John Bird

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 20:09

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

Presenter0:31

Mike Castaway this week is a magazine editor. He's where he is today because he was given a unique chance, but he might never have made it. Born into a London slum, he spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and, despite his natural talent and intelligence, drifted in and out of crime. As an adult, he turned his hand to poetry, playwriting, and printing, but it wasn't until he was in his mid-forties that the big break came. An old friend asked him to become the editor of a magazine designed to be sold on the streets by an army of workers who could pocket the profits to lift themselves out of poverty. Today it's one of this country's most successful publications. Mike Castaway has been awarded the title Editor's Editor and made an MBE. He is the editor-in-chief now of the big issue, John Bird.

Presenter1:17

It was, as it turned out, absolutely the right job for you, John, the editorship. Did you have any idea when it was offered to you that this was a a a job that was going to change your life?

John Bird1:26

Not really. Um Gordon Roddick, who who was the guy who came up with the idea, who started the body shop with his wife Anita, had been in New York and bought a copy of the Street News.

John Bird1:38

I thought it was a great idea and was going to try and run it over in the UK.

Presenter1:43

This was being sold by the homeless Indian.

John Bird1:44

It was sold by the homeless. What they were doing was they were buying the paper and then selling it and getting themselves off the streets. So he thought it was a great idea. He approached me largely because I'd been in the print. I'd done loads of magazines. I'd also sold papers on the streets. I'd also been ex-homeless. And I was also an ex-offender. So that probably covered a lot of the people who we were expecting to work with.

Presenter2:07

But how did he know you?

John Bird2:09

Well, I first met Gordon. We're both nasally challenged. In other words, we both got big conks. And I was on the run from the old bill in 1967, the end of 67, just before Christmas. And this large, big-nosed Scotsman came into a pub in Edinburgh with a load of his rugby mates. And he made some comments about me and some people I was with. So I went over to kind of challenge him. And then we then started talking strangely about poetry. And we found out that we were both large-nosed poets. But you can't.

Presenter2:42

But you can't have stayed friends all that time. I mean you he obviously then became a millionaire as we know through the bottom shop and so on. Did did you sort of ring him up to to touch him up for some money?

John Bird2:44

No.

John Bird2:47

The market shop.

John Bird2:50

Yeah, I did actually. I'm uh what happened was I I fell out of contact with him because I got very involved in politics and we were always arguing about revolution because he said politicians were, you know, the lowest form of life and here I was politi politicizing my life. And so we f we didn't fall out of co of our friendship, we just fell out of contact. And then I saw him on the telly like ten years ago and I thought, oh, that guy's become incredibly rich. So I thought I'd better beat a path to his door.

John Bird3:19

Then the idea of the street paper came up, and he said, You've got to do it.

Presenter3:23

But we say street paper, but very much not a pity paper, which I think is what the New York one was, wasn't it? Or is.

John Bird3:30

The big problem with the street paper in New York was you would buy it because you felt sorry for the person, or you were deeply interested in the social problems of homelessness. So, therefore, it was in a strange sort of way a kind of elitist publication. It didn't appeal to people across the interest barrier. If you were a social worker, great. If you were a homeless person, great. But if you were somebody going into an office or into a shop in Oxford Street, you wouldn't be interested in it. So, what we've tried to do is have a I hope I use the word correctly-a penetrable product so that everybody wants to get in there and read it. And it has all sorts of qualities that make it a very high use value.

Speaker 23:52

You look

Presenter4:12

And in a nutshell, what does it do for the people who sell it?

John Bird4:15

First of all, it gives people the opportunity of earning a legitimate income. It then becomes a way of them gaining in self esteem and moving on. It also, for some of them, unfortunately, is the only form of legal income that they're going to get, and it keeps them out of trouble.

Presenter4:31

Tell me about your first record.

John Bird4:33

Well, this is um Arthur Tracy.

