Philippe Petit

Speaker 10:00

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. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a Fenambulist, not a word in my everyday dictionary either, so to put it another way, he's a high wire walker. With nothing to help him apart from a pole, he's walked, danced, laid on his back and stood on one leg while balancing on a wire 1350 feet above the ground between the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Presenter0:51

That was thirty one years ago, and was the most spectacular, perhaps, of the seventy high wire walks he's done in his career, which include walking between the towers of Notre Dame and the steel pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge. He does it because it makes him happy. He's always refused lucrative commercial offers. As a boy, he escaped from his strict father by climbing trees, and after an unsuccessful schooling he became a street magician and juggler. Now fifty five, he lives in New York, where he dreams of walking across the Grand Canyon. What he does, he says, is life affirming rather than life threatening. I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry, and the soul of the wire, he says. He is Philippe Petit.

Presenter1:37

Your um aerial journeys, Philippe, are all of those things. They're they're mad, they're beautiful, they're theatrical, they're poetic, but they're also incredibly dangerous. Do you feel no fear when you're up there?

Philippe Petit1:48

They are not dangerous to me because I prepare them. I want to get to be very old and I don't take any risk. And that always surprises people when they point at a little dot in the sky and say this man is mad, obviously. Well, I am mad into protecting my life, that of the buildings that I attach my wire to and that of the people around me, underneath me. So no, there is no fear because there is no reason to be fearful for me. I cannot talk for the other wire workers.

Speaker 12:01

Mad.

Presenter2:15

But you've gone further than that. You've talked about almost going to sleep up there. It's unthinkable.

Philippe Petit2:16

Uh

Philippe Petit2:21

Yes, it's a world that I have made mine, and it's a world made for me of calm and peace and beauty. When I am there I become probably half man, half bird, and it's another world.

Presenter2:33

Mm-hmm.

Philippe Petit2:34

And that's where I live with this big smile that you can see on the pictures.

Presenter2:37

And you're happy even before you set out, I read, because you you when you stepped out on to the parapet there, I think you peed happiness into the plaza below.

Philippe Petit2:46

Yes, so you are talking about backstage.

Philippe Petit2:49

Now that was that was an intimate thing. I don't know why I let that be printed in in my books, but I wanted to share with the reader this adventure that was first a secret one and then I offered myself to the world as as you know that we had a hundred thousand people there at the end of my eight crossings, forty-five minutes on the wire, dialoguing with birds.

Presenter2:54

But I know.

Speaker 12:56

Yeah.

Speaker 13:00

And then I will

Presenter3:10

Just give me the styles of how you went across. Because as you say, you went backwards and forwards eight times, didn't you?

Philippe Petit3:13

This was not planned because I am I am a man who improvises on stage and my stage, as you know now, is this thin uh cable as big as your thumb. The first crossing was that of a almost test because you never know how the wire is being rigged and you discover that on your first crossing. And after that the towers invited me to walk more and after that maybe the weather or the discovery of New York looking up invited me to do more. It was not planned, but my friends told me you performed eight crossing and and you stayed forty-five minutes up there.

Presenter3:44

But you didn't know that at the end of the day.

Philippe Petit3:45

But I didn't know that and it was not planned.

Presenter3:47

Well now, we ask you, as you know, on this programme, for eight pieces of music that you'd need if you were alone on a desert island. Perhaps it should really be music that would comfort you on a high wire. What's the first disc that you've chosen?

Philippe Petit3:58

For me, this music is a single line. I see it as a rope, a musical rope, pulling me and guarding me. And I should say that I am not a musician, but music is the motor of my creation on the high wire and elsewhere. So this music, to me, it's a it's a wonderful entrance.

Presenter4:46

That was Gabriel's Oboe, written by Ennio Morricone for the film The Mission, performed by Yo Yo Ma with the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, with Morricone conducting.

Presenter4:56

You did that walk at the World Trade Centre, um, Philippe Petit, in in nineteen seventy four. When did the the idea first come to you?

