George Lloyd

Speaker 20:00

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 20:08

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

Presenter0:29

My Costaway this week is a composer. Early in his life he enjoyed huge success. His first opera received rapturous acclaim in London when he was only twenty one. Illness and misfortune followed. His music fell out of favour, and he retired to Dorset and grew mushrooms. But the musical establishment rediscovered him. Today, at the age of eighty one, he is one of this country's most successful composers. His latest work, A Symphonic Mass, was received at its premiere with what one newspaper called monster raving loony ecstasy. He is George Lloyd.

Presenter1:04

So despite a a quarter of a century in the musical wilderness, your your work is now published, it's recorded, it's being performed to sell out audiences. What's it like to be successful again?

George Lloyd1:16

It's really a wonderful way to uh to spend one's latter days. I sometimes think of uh people I've known. For instance, when I when I was just starting, I met Cyril Scott and he had been very, very, very famous at the early part of the century. People compared him to Debussy. But by the time I knew him, he was absolutely thrown away. Nobody would look at him and he died uh in in obscurity. And I've often thought to myself, How lucky I am that uh I'm writing and uh full of life and and now people want to listen to my music.

Presenter1:48

But does that kind of success go to your head, or have you been snarped?

George Lloyd1:50

Oh, I I no, I think at my age one's uh has seen too much disasters of one sort or another. No, it doesn't go to my head. At least I hope it doesn't.

Presenter2:01

Apparently snatches of your music are played in pubs and discos these days. In what form?

George Lloyd2:05

Well

George Lloyd2:07

Well, I don't know. I don't go to discos and pubs, so I've never heard it. But it is perfectly true that a few years ago when I was looking through my Performing Rights Society quarterly statement, they do it with signs and symbols, and this was a sign I'd never seen before. And I looked it up. I said, My God, I've succeeded. I'm being played in a disco.

Presenter2:29

Uh

George Lloyd2:29

First time it's really

George Lloyd2:31

Really, I thought that was fabulous.

Presenter2:33

But you're a tunes man, really, aren't you?

George Lloyd2:35

Oh, well, yes, of course I suppose I am a tunes man because uh music without uh without melodies, without tunes, without s uh singing phrases, to me is just not music.

Presenter2:45

And so so you believe that that music is

Presenter2:49

Totally. To feed the soul, is it? There isn't a uh any intellectual purpose in it.

George Lloyd2:54

Well it's difficult to be too hard and fast over that. If it's just, just, just what do you call the soul, it can tend to be perhaps a bit sloppy. You've got to use your wits and use your brains, although that's not enough by itself.

Presenter3:10

Let's find out what what what will feed your soul or whatever on on a desert island. What's your first record?

George Lloyd3:17

Well, my first record is um a part of Heifitz playing Tchaikovsky's violin concerto and uh I just love that work and of course Heifitz was what uh violinists call the sans parai. He was the ultimate in violin playing and uh this is a great record. It's uh with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at their peak uh and uh because I tried to be a violinist myself I I really appreciate this.

Presenter4:45

Part of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, played by Jascha Heifitz with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fritz Reiner.

Presenter4:54

Tell me about your early success, George Lloyd. You must have been a very precocious young man to have had an opera staged in London at the age of twenty one.

George Lloyd5:03

I don't know whether it was being precocious. I'd been doing all my sort of normal studies, studying violin with Albert Salmons, and I did my composition and all the rest of it. But at the same time, my father used to put me through the ropes with opera because he was uh a person who had an enormous uh knowledge about particularly all the very early operas. He would say, Now, here's a scene from some play or other. Now, you go and set that. So I'd have to go and set that uh and of course I

Presenter5:33

How old were you when you did that?

George Lloyd5:35

Oh, uh about sixteen, seventeen and uh'cause I started studying seriously at music when I was fourteen and a half. And uh I'd get stuck and then he'd say, Well, let's see what Rossini would have done in that situation So I was sort of also brought up in the opera world so it it seemed to me perfectly natural that I should write an opera.

Presenter5:50

Yeah.

Presenter5:53

But was it his idea? Because he wrote the libretto.