John Bird4:37

My father really loved Arthur Tracy. He had a big kind of booming kind of voice. And it's also he was known as the street singer. So it's about the streets of Paddington. And it always reminds me of Paddington. And it reminds me of that sense of celebration that used to get in the streets that unfortunately has disappeared. And I'm one of the people with a lot of other people who want to re-celebrate the streets.

Speaker 45:01

A tree that made in summer well

Speaker 45:10

A nest of robins in her hair

Speaker 45:19

Upon whose bosom the snow has lay.

Presenter5:26

Arthur Tracy, The Street Singer, Singing Trees, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty five. So, John Bird, you were the ideal person to edit the big issue, not least because you care passionately about the spirit of the street, a spirit that you've grown up with. How small were you when you got your first taste of it?

John Bird5:44

Um well I wu I was born in Paddington um just off the Portobello Road on on uh just after the Second World War.

John Bird5:52

And uh

John Bird5:53

The Jerries had a go at uh Paddington because of the rail link, so there was it was a a big debris. Uh lots of slums, lots of uh broken buildings, bomb sites and all that.

Presenter6:03

But you ran the streets uh as a kid. You ran around the whole time.

John Bird6:06

Oh yeah, the whole thing.

Presenter6:11

And there were five four of those, five of them.

John Bird6:13

There there was four at the time. It went on to be five. Um I used to wander down from the slums into Kensington Gardens and all sorts of things like that. And really, um really just enjoyed wandering around.

Presenter6:25

And what sort of people did you meet as you went?

John Bird6:27

Well, some of them weren't particularly nice, but most of them, I have to say, there was a kind of concept, and I don't want to sound as though I'm talking about some golden period, but there was a sense, especially in Paddington, that we all kind of belonged to each other. Everybody was your aunt and everybody was your cousin. And little girls would come up, and if they looked at you and thought you were a little bit dirty, they'd spit on their hanky just like their mothers did, and wipe your face, which was terrible, but you got on with it. And there was this kind of real sense of that we were all in it together, you know.

Presenter6:58

And your father was a labourer and your mother was a a barmaid and they together didn't pay the rent very often, is that right?

John Bird7:00

Right.

John Bird7:04

They were they were they had this kind of allergy to the rentman or the rent lady, I remember it was a lady which unfortunately came to a head in 1951. I'd just come back from school, I'd just started school and there was all the stuff on the on the stairs outside the house. So we moved in with my grandmother.

John Bird7:24

who lived above a woodcutter in a little mews just round the corner, Burlington Mews. It's all gone. And we actually lived in a room and we shared I shared a bed with my mother and father and my two brothers. They were one end and we were the other end. And my youngest brother was in a drawer on the floor. So my parents were what you might call economically challenged or ecologically inept. But, you know, we we survived, I think.

Presenter7:50

And wasn't it wasn't that the area where Christie lived, the murderer? I mean, about that time, sure.

John Bird7:55

Oh yeah. Um

John Bird7:56

I was in that area about 52, 51 when when Christie was caught and we used to have this terrible little jingle which is old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get a bottle of whiskey and when she was there three bodies were there all belonging to Christie and he was the bogeyman and my mother and father and everybody would say if you don't watch out we'll get Christie after you so he became the kind of Latter-day Jack the Ripper for us.

Presenter8:21

Record number two.

John Bird8:22

My next record is is Revelle's Bolero, but played on a piano as opposed to orchestrated. I don't like Bolero. I think Bolero is an ugly uh when it's orchestrated because it's so syrupy and all that. But if you strip all that away and you play it on the piano, it is incredibly refreshing.

Presenter9:41

Louis Lauty and Helene Mercier playing part of Ravel's Bolero. Eventually, John, as a result of being evicted so many times or being technically homeless, you and your brothers were sent to an orphanage. You were still very small, and it was apparently a terrible experience. Why?

John Bird9:57

I just sunk my brothers became a part of the system.