Philippe Petit5:04

The dream started before the object of the dream existed. I was actually in a dentist's waiting room as an eighteen years old kid in Paris, you know, with a big pain in my jaw, and I was looking at those old magazines you find on the table there. And I really opened it at a place where a picture of an architectural model announced that one day those two towers will be built, and when they are, they will become the highest in the world. Now, retrospectively, you have to understand, I was at the beginning of my life as a wire walker. How pretentious of me to tear that page and to put a little line with no wire walker, of course, between them. And then I decided to sneeze very loudly and to tear the page, and I put it in my shirt, and I had to leave. So, of course, I had a big pain. I had to find another dentist, but I acquired a dream. And that's how it started six and a half years before my work.

Presenter5:50

Yeah.

Presenter5:54

Mm-hmm.

Presenter5:58

But when did you raise the game, as it were, from being an ordinary wire walker in the circus tradition, not that you ever were in it?

Philippe Petit6:05

I never was. No, I know you weren't. But

Presenter6:06

No, I know you won't, but but that's the kind of thing you learned in the first place, you know, and to unicycle on a while. When did you raise the game to coin a phrase and think I'm going to do it between building?

Philippe Petit6:10

Uni site

Philippe Petit6:16

Well, it was a process. I was six years old when I decided to learn magic by myself. Now, at six years old, that's again quite unusual. And then I went to sneak around the circus to look at magicians and jugglers. And I heard, I didn't see, I heard of those people who walk like magicians on a wire. And immediately I was fourteen, fifteen. I needed to learn by myself again. So this vocation of wire walker came at a late age in the circus, you're being told by the music.

Presenter6:45

So you're saying it's your own inspiration. It wasn't what you'd read in history books. It wasn't any what you saw in the circus. It was you one day who looked up at the sky and saw some towers and thought.

Philippe Petit6:56

Heard, heard. I mean imagine you hear about a bird, but you never saw a bird fly. I mean, what a magnificent uh way to dream about something. So I was free with my imagination to imagine the ideal wire walker. I had not seen anything.

Presenter7:08

So did Notre Dame call to you then?

Philippe Petit7:11

Absolutely. I love the word you use because it's exactly that. I was uh street juggling and I had a little room in Paris and each time I was leaving my room close to the Ponteillon and those towers will look at me and one day they pull me by the sleeve, they called me. I'm being called by something missing between what nature or man creates. Those two mountains, they need a wire.

Presenter7:33

Record number two, tell me about that.

Philippe Petit7:35

This beautiful piece, this Vorjak sonatin, is actually something that I feel very close to, not only because I heard it as a child in my family, it was, you know, my parents were listening to it often, but also because I know how it was composed in 1893 by Vorjak. He used to call it an amateur piece because he composed it for his son, Antonin, ten years old, who played the violin, and his daughter Ottilie, 15 years old, who played the piano. And when those two kids had practiced and did an opening for the father, he had tears and he said, This is my favorite premiere.

Presenter8:56

Part of the first movement at Vorjac's sonnetine for violin and piano, with Suzanne Leon on violin and Stephanie Leon on the piano. And memories for you, Philippe Petit, of life in the suburbs of Paris in the fifties and moving on into the sixties. You were obviously a very unusual child, you say you were

Speaker 19:12

Uh

Philippe Petit9:12

Yeah.

Presenter9:13

Fascinated by magic, fascinated by the circus. What about your friends at school? Were they fascinated by you?

Philippe Petit9:18

I had almost no friends. I remember my childhood as being very solitary because I had something to do, and that's probably why I was expelled of five different schools. I was not listening or interested in the least of what's happening on the tableau. I was actually practicing my sleight of hands underneath the desk, and I was being arrogant, and I would steal the watches of the teachers, I would, you know, do something bad. I mean, but the other boys must have thought that was wonderful. Yes, but I didn't like the company of my equal. I was more interested in adults. I played by myself, and I built my own world, and that has not ceased.

Presenter9:53

What about your father? Because I said in the introduction that you escaped up trees from him. Well what what was wrong with your relationship?

Philippe Petit9:58

What is wrong with your relationship? I escaped my family too, and that's part of who I was building as a young person. My parents, as I developed this taste for being a traveling troubadour as a street juggler and later on a wire walker, my parents did not

Philippe Petit10:15

directly support me. So actually I didn't talk really to my parents my entire life until the end of my father's life at eighty years old. We discovered each other and we became friends for a couple of years be

Presenter10:26

But were you driven to being that kind of little boy because your father was excessively strict? I mean, he was always he was a war hero, wasn't he? He was a very good person.

