Lord Browne

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a business man. For more than ten years now he's been running one of the world's largest oil companies, supervising its growth from a twenty billion pound organization into one worth more than a hundred and thirty billion.

Presenter0:44

His success may be due in part to the fact that the company itself is almost part of his DNA. He's never worked for any other, joining it after leaving Cambridge, where he saw his first-class degree as a stepping stone into the commercial rather than the academic world. His father, too, had worked for the same firm. And so, with single-minded determination, he set about building a career that has made him one of this country's most unusual company men. His lifestyle is not necessarily what one would expect from such a high achiever. He lived quietly alone with his mother until she died six years ago. But then, as he says, while people like to get together with individuals like themselves, life is more complicated. We're all brought together to do different things. He is the chief executive of BP, Lord Brown, John Brown. It's pretty unusual, though, these days, John, to spend one's whole working lifetime with one company. Was that a conscious decision? You must have been head-hunted, courted, time and again.

Lord Browne1:40

No, it wasn't a conscious decision. I almost started by accident because I took a sabbatical from Cambridge and decided to go and work, under pressure from my father, who asked me a question which was very simple, If you haven't tried working, how do you know you don't like it? And that's unarguable. So I got a job with BP for a year to go to America. And I liked it so much I stayed another year and then another year, and then I gave up the idea of going back to Cambridge.

Presenter2:07

But you, as I understand it, fell in love with the oil industry uh as a boy of ten because of your father, because he was in it and you went out to Iran where he was working, didn't you?

Lord Browne2:16

Indeed, my father would take me to see various things, like drilling sites, and I found that very exciting. And I remember one time there was a great well fire in Iran at Awaz.

Lord Browne2:27

the RWA six blowout, and I met this extraordinary man called Myron Kinley, who was the person who taught Redd Adair how to put out oil well fires. Extraordinary man, I mean he'd lost an eye and lost an arm, but behind the rather brusque mannerisms and the can-do attitude, there was of course an extraordinary engineer who really understood what he was doing.

Presenter2:52

However, when, as I mentioned in the introduction, you would decide, having got a a first class degree, to go into commerce, into business, not into academe, you must have suffered because they would have been very sniffy about that in Cambridge, wouldn't they?

Lord Browne3:05

Indeed, it was almost the source of slight ridicule from some of the people who taught me, and I remember the vivid experience of being stopped in the street by a professor of mine, who introduced me to some of his friends, and said, This is Brown he's going to be a captain of industry. Isn't that funny?

Presenter3:23

Okay, first record to take to your desert island. What is

Lord Browne3:25

It is Chan Chan, which comes from the Buena Vista Social Club. I picked this because it reminds me of widely Latin America and South America. I did a lot of business in Colombia. I visited whole parts of this region. And besides, I think on a desert island which is bound to be probably tropical, this is a good way of evoking the themes of the tropics, at least a certain part of the tropics, and probably standing there and smoking a good cigar.

Speaker 43:55

Dia no Cerro Bo y para Martane.

Speaker 43:58

Ye vo a puerto boy paramayarí.

Speaker 44:07

Yantosero voy para ma tane. Ye vo a puerto voy para mayane.

Presenter4:25

Chan Chan, written and performed by Francisco Repilado from the album The Buena Vista Social Club and the image of you, John Brown, standing with watching the sun go down with a good cigar in hand. So you've become the highest paid executive in Britain, running the country's biggest business. You kick-started it into the Super League when you took over as Chief Executive in'95. Am I right in thinking it's an amazing statistic this that BP shareholdings provide one pound in every six of all dividends in UK pension funds?

Lord Browne4:53

That's right. We are represented in so many of the pension funds in the UK.

Presenter4:58

It's a huge responsibility. And yet, I read, you're not afraid of taking a gamble, taking a risk. Didn't you once spend the entire exploration budget on exploring deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico?

Lord Browne5:09

That's right. We started exploring having absolutely no idea how to actually extract the oil if we found it. Now we'll be extracting a tremendous amount of oil from the Deepwater Gulf of Mexico, which is one of the biggest places we're operating in.

Presenter5:22

But what you have on your side is that you know what you're talking about with respect because you worked at the sharp end, because you began in in physics, you are an engineer, and so you're not just a management man, are you? So it's an informed risk then when you take it and one informed by yourself.

Lord Browne5:38

Yes, I I'm very proud to keep saying that I'm an engineer, although I haven't practised as an engineer for a little while, but I do think it's very important to be grounded in the basics of any business you're in, because there is no substitute from having in your mind a view of what actually is going on, not a piece of paper, not a pile of numbers, but actually people solving problems, and then it allows you, I think, to better understand what they're telling you.

Presenter6:06

Well, indeed and and you are you have a reputation for being a a master of detail. You must terrify your employees when when they come along, you know, because you're not going to let them get away with anything, are you?

Lord Browne6:16

Well, I hope I don't terrify them. Maybe they've got used to me. But I do think attention to the right detail not all detail you have to pick and choose is part of business. Getting an accurate sense of what's going on. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is very, very small.