John Bird10:01

You know, they got on well with the nuns and all that, and I just didn't, and I just became, I started running away.

John Bird10:07

um starting fires, doing everything.

Presenter10:09

But you said they were violent with you.

John Bird10:11

They were pretty violent. Um they you know, they they did give you a good clump.

John Bird10:16

They were all largely women who had been picked out of the bogs of Ireland, and they were um my first experience of what you might call intense injected charity, which kind of put me off it for life.

Presenter10:30

So one way or another you turned to crime. As you say, you ran away. What were you doing? Shoplifting? Petty theft? Yeah.

John Bird10:35

Yeah, well I was there about three years, I think, and when I came out we the family re uh formed in uh just near the World's End on the New Kings Road, you know, that kind of area.

John Bird10:46

between Fulham and Chelsea. And I just I don't know what happened to me. I obviously lost the plot and I started uh be I became an arsonist um almost overnight and um just kind of was nicking anything that moved.

Presenter11:02

And in the end you were sent to a detention c centre, which I I think was meant, as it was called many decades later, to be a short, sharp shock, but it didn't work for you.

John Bird11:09

Yeah, it was it was a boot camp full of people largely who'd left the army and they were incredibly disturbed. You know, if if you didn't run they'd kick you and if you did run they'd trip you over and then they'd spit on you and punch you and all sorts of things like that. These were the people I was sent there by a wonderful socialist um magistrate called Lady Baroness Wooten, lovely lady.

Presenter11:30

Great reformer.

John Bird11:31

Reformer. Great reformer. Wonderful lady. Wonderful record. And I remember she said to me, because I'd been stealing bikes and doing other things, I think it was a kind of cocktail of wrongdoing. She said, We're going to send you for a short, sharp shock because people like you have got to learn to respect other people's property and all that stuff. And great. I mean, I'm a firm believer in making sure that you teach people how to respect other people's property. But it was a real horrible experience, and it made me much madder. The first thing I did was go around and beat up a few of my mates who'd been beating me up. And then I found myself pulling down a fence in the local park.

Speaker 211:44

Can I have to send you for a

John Bird12:11

But in the

Presenter12:11

But in the end, she sent you somewhere else, and this time it was the right place because

John Bird12:15

Yeah, yes, she started the process. I ended up at the Quarter of London Sessions where I was sent to a approved school which was a reformatory. And they believed, and I think they've done away with this system and I don't know why. They believed in giving you a job, training you in certain schools. I did GCE classes, never got the GCEs. I learnt all sorts of things about gardening. I learnt all sorts of things about woodwork and plumbing and all that sort of stuff. I began to settle down and I began to see a kind of road out of it.

Presenter12:45

Record number three.

John Bird12:47

Record number three is quite interesting because just before I left a proved school, which was a wonderful old school called Pipaharrow, it was called Parkhouse School, but the building was Pipaharrow. And one day somebody came back because he didn't have a job, and this guy came back with a little disc, a little demo disc, and kept playing it and playing it because he was the friends, the friend, or the roadie, of a new group of West London lads. And he kept playing Come On by the Stones, and he was a mate, and this was 1963. The Stones hadn't made it yet. This was their first record. And in a way, it was quite interesting because I hated it. And then he made us listen to it so often that I really got to love it. And it is probably one of my favourite pop songs.

Speaker 413:33

Everything is wrong since me and my baby party. All day long I'm walking cause I could get my car started later on my job and I can't afford to check it. I wish somebody come along and run it to it and wreck it. Come on, since me and my baby party, come on, I can't get started. Come on, I can't afford to check it. I wish somebody come along and running to it and wreck it. Everything is wrong since I've been without you every night lately. Thinking about you every time I fall, sounds like thunder, something

Presenter14:04

The Stones and their version of Come On. So, life was a kind of process of self-reinvention for you, by the sound of it, John, wasn't it? First, the petty criminal who became the poet, I think that happened.