Philippe Petit10:32

Yes, yes, but at the same time yes, he was very strict and uh apparently unwilling to agree with the destiny I had chosen. At the same time I discovered he was a writer, he was a poet, he was an historian, he was a purist.

Presenter10:47

And as a pilot he knew about the joys of flying hundreds.

Philippe Petit10:49

Yes, exactly. So there were those uh complicity that actually could have made us good friends and that relationship only harbour later.

Presenter10:50

So there

Presenter10:58

But he was still alive when you did these high wire performances. What did he think then?

Philippe Petit11:00

What did he think then? Well, he was proud, except he he would always say my my uh son is uh does theater in the sky. He would never say he's a finomble because that is apparent to circus and to probably a lesser life in his way of seeing the world.

Presenter11:15

What would he like you to have been?

Philippe Petit11:16

Oh, doctor, something honorable, something serious.

Presenter11:20

Make wood number three.

Philippe Petit11:21

Well, we're about to hear a piece that

Philippe Petit11:26

represents for me what I love about the high wire. And actually I use this music in my longest and most complex walk, which was an inclined wire that Chirac asked me to do for the bicentennial in 1989 as an anniversary of the Rights of Man celebration. So I started from the Palais de Chaillot, 700 yards in the sky to 110 meters high, the second story of the FL Tower.

Presenter11:50

I'm gonna d

Philippe Petit11:50

It doesn't

Presenter11:50

Yeah.

Philippe Petit11:50

At forty-five minutes it was a performance, not just a walk. And at some point I broke the music programme by presenting and the sound was heard, you know, all over Paris. I mean it was really beautiful sound. Uh it was uh Les Gymnopénie of Eric Satie that was completely ethereal and people were completely quiet. We had two hundred and fifty thousand people. I could hear them breathe almost from the wire. So this music for me is mid-air.

Presenter13:17

That was Eveline Crochet playing Eric Sati's first gym nobody. Uh so you were a street performer first, Philippe. This was in the sixties. Where? Is this on the left?

Philippe Petit13:26

Yes, yes, my first performing outside was that of a street juggler. But of course juggling was an excuse to m create a an étropement crowd and I will uh draw a circle of choke. And then I created a silent comic character, all in black, with an old top hat, with an old mail bag from nineteen hundred in which I would throw props. And um it took me a lifetime to create this character and now it's my double and I cannot live without him.

Presenter13:55

Can you interact with the graph?

Philippe Petit13:56

Absolutely. I I see myself as a bad juggler. Juggling is an excuse to get people around me and then they're mine. I'm gonna play with them.

Presenter14:04

But you also pick their pockets sometimes.

Philippe Petit14:06

Yes, yes, this was the development of my character. Uh I became actually for a very short time criminal pickpocket, but that passed very quickly, around 17, 18, I realized.

Presenter14:15

So you could quickly take the the wristwatch.

Philippe Petit14:17

I realized that a life in jail is certainly not what I should do with my life, so I quickly put the art of Peapocket on stage and in the street as a performing art.

Presenter14:17

Uh

Presenter14:26

But were you ever arrested?

Philippe Petit14:27

Ah Beautiful question, because I am proud of answering I have been arrested more than four hundred times, mostly for street juggling, sometimes twice a day or twice a night.

Presenter14:38

But you made a good living, didn't you? I mean, forget about the criminal activity. You were passing round the hatch.

Philippe Petit14:39

Do made a

Philippe Petit14:42

Bye.

Philippe Petit14:43

I made a fortune as a street juggler and I you know I I still can go anywhere on the globe not even speaking the language being parachuted anywhere where there are human beings and then I will perform I will pass my hat and if the people have no money they will invite me to dinner or they will offer me a smile and this is an ambassadorship that I carry with me and that is one of my joy of living. I will never stop being that street juggling character and it was the birth of my performing life.

Presenter15:09

Tell me about record number four.

Philippe Petit15:10

Duke Ellington, Sunset and the Mockingbird has a little history because he was in Tampa, Florida, driving between gigs and

Philippe Petit15:18

The sun was almost uh coming out of the night and he didn't see, but he heard. He heard a bird. And as he was driving on the cuff of his shirt, he wrote down that phrase. And then throughout his gig in Florida he sang that little phrase and he says, What bird is it? and nobody could find out. So he decided, Okay, let's call it a mocking bird.

