midlands Arts. I've got a lot to look forward to. I've got lots of important theatres, the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, the Playhouse, Nottingham, the Royal Theatre in Northampton, the Buxton Opera House. I've got ethnic dance festivals, ethnic rock and roll festivals, for which I'm now

Maxwell Hutchinson28:10

In a major way responsible. I'm looking forward to that.

Presenter28:12

So will you leave your architecture behind?

Maxwell Hutchinson28:14

Oh, no, no, no doubt about that at all. And I've only been getting back over the last few months back into more time at the practice and I enjoy it enormously.

Maxwell Hutchinson28:23

Record number seven.

Maxwell Hutchinson28:25

I've chose a piece of pop music, straightforward, gutsy American pop music by a band called The Pixies, who are a young American band. They don't use lots of synthesizers and effects. They just play the guitar, sing loudly, and often they're very rude, but I've chosen a a simple song called Here Comes Your Man.

Speaker 428:41

There's a box car waiting outside the family store.

Speaker 428:49

Out by the fire breathing Outside we wait till face turns blue I know the nerve is water

Speaker 429:00

I know the dirty bit has

Speaker 429:04

Out by the box car waiting Take me way to nowhere late

Presenter29:12

Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies, a group Max Hutchinson says make a lot of noise and are often rather rude. Do you think that could be part of a description of you, Max?

Maxwell Hutchinson29:21

Well I'm sometimes rather louder than I intend to be, but that's too many years singing in pop bands with lousy PA systems. Now I d I hope I'm not rude.

Presenter29:29

How are you going to survive on the desert island? I can't imagine that you'd be very good on your own for very long. I'm enormously good on my own.

Maxwell Hutchinson29:36

In fact, I take my being on my own very seriously. I go away on holiday on my own and don't talk. I go to Italy and I write down everything I would have said had someone been there to listen to it. And I go on retreat with Benedictine monks and uh in the Cotswolds and observe Benedictine silence, greater and lesser silences. So yes, I'm I'm very good at being quiet and very good at being on my own.

Presenter29:57

For how for how long do you do that?

Maxwell Hutchinson29:59

Well I g I go to Burford Priory in the Cotswolds, not for more than a long weekend, and I do sneak out occasionally.

Presenter29:59

Okay.

Maxwell Hutchinson30:06

But uh I go to Italy on my own for long weekends, that sort of thing, and don't talk at all.

Presenter30:11

So there's part of you that's quite a solitary figure, is that you're sort of alone in life?

Maxwell Hutchinson30:13

So you'll sort of

Maxwell Hutchinson30:15

Yeah.

Presenter30:15

Uh

Maxwell Hutchinson30:15

Yeah, I like being alone very much. I think we all need space to think and write and dream and plan.

Maxwell Hutchinson30:21

And I like to do that on my own. And I think that then social niceties and what a lovely morning it is and what should we have for breakfast and where should we go today you think, I don't want all that, I just like to be alone for a bit.

Presenter30:31

And you don't have any family?

Maxwell Hutchinson30:32

No, I don't, no.

Presenter30:34

And that doesn't mi that doesn't worry you.

Maxwell Hutchinson30:37

No, no, not not not at all. It makes me I had to be very self-sufficient. I had to be very confident about who I am. I mean, what is that thing called Maxwell Hutchinson that sits inside this place where I am? And uh

Maxwell Hutchinson30:49

I don't mind that at all. I never have second thoughts about it.

Presenter30:52

And that Maxwell Hutchinson likes an audience, doesn't he?

Maxwell Hutchinson30:56

Yes, I like to

Maxwell Hutchinson30:58

I like to be able to communicate with people, hopefully for their own good. Nothing I like more than making people smile or laugh or learn something about themselves, or even cry. I did a speech recently about music lurking in buildings, for example. It was in the the Maltings at Snape, and I talked about Benjamin Brittney. He's dead and buried, but yet his music hangs around, and some people, you know, shed a little bitty tear.

Presenter31:20

So paint me a picture of you on this desert island, then what are you going to do with yourself all day, in your happiness there?

Maxwell Hutchinson31:26

Well, I'm surprisingly practical. I spend most of my weekends in a boiler suit, because some people go gardening and I go riding horses and making things. I'm very good with hammers and screwdrivers and making most architects are. And when I was at school, we were taught in engineering workshops how to make things. So I'm surprisingly practical. I'd like to build lots of things, lots of structures. In Grysdale Forest in the Lake District, there's marvellous sculpture mixed up with the woodland. So I'd certainly do that. I'm a strict vegetarian, so eating would be dead easy. And I'm quite interested in sort of seeing what I could grow with the seeds and what I could build. So maybe when they finally found me, and everybody would be searching for me, I'm sure. So when they finally found me, they'd find lots of sculpture and buildings and lots of vegetable gardens and plants and things.

Presenter32:09

Last record.

Maxwell Hutchinson32:10

Well, I've chosen my last record, part of Shostakovich's second piano concerto in F major.

Maxwell Hutchinson32:17

Shostakovich is where architecture and politics comes together in the most amazing way. I mean his confrontations with communism and the dictates of what he should write and what he shouldn't write and the role of music in society. And the other reason I've chosen Shostakovich is it's got more tunes in about twenty-five bars than the Pixies will write in twenty-five years.

Presenter33:34

Part of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. two in F major, opus one hundred and two, played by Christina Ortis, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter33:46

Which of the records, Max, is the one that's more important than the others?

Maxwell Hutchinson33:48

Well this is this is agony, of course. I can't manage without any of them. I need them all. I'll take the Elgar, without any doubt. And I don't know the first symphony really as well as I should do, because I spend if I listen to Elgar, I listen to The Enigma and I listen to Garantius and the Apostles and the Kingdom and the Cello Concerto. So I'll definitely take the Elgar.

Presenter34:06

And of course you've got the the Bible and Shakespeare waiting for you.

Maxwell Hutchinson34:08

Yes, there's lots of bits of the Bible that I want to set to music, so you've given me lots of time to do that. The the book would be T. S. Eliot, and I would take the collective words if I could, but if I'm limited, I'll take the four quartets, because I've started to write those words, time present and time past, are both perhaps present in time future, innumerable occasions, and you're going to give me lots and lots of time to do that.

Presenter34:29

Indeed we are, and luxury.

Maxwell Hutchinson34:31

It's a guitar. It's a Fender Stratocaster designed by Leo Fender, and it's a very special one. It has serial number E eight zero seven zero four six, and it is the best Fender Stratocaster in the world.

Presenter34:43

Just like Hank Marvin's?

Maxwell Hutchinson34:45

Yeah, it's a bit more modern than that. It's got a bit more bells and whistles on it, but it is just beautiful.

Presenter34:50

Maxwell Hutchinson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 335:02

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.