John Bird14:15

Yeah, yeah, I I I'm fifteen I had a girlfriend called Lily Lemmon who didn't like me being a kind of scruffy working class oik and suggested that I read and I started to read I started nicking books of poems from the King's Road. I nicked the beat poets and I read the the poetry because it was so easy and I thought I can do this kind of stuff and I can you know chat up the birds so to speak.

Presenter14:16

Yeah.

Presenter14:39

And that was what you you'cause you also had seem to have had this ambition to become middle class as well.

John Bird14:42

Oh yeah, I was really cheesed off with with with working class life because I couldn't stand the idea of going to work. There was I mean, I was pretty avant-garde, you know.

John Bird14:52

And also I didn't particularly like the kind of heavy level of aggression. I mean though I'm have been accused of being aggressive on occasions. I just wanted to get out of that kind of stuff. And then I found that I got interested in reading and writing and I I became a horrible little ex working class snob.

Presenter15:11

How did that go down with Bird becoming the revolutionary? Because, I mean, then you were kind of collecting money on the streets for the workers.

John Bird15:17

Yeah. Well, it was difficult for me because I I did become a a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party later in when I was twenty one, and I became a member of an organization that preached or

John Bird15:31

suggested that there was this kind of heroic working class. And I didn't know any of these heroic workers. All I knew was all the people who were on the fiddle with me in the kind of slums and poor housing of West London and the West End. I didn't see this heroic working class. So it was rather difficult and also they didn't particularly like the fact that I had this atrocious sense of humour where everything was funny, you know, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I wanted to start a magazine called Melt, which is Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Melt Capitalism, I was going to call it. And I thought it was great and they didn't, you know, so we never published it.

Presenter16:08

Record number four.

John Bird16:10

Record number four is it's kind of got a kind of revolutionary angle to it, though it may not sound so. Bobby Darren singing Mac the Knife. I became very interested in Brecht, very interested in the music of Kurt Weil. Then I had the pleasure of seeing the 1971 production of the Thrutney Opera, which obviously Vanessa Redgrave was in, who I think then became a member of the party that I was a member of.

Presenter16:37

Workers' Revolutionary Workers' Revolution.

John Bird16:38

The Workers' Revolutionary Party. Uh not that I ever got anywhere near her. I mean the only thing I ever did for her was to deliver her papers. I was not likely to be on the political committee or the central committee. That was left to people like Vanessa Redgrave.

Speaker 416:53

Sidewalk, uh, uh, ooh Sunday morning, uh-huh Lies a body

Speaker 417:00

Just do'in life'.

Speaker 417:03

Can someone sneak in round the corner? Could that someone be Mac the Knife?

Speaker 417:14

And there's the chuck book.

Speaker 417:17

Down by the river, don't you?

Presenter17:20

Bobby Darin singing Mac the Knife. So that was the evolution of of John Bird, sometime Heinz baked bean canner, sometime gardener, sometime minicab driver, sometime, to be fair, writer, designer, printer of magazines.

Presenter17:35

What were your motives when you took on the editorship of the big issue some seven years ago? Was it more business than social concern, or vice versa?

John Bird17:44

It was really important in those days, back back in the early nineties, uh which seems like a lifetime ago in some ways. There were so many people having a go at homeless people. There were people the police were being asked to be social workers and sweep them off the streets and all that, and and they weren't

John Bird18:00

That that wouldn't have been the answer. So what we wanted to do was stress the importance of work.

John Bird18:05

That they, by their own efforts, would get off the streets. So, therefore, I was very, very insistent that homeless people bought the paper, which outraged homeless people, outraged the public, outraged the charities and other organisations who said, You can't turn people into sellers and just for some mechanalistic or capitalistic things. You know, and I said, No, what we're going to do is we're going to give all the profits away. All what is left over will go into social change for homeless people. But we are going to say to people, you have to be responsible for your own social transformation. It is not enough to simply give you another bowl of soup or another blanket. What we said was that you are given ten papers to start with, and you're inducted into the paper, and then you go out and sell the paper, and if you want any more, you come back and you buy it.