Presenter16:29

Duke Ellington and Sunset and the Mockingbird from the Queen's Suite. Now, Philip Putti, you you planned and executed the walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge in one week flat, I think. The World Trade Centre, um, on the contrary, was I

Philippe Petit16:39

Okay.

Presenter16:43

We know it was conceived six years earlier, but it was eight months in the specific planning of the

Philippe Petit16:47

Yes, yes, I was going to New York with a specific mission, artistic mission, of putting a wire there. So I found myself, after those years of preparations, confronted with the beast. And I put my nose at the bottom of one of the towers. And I look up. And you could imagine that actually I was looking at some kind of a landing strip for an alien vessel. I mean, something otherworldly. And right there, my nose glued to that cold aluminum facade. I realized that my dream was impossible. And that word impossible.

Presenter16:48

Getting that equipment or not.

Philippe Petit17:20

Etch itself in my veins.

Presenter17:22

But it was asking for your wire, too.

Philippe Petit17:25

Ah, yes, absolutely.

Presenter17:26

But you have to have great engineering skills, don't you, to set that I mean, if the tension of that rope, that piece of wire, that industrial

Philippe Petit17:30

This is

Philippe Petit17:31

The tension

Philippe Petit17:35

Yes, yes.

Presenter17:38

All sorts of terrible things can happen.

Philippe Petit17:40

Absolutely. First to choose the anchor point was very delicate because if you attach the wire from corner to corner, you will attach it at a very weak place. So I had to go actually in the roof and attach to the master beams. That was one thing. And the other thing is... But the towers bend. Exactly. Well, they actually were designed to breathe. Not really sway like a mast. But move in the wind or they swing. They breathe to move. And actually the two of them, they could move of a total of three feet. Let's call it one meter apart and come back.

Presenter17:59

But move in the wind or they snap.

Philippe Petit18:07

Now if you put a cable and if you tighten it, let's say three, four tons, which was my case, to be able to walk on it, then you are going to prevent the towers from breathing, from swaying. And in my search for solutions, I even talked to engineers and they told me, oh, what will happen is very simple. Your cable is going to disintegrate in thin air and you will be sand in the sky.

Presenter18:28

But I'm just thinking of all those pressures. A, you've got the pressure of wondering if your engineering skills are going to work, you know, if this wire is going to behave like you need it to behave.

Presenter18:37

Then you've got to get the weather right. And thirdly, you've got the pressure of how to get in and out of this building because this is illicit and you're ducking past security and all the rest of it. And at the end of all of that, you're going to walk out there

Speaker 118:46

Security and all the rest.

Presenter18:51

And give a performance. The pressures on you, the adrenaline that must be pumping by the time you step out onto that panel.

Philippe Petit18:58

You know, I people ask me, how do you prepare? And I don't have a little system, I don't have a little checklist, this, this and that, but I web in my mind, because of my learning, some kind of protecting device that is much more safe than all the safety devices that they use in the circus. And that's my answer.

Presenter19:17

And you don't have in your vocabulary, do you, the verb to fall.

Philippe Petit19:22

No, and I cannot write it on a page. I would say fly away. Physically, it's a dangerous profession, and I could fly away. But how can it be, since I am in command of my life, and I insist on this expression, in command. I will refuse if the cable is not ready, if a big wind or rain is coming, I will refuse to tempt to say I hope. I don't hope. I know.

Presenter19:45

Record number five.

Philippe Petit19:46

Jacques Breil, of course, I mean I'm French and I love him. Ne me quit pas, to me it starts as a love anthem. And actually I was belting this song as I was itch hiking as a teenager to the south of France and doing bullfighting and discovering and biting life. But Jacques Breil himself in an interview, he called it a coward song. Because the last couple, and I will loosely translate, says, I will not talk any longer around you. I will hide and I will watch you like if I am the shadow of your dog. Don't leave me. Don't get your freedom. Stay with me and I will be a little shadow and a little slave. And it's a coward song. I just say that so that you don't get completely prey to the beauty of the world about love because love has a lot to do with the absence of freedom and it's not love anymore.

Speaker 420:33

Number ball.