Presenter6:26

Getting

Presenter6:32

And you preside over all of this from an office which I understand is a mixture of kind of upmarket chic and high tech. You press a button, I'm told, and when you want someone to leave, a kind of exit opens. Time to go. Whole wall opens up.

Lord Browne6:45

No, the wall opens uh in order to extend the room so we can use all the rooms for meeting.

Presenter6:51

And your lunch is delivered in there every day, I'm told, underneath a silver cloche, but it's a working lunch.

Lord Browne6:55

It's a working lunch and if I have people in for lunch we eat in our meeting room.

Presenter7:00

And there's not a lot in the office, but there are, I'm told, some beautiful fountain pens.

Lord Browne7:05

Which you do use? I do. It's one of the things that's a transportable delight. I always think writing longhand has a degree of difficulty which makes you economical with words. Record number two. So record number two is uh a piece from uh Cussifanti. This is the first opera that I ever heard. I was taken by my parents to it and told this is meant to be funny. I must say I didn't find it so when I was very young. Now I find it a wonderful piece of Mozart's creativity, and it's a piece which I really love and I'd always want to have with me.

Speaker 47:43

Turma turmovi turma hadiknovia fana hate novia fana hadiknovi turma.

Speaker 47:50

Make for the beyond.

Speaker 48:06

Quesco que peto di kala haito piuetro meshmeho.

Presenter8:15

Yeah.

Presenter8:22

Yeah.

Speaker 48:29

Leave it.

Presenter8:36

A bit of nonsense from the end of Act One of Mozart's Cosi Fantute, sung by Montserrat Caballe, Janet Baker, Iliana Kotrebasch and Richard Van Allen with the orchestra and chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, conducted by Sir Colin Davies. We mentioned your father, Lord Brown, who was a a British Army officer in the war. He met your mother in Berlin just after the end of the war. What were the circumstances?

Lord Browne8:57

My mother was liberated from Auschwitz, which she was taken to when uh the Germans went into Hungary and Romania, my grandmother being a Jewish from Vienna. So my mother spent uh about eighteen months in in Auschwitz and and managed to survive, one of the few members of her family who were not murdered. How did she manage to survive? Well, it it just happens, you know, some people did and some people didn't, and and I never really understood, frankly, the details.

Presenter9:25

'Cause she didn't talk about it. She didn't talk. She

Lord Browne9:27

No, her view was very, very simple, that, you know, the the past is a m a matter of irrelevance. It's all about the future and you need to think about the future and that I think is what kept her completely sane and completely on point. And she was annoyed when people would ask her, Well, tell me about your past. She would always give them a little piece of information which was always the same thing and it was really quite irrelevant.

Presenter9:28

Like so many people.

Presenter9:42

Hmm.

Presenter9:53

But but you live together. It's it's surprising, isn't it?

Lord Browne9:54

But but

Lord Browne9:56

We did, but no, she her view was these are things that uh you know just keep to yourself until you depart this life. But they met because my mother understood many languages. My father was a military uh commander actually in Hamburg, and my mother came and helped him uh interpret and then they had a wonderful romance and got married.

Presenter10:17

It would have been unusual f for a British Army officer, though, to marry what would have been effectively a displaced person.

Lord Browne10:24

It was very difficult indeed because papers had to be obtained and I know it took some time. And then they did get married and the only sadness I remember of that is uh the only photograph of my parents' wedding which I still have is when my mother had cut out all the crowd from the background who'd been watching it. She wasn't a vindictive person, but I think she just couldn't bear the idea of getting married in Germany at the time.

Presenter10:50

These were Germans, she pointed out.

Presenter10:52

Just in case they might have been.

Lord Browne10:54

Who knows? Who knows? But I think a remarkable to have come through this experience that none of us can really understand. I lost my maternal family in effect. My grandparents were murdered. Most of my aunts and my uncle and my cousins also died, so really the family got wiped out.

Presenter11:16

And you were born in West Germany in 1948 and taken off to live in Singapore, which we shall hear about in a minute, but let's pause for some rest.

Lord Browne11:22

So the third piece it's from Puccini. This very much reminds me of my mother. It also reminds me of a time when I took a house in Italy which turned out to be right next door to Puccini's birthplace. And it turned out that in the library of this house there were a few manuscripts, few scores, which were Toscanini's scores of Puccini with all sorts of scribblings on. And doubtless they were pretty direct, I think, from Toscanini.

Speaker 411:56

Beyond the

Speaker 412:07

Bring Moon with a song.

Speaker 412:13

Akono Sisi.

Speaker 412:21

Each removal and the Lord.

Speaker 412:28

Peace it on.

Speaker 412:36

The cross of all the

Presenter12:49

Omio Babbino Caro from Puccini's Gianni Schiki, sung by Angela Giorgio, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antonio Papano. You say your mother, towards the end of her life, she sensed that the end was nigh and wanted to talk about her judgment.

Lord Browne13:03

Well, I I expect she was sensing in some way, but she asked me uh to take her to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and then later to Yad Vashem.