Presenter19:02

But there's a cover price. I mean, these days it's a pound, isn't it? So what would they have paid you for that paper?

John Bird19:04

Yeah.

John Bird19:06

Well, uh f f at the moment they are paying forty pence for a paper which they sell for sik for a pound, so they're making sixty percent.

Presenter19:13

But you have to be beware, don't you, of falling into the trap of saying, you know, we've invented a a wonderful system that is having marvellous effects when that isn't always true. I mean, you you people will actually look at people who get sent to halfway houses, you know, and say, isn't it marvelous they're to halfway house, but they might never arrive.

John Bird19:32

That's right. We say that our work is good, bad, and indifferent, like most people's work in life. We're trying to improve the good, get rid of the bad, and improve on the indifferent. But the thing is, we will never be beyond criticism because we're working with people who are themselves good, bad, and indifferent, who are themselves riddled with all sorts of social problems, all sorts of baggage. And we will always have to struggle to win the battle, to enable people to stand on their own two feet.

Presenter20:08

But the point is, isn't it, that that you know that that's possible because it's exactly what you've done for yourself.

John Bird20:13

Yeah, there is a kind of element i in there, yeah. The big issue was wonderful because people suddenly queued up to believe in me. I hadn't been believed in for a long time. I I learned to develop uh um the the pattern uh of uh knowing what I was doing. And then once I'd learnt, uh I I then developed the ability to know what I was doing. And it is all about having the confidence. And that's the kind of confidence we have to give homeless people, even though they will

John Bird20:41

Louse up, even though they will make problems. We are not perfect, they're not perfect.

Presenter20:46

I quit number five.

John Bird20:47

Record number five is back to a bit of posh music, um Bussoni's variations on fugue in free form on Chopin's Prelude in C minor opus twenty two.

Speaker 421:00

That's very boring.

John Bird21:01

I know that is very posh. I discovered Bussoni when I was at college at the age of thirty-seven. Not an awful lot was going right for me and I became a mature student or a manure student as my daughter used to call me and did the equivalent of O-levels for thirty-seven year olds which was to do a humanities degree at Ealing College which is now the University of Thames Valley, a wonderful place. And I went in and did this course and found that the most fascinating part of it was the music faculty. They were these people who were totally devoted to music and you could sit there and talk to them and go on. And I found that I actually had quite a musical appetite. This music is so much the kind of music that I I love listening to. Though it's posh, it has this kind of real meaning and is not simply you know just some kind of bra background music. You have to listen to this.

Presenter23:01

Daniel Blumenthal playing part of Bussoni's variations and fugue in free form on Chopin's Prelude in C minor, Op. twenty two.

Presenter23:09

You're a man, John Bird, obviously, who who knows and loves his London, and now you'd like to be its its mayor. Why? What do you want to save it from?

John Bird23:18

Whoa, um

John Bird23:20

I'd like to save it from...

John Bird23:22

What you might call a dysfunctional democracy, which is about a cabal of well-intentioned burners of the midnight oil.

John Bird23:33

Who will conspire to make sure

John Bird23:36

that their opinions have got over, that their kind of democracy, which is a representational democracy, which is they're going to be the best people to stand up for the interests of Londoners and the quality of London life.

John Bird23:49

I don't believe in that any more. I don't uh I've lost my faith in

John Bird23:53

The people who want to represent me, I don't want to represent anybody else. I want to represent myself, and I want hundreds and thousands of millions of Londoners.

John Bird24:03

Recognizing that we cannot rely on other people to.