Speaker 420:37

Il fautoublier tour.

Speaker 420:40

Pe soublier, qui san frie des jard.

Speaker 420:46

Oublier le tent, des malenton du et le tent, per dieu.

Speaker 420:53

A savoir, command.

Speaker 420:56

Oublier c'estur, qui ture par foie accur de la

Presenter21:02

Jacques Prel and Nemequita Par.

Speaker 421:03

The kita park.

Presenter21:04

Uh

Speaker 421:05

Uh

Presenter21:05

Tell me, I mean, people would have been thinking as we we've talked about the Big Walk, the World Trade Centre, that of course the Twin Towers no longer exist. You had a unique relationship with them. I wonder how you felt on september the eleventh.

Speaker 421:05

Tell me

Philippe Petit21:17

Something very alive was pulled out of me and I felt crushed. But how can I speak like that when actually the towers in their fall took with them thousands of humane life? I could have been one of them. I was there a few weeks before and I used to visit and daydream and bring my friends at the top. I could have been there that day. And yet, how can I talk about it in this apparently selfish way of my towers? And yes, I felt very bad.

Presenter21:44

And now your dream is to walk across the Grand Canyon. You've compared it to staging an opera, and all your walks are rather like an operatic performance, aren't they? But you can't get to do your backers keep backing out. Why do they back out?

Philippe Petit21:47

Uh

Philippe Petit21:55

You'll figure it out.

Philippe Petit21:58

There are two types of projects. The one when the telephone calls and somebody wants me to perform, that's the user life. And there is the other type I was saying when I go through life and I say, oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to put a wire there? This is when the whole world is against me. When I have to get the permission, get the money, seduce, convince. No, I won't ban UFL power. No, I won't die in your backyard and you won't lose the elections. So what a strange profession. And the Grand Canyon is a good example of that. It's probably the most sublime. But it's not a project. I don't like that word. It's a work in progress.

Presenter22:33

But is it going to progress?

Philippe Petit22:34

Yes, yes, it's progressing, but right now it's it's dormant.

Presenter22:36

But the back of the cloud. Because, isn't it? They they don't want to back you to your death, essentially. That's that simple.

Philippe Petit22:38

And they

Philippe Petit22:42

It's not that simple because it's a work of art. So you have to open your eyes and your heart. And if I pull you in my world and show you my ten years of preparation for this show, you will be convinced that there is again no risk and it's going to be something beautiful and you have to dare to do it.

Presenter22:58

But you appreciate the problem for the networks who might

Philippe Petit23:00

No, I don't appreciate I we don't speak the same language.

Presenter23:02

But if they are broadcasting live and you would want it live, there's no point in running this thing recorded after the event is. And then if you fall, then there's something well, it's more than unethical, it's immoral.

Philippe Petit23:07

And what are all the applications?

Philippe Petit23:14

It's not as simple as what if he falls. And my answer is, what about life? Do you want to hide and be comfortable and not live? Or do you want to live your life in a daily adventure? And I happen to have a profession, yes, that that carries such uh uncertainties.

Presenter23:30

Do you think it'll ever happen?

Philippe Petit23:31

Absolutely. One day I will have an angel of the art who will raise his hand and say, you know, how's you spell your name? I'm writing the check. I mean, I'm naive, I make it very simple. But if you put a dream in a little dormant box, you're killing yourself, you're killing the dream. So I keep like a naive person, climbing to the roof and yelling my dream, and one day there will be a echo coming back.

Presenter23:51

Tell me about your sixth piece of music then.

Philippe Petit23:53

Well, I was asked to tell the history of the city of Frankfort in one wire walk. And one of the pieces I used was to pay homage to the very tough moment in their history that concerned the Jewish people and the ghetto. And I choose this beautiful calling to the synagogue and this counter, Nachama, with almost no music, is actually climbing to the sky with his voice.

Speaker 424:36

Shall matter whether I saw that hope no song learned.

Presenter25:15

The Mudanon, Psalm ninety nine, verses seven to nine, by Boas Bischofsverde, performed by the cantor Estrongo Nachama, with Harry Foss playing the organ.

Presenter25:26

What, Philippe, of the competition in this strange field of performance art that you inhabit? I mean.