George Lloyd5:55

Yeah, he wrote the libretto, yes. We were asked to do this. Well, we were asked to do this by a man who ran uh a man called Walter Barnes who ran all the music in Penzance and uh that was part of my world. I was born in St Ives, and we did it. It was an extraordinary piece of luck. The principal critic of the Times, Frank Howes, was there at the time and he came along and heard it.

Presenter5:57

Was it his idea?

Presenter6:17

But on holiday or something.

George Lloyd6:18

He was on holiday, yes. And he walked in and he wrote a a really ecstatic one of the best reviews I've ever had in my life, I think. And then everybody said, Well, we can't let this die, it should be done in London and uh well, nobody would have looked at us if it hadn't been for that review that that just set us up.

Presenter6:37

Hmm. So nineteen thirty five it went on in in London.

George Lloyd6:39

Uh, that's right, at the old Lyceum theatre, Irving's Theatre.

Presenter6:43

and a very distinguished audience, I gather.

George Lloyd6:45

Oh, well, oh, all the big wigs came along. Beecham. Beecham came, yes, he came along, stroking his little beard. He walked into into the dressing room and said Very good, my boy, very good. You keep the interest going all the time. Well, that was a tremendous compliment from Beecham. But the greatest

Presenter7:03

But the greatest accolade came from Vaughan Williams, didn't it?

George Lloyd7:05

Yes, he he came in and uh unfortunately I was not an admirer of Vaughan William at that time. I do appreciate him now. At that time I I didn't because I didn't like all that sort of folk music uh business. And uh he walked in with his big black boots and uh said'tisn't fair, you know,'tisn't fair, I've been all my life trying to uh learn to write an opera, and here's this boy.

Presenter7:23

Yeah.

George Lloyd7:30

But uh you must have been

Presenter7:31

You must have been bowled over.

George Lloyd7:34

Not really, because when people used to say all these nice things to me, I'd sort of go home and say, Well

George Lloyd7:40

Silly old fool, don't they know I'm not Verde? You know, because I I thought nobody could ever write uh music except Verde. And what was I? Just trying my best to write a tune or two.

Presenter7:52

Let's have your second record. It's one of yours, in fact.

George Lloyd7:55

Yes, um uh John Sockman. I was uh commissioned by the Arts Council to write one of the three operas for the Festival of Britain. Vaughan Williams uh did one for Covent Garden, Pilgrim's Progress, Benjamin Britton did Billy Budd for Saddler's Wells, and they asked me to do an opera for the Carl Rosa Company. Carl Rosa Company of course doesn't exist now, but at that time it was the principal touring company and uh the idea was that this would go all over England to cheer people up a little bit and uh that was partly why it has a cheerful end. Of course I've been sworn at since then because you know we don't have cheerful ends nowadays, very bad taste.

Presenter9:34

That was Sibyl's aria from George Lloyd's opera John Sopman, sung by Janice Watson, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the composer, my castaway, George Lloyd. So there was never any doubt that music was to be your life. It was your life from when you were very small.

George Lloyd9:50

Well, yes. There was always a tremendous amount of chamber music uh going on. My father was an excellent amateur flute player. My mother played piano and viola and uh all sorts of things. I grew up with quartets and trios and uh Bach being played on the flute.

Presenter10:08

And you were gonna you were gonna be a fiddler.

George Lloyd10:10

Yes, when I was about five I started uh learning the fiddle with my mother. But uh when I was uh eight, nine years old, when I should have been building up more of a technical foundation, I had a series of illnesses. In fact, I had rheumatic fever three times. Uh I spent nine months in bed at one time and that rather put me back. But even so, by the time I was fourteen or so, I put a pistol to my father's head and I said, you know, it's time I started studying music because I'm going to be a musician.

Presenter10:38

But in the end composition took over, and and and you wrote your first symphony, I think, when you were nineteen, and you sent it off to to the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra.

Presenter10:49

And heard not a thing, so you went after it.