John Bird24:08

Save our streets and to save our communities. Our communities are rotting, and the only time that they ever gain any meaning is when people take control of the community. And what I believe very strongly is that we give so much power into the hands of politicians, into the hands of MPs, and they have their surgeries, and their surgeries are often made up with people coming back again and again with the same problems. They are not an expression of what the community requires.

Presenter24:37

But how can you be that? If you became mayor, you would be that politician, wouldn't you?

John Bird24:40

I would what I would be doing is, I would be going down and spending a tremendous amount of time.

John Bird24:46

freeing up the community, I would be going down and I would be spending as much as possible of the of effort in saying to the community, you have to do it yourself.

Presenter24:56

The parallels with Dick Whittington are inescapable, of course, you know, the boy born in poverty who stands for mayor.

Presenter25:04

How do you rate your chances? Are you gonna make it, same as Dick?

John Bird25:07

Have you got a kid?

Presenter25:07

Have you got a cat?

John Bird25:08

I have I had a cat. I've yes, I think he ran away.

Presenter25:11

Spotted handkerchief.

John Bird25:12

Thank you.

John Bird25:13

I'd say that I stand a very good chance of lousing it up for a lot of other people or some people anyway.

Presenter25:20

Record number six.

John Bird25:22

Record number six is Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry in August in New Orleans' 1961 recorded Come On. We heard the earlier version by The Stones. The Stones has this kind of wild kind of, you know, going down the pub, enjoying yourself, kind of rough, not particularly musical in a way. This is Chuck Berry laid back, missing the beat on occasions and really being underplayed, so to speak. I love it because it's like two ends of a culture, even though they're only separated by two years.

Speaker 425:59

Everything is wrong since I bless all you baby I really want to see you and I don't mean maybe I'm doing everything tryna make you see That I belong to you honey and you belong to me So come on I wanna see you baby, come on

Speaker 426:16

I don't mean maybe come on.

Speaker 426:19

I'm trying to make you see that I belong to you and you belong to me. Come on.

Presenter26:29

Chuck Berry and his version of Come On. A lot of people would vote for you for Mayor, of course, if you could clear the streets of the homeless and beggars and drunks, of course. Have you a policy that could achieve that?

John Bird26:40

There is no policy. As long as you have a free society and people are free to fall through the net, so to speak, as long as you have a situation where people become mentally unstable.

Presenter26:53

John Major used to say, of course, when he was Prime Minister, that a lot of people who slept on the streets did so because they chose to. Is there any truth in that?

John Bird26:59

Well, there is a truth in it because if you were to go into some of these

John Bird27:03

Victorian and even nice Edwardian hostels, or you were to live within the regime of people saying do this, do that. It's a terrible thing for people to do, and people have sometimes chosen to sleep on the streets. I remember when I was sleeping on the streets in the early 60s, I used to go into Salvation Army places, and I hated it. I just hated that kind of regime. A lot of them have improved, I have to say.

Presenter27:25

So the truth is that that that that uh they're there because they want because they don't want to be in the hostel, but they're not there because they want to be homeless in the first place.

John Bird27:32

No. Well, some people do choose to be homeless. I don't think there's many of them in the UK. I've just come back from the US and there's quite a number of people who've made a decision to drop out of society. But I think that represents a very, very small section, even in the US. The important thing that we have to remember is that often the streets are a reflection of what has gone wrong in society, not just what's gone wrong in the life of the individual.

Presenter27:57

But then, you know, Tony Blair, in fact, said to your magazine in an interview for The Big Issue, didn't he, w just before the last election, that he believed in zero tolerance, that these people should be moved on, as they are in the States. You know, the police just push and push and push them on.

John Bird28:11

Yeah, that's quite interesting for me because I banged on at the time about the fact that if you try zero tolerance and they were trying it in the King's Cross area, then what you'd do is you'd move the problem elsewhere. And if you go down to Covent Garden now, you will see that the shopkeepers are very distressed and people in the streets are very distressed because the problem has just been moved on.

Presenter28:32

So what should the government be doing?