Philippe Petit25:32

There is no competition. I would wish that when I visit the circus schools that exist and flourish around the world, I would see some young people who want to become a wire walker. What they want to become is a low wire walker, where they don't risk their life, where they don't have tons of equipment to draw. But nobody wants to fight uh the birds in the sky, and it's a shame. And when I get old, in a long, long time from now, I will create a school, but not a school of wire walking, much more, a school of performing arts.

Presenter25:59

But people will of course immediately be thinking of David Blaine, the man who buried himself alive in Times Square, the man who dangled in a glass box a couple of years ago over the Thames. Do you accept that he's

Philippe Petit26:10

I'm not hearing the question. Those words do not belong to my vocabulary and those artists who I consider as stuntmen.

Presenter26:10

Part of your work.

Philippe Petit26:18

Do not interest me. To me, magic is when in front of a child you open your empty hands and you create a coin and you say blow on it. No, no, it'll be.

Philippe Petit26:27

Harder. And then it's the child that became a magician with his or her own breath because the coin has disappeared. That is the magic that will never change, that has been forever. But the magic with with the trapped doors and with cables and with modern meanings and all those demonstrations of what?

Presenter26:45

But do you accept that he is an artist or are you saying that it's

Philippe Petit26:45

To accept that he is an art.

Philippe Petit26:47

Of course not. It's something different.

Presenter26:50

Well it's a trick, is it?

Philippe Petit26:52

Well, I don't like to talk about other artists when they're not in front of me and I will have no problem saying to an artist if if he he or she is ready to hear my concept of what art is. And art is about creating, inventing, discovering. So when you talk about, I don't know, eating twelve pizza on your hands and being in a Guinness Book of Record, what does that do to the people who watch that?

Presenter27:16

Let me just I mean, one more thing. David Blaine, in his glass box over the Thames, did attract an awful lot of people. They stood up and looked at him in the sky and they dreamt their dreams. They came from all over the country.

Philippe Petit27:23

Yeah.

Philippe Petit27:24

And it

Philippe Petit27:28

Came from all over the country just to say that. I don't know if it's dreams. I mean, we have the thirst for discovering, for going in another planet, for climbing the highest mountain. And if we turn that thirst for discovery into a kind of artificial challenge, the highest, the longest, the strongest, this is not the discourse of life. I think one of the next songs actually has to do with giving advice to a child on the path to life. And you should not say to a child, try to be the strongest, the highest. You should say, try to express yourself and try to be yourself. And that, as we know, takes a lifetime.

Presenter28:04

So what is this next piece of music?

Philippe Petit28:05

Well, it's my friend Paco Ybanez with the magnificent sound of the contrabas of François Rabat, another friend. Paco Ybanez sings in Spanish a beautiful poem from José Agustín Goiti Solo, who is writing a letter to his young daughter. As a loose translation, Never give up, never fall apart, never say in the middle of the road, I cannot walk anymore and I'm staying right there. And remember all your life what I wrote thinking about you. And it brings tears to me because I think of my young daughter called Gypsy, who is no longer alive.

Speaker 428:39

La vidas bella ya veras, coma pesar de los pesares. Tendras amigos, tendras amor, tendras amigo

Speaker 428:54

Nombresolo una mujer, ha si tomados de una nuno, son como pol, bono son nada, no sonada.

Presenter29:06

Yeah.

Speaker 429:06

Uh

Presenter29:06

Ah, the Paco Ibanyas and Pala Bras Para Julia, accompanied by Francois Rabat on double bass, and a song Philip for Your Daughter Gypsy, who died aged nine some years ago of a brain hemorrhage, and is buried, I think, in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, which is where you were.

Philippe Petit29:22

Church of St. John the Degine in New York, which is where you were. Ashes are uh kept uh in the columbarium of that cathedral which I call my home.

Presenter29:31

And you're artist in residence there, yes.

Philippe Petit29:33

Yes, for the past twenty five years. I have a practice wire in a Synod Hall, which is a building close by the cathedral that has a stained glass window, candelabra, beams. And I have my archives and I have I even had a secret wine cellar. Don't tell anyone. I think the different deans that have been there see me as the kind of modern casimodo.

Presenter29:34

This is where your practice wires is.