George Lloyd10:51

Yes, well, Sir Dan Godfrey was the big man. He ran the orchestra and did all the conducting. And after about a month, I hadn't h had an answer to my letter, and I thought this was outrageous. So I got on the train, went down there, and I told the secretary who I was, and she said, Well, wait a minute, I'll go and see if Sir Dan will see you. I waited about five minutes. Suddenly the door opened and a great big, massive, bald, sort of red, bald head. He looked like a bull, and he had a score in in his two hands. And he came right up to me, and he said, Can't they teach you how to write triplets? How can my musicians play those when the snow went? You know, I was, oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Sir Dan. Will you play my symphony? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. So I then plucked up courage and said, Would you let me conduct it? Oh, if you want to, yes, come along down. He was an extraordinary man.

Presenter11:48

Shall we have record number three?

George Lloyd11:50

Well, as you've gathered, although I was very uh operatically orientated, I was also completely uh seduced from the chamber music that I'd been brought up with, and I just fell in love with brass and drums and everything. And uh bailios meant a tremendous amount to me in those days. So uh this record I'd like to play the march from the Symphony of Fantastique.

Presenter13:17

Part of the fourth movement of Berlio's Symphonie Fontastique, played by the B B C Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis. So by the time you were twenty five, George Lloyd, you'd written two operas and three symphonies, although your second opera was not a successful production.

Presenter13:34

But then war intervened, and rather disastrously for you. Can you tell me what happened?

George Lloyd13:41

Well, I tried to join the navy actually, but uh they didn't want to have me. I think my heart was a little bit dodgy. So um I went into the marine bands. Now at that time all ships from cruisers upwards, cruisers and battleships uh they had a marine band of fifteen, sixteen players. When the ship was in port uh they entertained and did all the rest of it, ceremonial stuff. But um when at sea they were down in the bowels of the ship doing all the gunnery stuff, all the clever stuff, you know they weren't computers but they were like computers and uh all the information came in and that went up to the turrets and uh we were doing the uh Arctic convoys.

George Lloyd14:24

And they were always very difficult, a tremendous amount of loss. And uh there was a a bit of a scrap one day and uh the ship was hit. Well, uh on one side of our position uh was the magazine and on the other side were the oil tanks. And the the oil tanks uh were broken and down came all this oil and uh most of the people were uh were just drowned in horrible thick black oil. But uh I was a lucky one and somehow or other I survived. Uh I survived but uh I was a total wreck after that.

Presenter14:59

You were put ashore, weren't you?

George Lloyd15:00

Uh well, yes, I I eventually after a month or so I landed up in um a naval hospital near Aberdeen and I was there for quite some time and finally the doctors uh saw my wife and they said, Look, uh we can't do anything with your husband They tried all their different tricks of this and that, even hypnotism and everything but they

Presenter15:23

So you were shell shot.

George Lloyd15:24

I was just shell plain shell shocked, yes. I hadn't lost a limb or anything, I was just playing shell shocked. I I think this this extraordinary business of being uh no, we had to climb up these ladders with all this oil coming down, and I think the exertion of that or something it just uh burnt out my nervous system. Anyway, um I I couldn't do a thing, I was just like a doll on the end of a a string and a and they told my wife I'd have to spend the rest of my life uh in hospital, and that was that. So, yeah, quite deafly.

Speaker 215:42

Anyway.

George Lloyd15:54

And uh well, my wife, she's a brave soul and she said, Well, if you can't do anything, uh why don't you let me have a try? I said, Well, you don't know what you're taking on At any rate, uh she took me away and I lived in the country for three years.

George Lloyd16:09

And it was an absolute nightmare for her. But little by little by little I started to recover a bit. And then she took me out to her home in Switzerland, where I lived for another three years. And uh of course I always wanted to get better, you know, and nothing was going to stop me. And I started uh doing little exercises, writing little tunes, trying to get my head to work on notes again.

George Lloyd16:34

And eventually I wrote a symphony. It was pretty agonizing, but I wrote it and um it has a cheerful end, which uh a lot of people they they they can't understand this. They think it it's very cheap really. That here was I I I had seen some of the nasty side of the war and why wasn't I writing something really grim, you know, just to show everybody. Uh but uh I took a a different attitude. Uh here well, I was alive and everything was good again, so I wrote a rather buoyant type of ending.

Presenter17:06

And and that's your

George Lloyd17:07

That's my fourth that was my fourth symphony, yes.

Presenter17:09

And it's your fourth desert island disc?