John Bird28:34

You've got to create the social support for getting people off the streets and keeping them off the streets. Many of the people on the streets do have personality problems, do have problems with...

Presenter28:43

But what does this mean? Create the social support? What does that mean?

John Bird28:46

Well that means unfortunately you've got to spend some money and spending money wisely is giving people the chance where they can move into a house, move into some form of accommodation, have some kind of support worker and be given some form of employment where they're not going to be pushed out of the door simply because they can't keep up. You need those unfortunately you need a lot of the kind of sheltered operations that you give to older people.

Presenter29:14

You need the handouts that you say are not the right thing for

John Bird29:16

They're not handouts. A handout takes you nowhere. No one has been ennobled by handout. But giving somebody the opportunity of stability, of actually being able to remotivate themselves, is not a handout.

Presenter29:28

Record number seven.

John Bird29:30

Record number seven is Salad, and the number I've chosen is Kent. About 91, 92. I came across them through friends, and I was just blown away by this kind of strange, almost combination of white noise and all just a kind of cacophony of sometimes unrelated sound. I mean, I don't want to make it sound too intellectual, but I just love this kind of exuberance. And it reminds me that once I was a youth.

Speaker 430:02

Why do

Speaker 430:06

Spend all your money in rent Why don't you live in a house and plant Don't ever move

Speaker 430:14

Why don't you live in a house in Fent?

Speaker 430:18

We got his head on sent, living a house in Kent.

Presenter30:27

Salad and Kent from their album Singles Bar. So how will the urban man survive on this desert island, John? No concrete, no clubs, no camaraderie?

John Bird30:37

I'd probably go mad. I'd have a load of problems.

Presenter30:37

Booge.

Presenter30:42

Could you hack it though? I mean, you've hacked so much else by the salvage in your life. Uh self-sufficiency isn't a problem for you, is it?

John Bird30:48

Self-sufficiency isn't the problem. I think the problem is meeting people. I love meeting people. You know, I'm not the most humble of people, but I've been made by people. Gordon Roddick remade me. Anita Roddick remade me. I would find it very difficult because I'd probably want to be remade at least once a year. And there wouldn't be anybody there to help me with the remake. All this rubbish about people being independent, we're all there's a scheme of dependency, we're all dependent on each other, and that is why I wouldn't be able to survive a desert island. I would probably have to take up smoking again. I'd have to have loads and loads of rolling tobacco and just smoke myself to death because I don't know if I could wait five or seven years to be rescued.

Presenter31:33

Last record.

John Bird31:34

Uh is Duke Ellington's caravan?

John Bird31:38

I would say that Duke Ellington is

John Bird31:40

one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, and he will be remembered as that.

Presenter32:10

Duke Ellington and his orchestra playing Caravan. If you could only take one of those eight records, John, which one?

John Bird32:20

I think I'd have to take the Duke Ellington'cause I'd probably need cheering up a bit and uh reminded of smoky rooms late at night or early in the morning.

Presenter32:29

What about your book? What is the Bible and Shakespeare?

John Bird32:32

Yeah, I well being a kind of obsessive Londoner I would love Ben Weinreb's Encyclopedia of London. It's a fantastic book. I've been delving into it for many years. They modernise it every now and then. It is essential reading. There's literature in there. There's all sorts of weird information like the Air Rated Bread Company, which is now on the Sainsbury site in Camden Town. The ABC Tea Rooms and things like that. It's got all those kind of nice little echoes. I'd probably add sections and enlarge sections. So it would be a working book. It would be a book that if I was there for 10 years, God forbid, it would probably be 50,000 pages.

Presenter33:13

And what about your luxury?

John Bird33:15

Well, my luxury would have to be a mon blanc pen. It's not simply the cachet of having a posh pen. It is just a beautiful writing im implement.

Presenter33:25

John Bird, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Bird33:29

Thank you.

Speaker 233:38

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