Presenter29:53

Well, listen, w you know, that's one way of living. You live here on a desert island, I'm afraid, all alone. It strikes me from everything you said, it wouldn't be that different from the way you live your life, because you would be independent, it would be peaceful, it could be beautiful, you could seek perfection in this kind of solitary state.

Philippe Petit30:06

Yeah.

Philippe Petit30:10

I will be the happiest man on earth on a desert island. I mean, I am somewhat of a misanthrope sometime when I look at my ridiculous life and tangled in too many passions and really living in my world. Because I think the most amazing thing for an artist is not to so much address the crowd and try to get from the audience performing some kind of link. I think it's the opposite. If you close yourself, if you lock yourself in your own world and offer that role on stage, whatever your stage is, then the people, your audience, will be amazed. Taste record, tell me about that. To me, it's a beautiful way to end this very difficult choice because it is a music that, again, elevates me. And it's from François Rabat. This song, to me, makes me think of.

Philippe Petit30:55

The time where I would have liked to live in the Renaissance in the Middle Ages. And I I think of the golden age when I hear this music. It's a round music, like we say it's a wine that is round because it exudes life. To me, this tune has the entire universe in it.

Presenter31:41

Mamer Baija, composed by and performed on the double bass by François Rabat again, with Michel de Laporte on percussion and Georges Arvanitas playing piano and organ. Now, Philippe, if you could only take one of I mean, it's been hard enough, I know, for you to choose eight, but say if you could only take one, which one would you take?

Philippe Petit31:55

Choose eight percent.

Philippe Petit31:57

No hesitation, I will take Anton Vorjak Son Latin up to Samporviono y piano.

Presenter32:03

That takes you back to your childhood, that childhood that you didn't like.

Philippe Petit32:04

Absolutely.

Philippe Petit32:06

No, but it's not my childhood. It's an image of life.

Presenter32:09

Now your book. We give you the Bible and we give you the complete works of Shakespeare. I don't know if you want them, but you're allowed to choose one book for yourself.

Philippe Petit32:13

I'll I'll use the Bible as a stool to be able to look at the horizon and see if the boats are coming and uh I will use every page of the Shakespeare volumes to light my fire, but I will bring my own book.

Presenter32:17

They will

Presenter32:27

And I broke up.

Philippe Petit32:27

Can I talk about it?

Presenter32:28

Are we t what owned book?

Philippe Petit32:29

Well, I will bring a seven hundred page thick book called The Ashleigh Book of Nuts that lists actually all the nuts that exist. And you can imagine I am a lover of ropes and knots. And since now you know I am a rebel, so I will do something that is completely not allowed. I will take this thick book of knots, and I know 300 nuts, so I don't need to have all the pages, and I will carve a secret cavite in the middle of the book. And inside that book, I will have a little book of short stories. It's called Gravite by Erika Wagner. So you see, I am cheating. I hope you allow me to cheat a little bit. Nobody will know that in my thick book of knots there is a book of short stories. But I will do that. I will have the practicality and I will have the daydreaming.

Presenter33:14

And a luxury.

Philippe Petit33:16

Well, I first thought about objects. I won't give you the list, but actually I thought of an object that I have sitting at home, and I call it Lobje Mystérieu, the mysterious object, because it was discovered in a barn when I was a child, and my father all his life was trying, calling to Association of Old Tools or whatever, to say to people, What is this? It looks like an artillery shell. It's a wooden cylinder standing vertically, roughly twenty centimeter high, with a pointed top. And the diameter at the base is roughly like 10 centimeter. But there are two metal branches full of very sharp teeth, like a like to catch wild animals. And they fit inside two vertical grooves of the cylinder, but a spring at the base keeps these branches in an open position. But if you bring them with your two hands, they marry the beautiful shape of the cylinder and a cone at the top. So it's a trap, well, exactly. Is it a trap? Except the teeth are inside, not outside. Except it works by opening, not by closing. So, no, it's not a trap. And we have talked, as you can imagine, on all continents to specialists of all kind, and nobody to this day knows what it is. And still, it remains lobje mysterieux. And I think in a desert island, it will force me to keep thinking. And that's actually who I am. I cannot stop thinking and enjoying life.

Presenter34:10

So it's a trap of sort of

Presenter34:38

Philippe Petit, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Philippe Petit34:41

Thank you very much.

Speaker 134:50

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