George Lloyd17:12

Oh yes, yes, so it is, yes.

Presenter18:16

The finale of George Lloyd's fourth symphony played by the Albany Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Lloyd, which stayed in the cupboard for thirty five years, you say.

George Lloyd18:26

Yes, it did. Nobody wanted to know it, but uh it came out eventually. I think that that uh that should cheer me up sitting on my desert island. I say, Well, I may be here for thirty years, but eventually I'll get out of it

Presenter18:37

Stick around long enough.

George Lloyd18:38

Yeah, stick around long enough.

Presenter18:41

So so your confidence though was obviously restored by being discovering you could still write music despite your awful experiences?

George Lloyd18:48

Uh well, yes and no. I was still a bit very diffident about everything. I couldn't meet people, I couldn't do anything, you know, I wasn't fit for the music uh world really. Uh but I I had to write uh

Presenter18:55

Mm-hmm.

Presenter18:59

And then you got the commission from the Arts Council.

George Lloyd19:01

Then I got the commission for writing an opera. I managed to deliver it on time. And well, there again, I'm afraid this sounds as if it's just one sequence of disasters. It wasn't well produced. Unfortunately, the conductor and the producer they didn't merely not get on very well together. They literally hated each other and they wouldn't even talk. So you can imagine the atmosphere. The only form of communication they had was through Sir Edward Downes. It was his first job in an opera house, and he'd been engaged to teach the cast this new opera. And these two coots, they had to communicate through him. I was never allowed to a rehearsal at all. And

George Lloyd19:47

That really finished me.

Presenter19:48

To be fair, your story is borne out by the Times critic, which was again Frank Howes, I think, as he I've got a quote here from him. He said the performance was too rough to do justice to the orchestral score.

George Lloyd19:59

I think he realized that uh they weren't really hearing what what should happen. However, I I've more or less uh wiped the slate clean over that because last summer I was able to do a whole disc, about seventy-eight minutes of music, which we call Highlights from John Sottman, and I had a lovely time. I had some marvellous singers and the Philharmony Orchestra, and so I sort of put everything right.

Presenter20:21

But the sad thing was, of course, that it was the last opera you wrote. It was your third opera, and you haven't ever written another one. Now, that seems terribly sad to somebody whose natural antecedents are are varied. I mean do you blame yourself? Do you think you were oversensitive?

George Lloyd20:35

Well, I blame myself to a large extent because it was partly a weakness of character, but also circumstances in that all this shell shock h did have a very serious effect on my character. I couldn't stand up to people. Whereas when I first started, I was quite aggressive and everybody was going to play my music, and that was fine. But after that, I just became very timid and lost confidence where other people were concerned. I still had confidence about writing my music, but not where the rest of the world was concerned.

Presenter21:09

More music.

George Lloyd21:11

Well, my next record is uh the quartet from Rigoletto. And of course, I must have a bit of Verdi, and I believe that Rigoletto is one of his greatest. The thing that I like most with this record, which is a quartet, is his ability to delineate characters through the melodic line. This is something which has completely gone out of modern composition. And in the quartet you'll hear, first of all, there's the tenor singing his lovely cantalina, and then you you have the mezzo coming in with little quick chirpy notes, and then in contrast, there's the soprano Gilda lamenting at the top, and underneath there's Rigoletto groaning away to himself. And these four characters are perfectly shown in this one piece. It's a great piece of technique.

George Lloyd22:45

Uh

Speaker 422:48

Well not so hard, is it?

Presenter23:09

The quartet from Rigoletto, Bella Figglia della More, sung by Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Huguette Turanjot, and Cheryl Milnes, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonning. So you turned away from music, this was the early fifties, and you farmed carnations first in Dorset. Was that profitable?

George Lloyd23:29

Well, we did manage to build up quite a successful carnation nursery, but unfortunately one day we we'd had some very bad returns from the market and so uh we got on the phone and said, you know, what's going on? The market man said, Well, he said, It's these South Africans uh they're sending in wonderful blooms, I mean better than any English grower could possibly grow because they've got the sunlight and everything, you know.

George Lloyd23:57

And all they want is the cost of the transporter. I said, well, how are they making their living? Oh, they don't want to make money on the flowers. They want pounds. They want sterling. And then they sell the sterling. So I saw the red light. I said, well, we can't compete with that. We've got to do something else. And I looked around and thought, well, there was still a good opening for mushrooms. So what a dreadful life. Fancy spending all one's life there, locked up inside these black places. But do you know? My wife and they became absolutely fascinated. Extraordinary things. And they suited my character also because if something went wrong with the carnations, well, it stayed wrong for about nine months. But with mushrooms, every week there was a new crop coming in. And well, if the previous crop had been very, very bad, because things are never perfect when you're growing things, by the time you were ready to cut your throat, you got a new one, and that would be a great success. So it was lovely.

Presenter24:53

So you did all that for about twenty years, didn't you?

George Lloyd24:55

We did that for a good many years. By the end of the sixties we were hoping that we could get out of this and all of a sudden in the very early seventies there was an explosion in land prices. In one year the value of land trebled in Dorset. So we thought, ah, well now's the time. And we were very fortunate. We sold in 1973, we came to London.

Presenter25:22

And back to the music scene.

George Lloyd25:23

And uh back to the music, yes. But uh I was totally unknown and uh nobody wanted to do a thing for me. It was absolutely hopeless.

Presenter25:33

Record number six.

George Lloyd25:34

Record number six i i is quite different to anything else. It's the Carnival de Vienne played by Moritz Rosenthal and it's been recorded off a piano roll. Now I'd at that time, this is I'm talking about sort of mid-sixties, I'd become very interested in the piano. I'd written a piano concerto. That was about the only thing of mine which was played for 20 years or so. And John Ogden did it in Liverpool. And we sort of struck up a friendship. He liked what I wrote and I thought his playing was absolutely fabulous and just suited me. And he used to come down and stay with me sometimes. And I'd just heard this piano roll, Rosenthal, and a lot of other wonderful pianists as well. So I sat him in a seat and I said, now John, you just listen to this because you pianists, you think you know how to play, but see what you think of this one. And he was absolutely shattered. After that, he went home and he told me later that for the first time in his life he actually started practising. He never practised. He was just born as a pianist.

Presenter27:46

Carnival de Vienne, played and composed by Mauritz Rosenthal.

Presenter27:51

You've said publicly that the reason one of the main reasons, anyway, you were out of favor for so long was that you were on a B B C Radio three blacklist. Uh do you need proof of that?

George Lloyd28:00

Do you need proof of that?

George Lloyd28:02

I think probably there wasn't an actual physical list, uh, but uh it it amounted to the same thing, and there were other composers also in the same boat as me. I I was just told that if I sent a score to them, uh they didn't even uh look at it. But I I don't want to dwell on that too much, because they did make amends. They made amends very handsomely. It was mainly due to John Ogden. One day he'd been down to see me and he went back with uh two or three of my symphonies.

George Lloyd28:33

And unbeknownst to me, one of these got sort of slipped through the net. And the first thing I knew was, because he he never told me, the first thing I knew was that the BBC wrote to me and said that in due course they would play my Eighth Symphony. Well, that was fine. I waited a couple of years and nothing happened, so I thought, well, I'd better find a conductor. So I wrote to Ted Downs, who was then conducting in Australia at the opera house, and it took him about a year to answer the letter. In actual fact, from the time they said that they would play this, it took them eight years. They played it in 1977.

George Lloyd29:14

I'd become totally disillusioned about everything at that time. And so I thought, oh, well, you know, they'll play this and that'll be the end of that. But what happened was I had so many letters from the public saying how they'd enjoyed this work that I said to myself, well, I've just got to pick myself up and try again.

Presenter29:37

So that was 1977. That was 977. And this was the big turning point.

George Lloyd29:38

That was designed in seventy seven.

George Lloyd29:41

Yeah, this was the big this was a really turning point in my life. So I got around and uh I I thought, well, I must I must see all the orchestras again and not one of them w would do anything until I went to the Philharmonia.

George Lloyd29:55

And there was an extraordinary young man who was the manager. He he was only twenty-eight at that time, Gavin Henderson, and he was one of these rare people who says yes before he says no. And he listened to the tape of the symphony and he liked it and he said, Now, what we're going to do is I'm going to get Larita, Mr. Itter, and La Rita at that time was a very, very prestigious record label, meant a tremendous lot.

George Lloyd30:24

And I'm going to get him to record it and we'll play it at the festival hall.

George Lloyd30:29

And lo and behold, that actually happened. And then he managed to persuade uh Uh, BBC to do my fifth symphony and my fourth symphony, and and then all of a sudden.

George Lloyd30:42

People had to change completings. He said a symphony.

George Lloyd30:46

Recording

George Lloyd30:47

He said two symphonies recorded. Three symphonies recorded. And after that it sort of snowballed.

Presenter30:52

Hm. They call it your Indian summer. Do you resent that slightly?

George Lloyd30:57

I don't mind the very slightest bit as long as they go on playing things for me.

Presenter30:57

I don't mind the

Presenter31:02

Record number seven.

George Lloyd31:03

Although I did start loving operas and everything, I also loved uh uh all the English orchestral music, and I think that the greatest symphony that an Englishman has ever, ever written, or ever likely to write, is Elgar's Second Symphony. So I'd like to have that.

Presenter32:20

Part of the first movement of Elgar's Symphony No. Two in E-flat, played by the Halley Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter32:27

A desert island would of course be the ideal place to write another opera. I mean, how do you write? Could you sit on a desert island and do you feel the music in in inside your head? And and and or is it a more intellectual process than that?

George Lloyd32:41

No, I I'm afraid it's not an intellectual process with me. Something comes along inside me and uh if I don't write I actually fall ill. It's almost a physical thing uh with me. It it sort of takes the whole of my body, it takes everything.

Presenter32:56

So what are you going to do on your desert island?

George Lloyd32:58

Well, I have no writing paper. I have nothing.

Presenter33:02

No.

George Lloyd33:02

I have nothing. So, well, this will be a very good exercise. I shall have to try to learn.

Presenter33:02

Yeah.

Speaker 433:02

Yeah.

George Lloyd33:08

to write my music and store it in my memory and that's going to be very hard, so I shall occupy myself for months, years learning how to do that.

Presenter33:17

Tell me about your last record.

George Lloyd33:19

Well, the last record in some ways I think is almost the most beautiful one of the lot because it's uh uh Lee Patty playing Bach's uh Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring. And I just think that he plays this like nobody else I've ever heard. And and I want to have this because I find that even now if I'm in a bad temper or I've been very agitated or if everything's gone wrong for me during the day, if I play that piece uh it sort of soothes me down. So if I'm on the desert island and I get very irritated by uh all the awful things, I mean I I can imagine there'll be fleas and insects and all sorts of things which will come and uh uh make me very cross. Uh so then I'll just uh play this wonderful piece.

Presenter35:03

Bach's Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring played by Dinu Lipati. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you choose?

George Lloyd35:12

Well, if you had to play a thing a hundred times, which one lasts the best? I almost think that Bach would last uh better than anything else.

Presenter35:21

Super.

George Lloyd35:21

Depends on one's mood, doesn't it?

Presenter35:23

Dinu Lipati, you hold on to the middle of the middle.

George Lloyd35:24

Yes, all right, we'll keep that one.

Presenter35:26

What about your book?

George Lloyd35:28

Ever since I was a boy I have loved Langland's Pierce Plowman and I like to read it in the original Middle English and you have to have a dictionary with you because it's very, very difficult. But the sounds are simply gorgeous. And I've never ever managed to get to the end. I start and I say this is great and and after a certain length of time something rather comes along. I've never got to the end so as I'm going to have plenty of time I'm going to tap Pierce Plowman.

Presenter35:54

And your luxury.

George Lloyd35:55

I imagine that uh I would have been able to build a little cabin of some sort, and so inside it I want a good picture any one of the great English portrait painters of the eighteenth century, which would uh sort of remind me of of civilization.

Presenter36:10

Which is your favourite?

George Lloyd36:12

Because we started this programme with violins, I think I might have Romney's portrait of um Lady Hamilton because she played the violin. And so I'll have this lovely portrait. I'll help her.

Presenter36:24

George Lloyd, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

George Lloyd36:28

Thank you, Zoo. Thank you.

Speaker 236:37

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