Lord Browne13:14

But I always remember going round the Holocaust Museum with also another Auschwitz survivor. I found the experience very harrowing. My mother was in a wheelchair at the time, but we eventually went to the Auschwitz Memorial in the Great Memorial Hall, and she lit a candle, and I found the whole thing really quite unbearable.

Lord Browne13:32

I remember when we left we got into the car and she looked at me and said, Why are you so upset? and I found that a remarkable question.

Presenter13:38

By far

Lord Browne13:41

And I remember to this day she said, It's just a museum it doesn't smell, and there's no noise. And that, I think, is a really remarkable point to remember about things. Unnecessary preoccupation with the past is probably a dangerous thing.

Presenter13:58

Okay.

Lord Browne13:58

It is the future that matters.

Presenter14:01

She was obviously a remarkable woman, and when you got to Singapore when you were a boy, she she ran a hat shop.

Lord Browne14:06

She did. That was even more remarkable because my father was a British Army officer and in those days, you know, women didn't work and women were expected to stay at home, but my mother wouldn't have anything of it. So with a long time a Singaporean resident, she set up a hat shop.

Presenter14:10

It was not in those days.

Presenter14:23

What was it called?

Lord Browne14:23

It was called the Hat Box, pretty direct, on the River Valley Road. I she picked the time about writers of business, because it was the coronation, and everybody needed a hat.

Presenter14:33

Your father died early, didn't he? He died in 1980.

Lord Browne14:35

He did. He died in 1980. I was actually in the States. I flew back, managed to get to my father the day before he died.

Presenter14:43

So that's really when your mother came to live with you, isn't it, John?

Lord Browne14:46

Not quite. It was a few years after that. I was asked if I'd go back to the United States, and I said to my mother, What do you think? Do you think you'd like to come with me? and she said, Absolutely, let's do this, let's have a change. So she came with me and helped enormously.

Presenter15:03

I can imagine that she told you exactly whom she thought you could trust and whom you couldn't.

Lord Browne15:07

I think you probably become more accurate about that as you have a bit more experience. And so she was pretty accurate.

Presenter15:12

So going back to Iran when you were ten I mean, you were obviously very close to your mother then as you continued to be throughout your life. The idea then of your being sent away to boarding school, this peculiarly English thing that happened to little boys must have been horrifying for her, let alone you.

Lord Browne15:28

Well, my father had clearly decided that it was time to uh give his son a British education, as he'd had, uh and uh he was of course right. Uh I was very close to him and he would always explain to me that it was good for me. So I was sent off to Ely from Aberdan in Iran. It was very hot in Aberdan, and it was very, very cold in Ely. And I was sent to a boarding house at King School Ely, the common room of which was a Norman undercroft, which had one small anthracite heater. So all I remember is being very, very cold indeed.

Presenter15:38

Yeah.

Presenter15:39

To him.

Presenter16:07

Record number four.

Lord Browne16:08

Well record number four is the record that would remind me of my home, which is England. So this is a piece from Elgar's Wand of Youth Suite, conducted by the very great Neville Mariner.

Presenter17:19

Part of Elgar's Wand of Youth Suite No. One with the Orchestra of the Academy of Saint Martins in the fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter17:26

One of the reasons, John Brown, that you joined BP, as I understand it, was that you wanted to go to the United States and they sent you to Alaska, which is not perhaps quite what you meant.

Lord Browne17:35

Indeed it wasn't. I'd expected to go either to New York or Los Angeles, but I ended up in Anchorage, Alaska, in November'sixty nine.

Lord Browne17:46

But it was, of course, in retrospect absolutely the right place to go the greatest oil field that had been discovered for several decades and I arrived in a small town.

Lord Browne17:58

that was expanding so fast that I remember if you didn't buy the milk in the morning there was no milk.

Lord Browne18:04

Because everything ran out the whole time. But pretty primitive living, I see.

Presenter18:08

Suspect.

Lord Browne18:08

Well, it was impossible to get anywhere to live. And in fact, I was being paid what I thought was quite a lot of money, but the rentals were so high that I couldn't afford them. And I was put in a in a hotel, I mean, I think in a one-star hotel, I think, if that, maybe no-star hotel, which was pretty grim, and I got to know people because the walls were so thin I could hear what they were doing next door, and it was quite eye-opening too. But it was fun, it was the Wild West, it was growing fast, and I mean, eventually I found a place to live.

Presenter18:43

So you did it properly is the point really from the bottom and you rose as we've heard all the way to the top. You went after that to New York and San Francisco, Ohio, before you came back here to the UK. You're an oil man through and through. It's therefore it was very astonishing I think not least to your colleagues in the oil industry when in 1997 you embraced the green argument. You stood up didn't you and you said that the burning of fossil fuels was contributing to global warming. How big a decision was that for you?

Lord Browne19:10

It was a very big decision for me and and for the company as well, because it it's a question of facing uh almost your worst fear. You know, what what are we doing as a company? And there were the twin forces. On the one hand, we were really needed. Uh people need energy, but on the other hand the evidence was increasingly mounting.

Lord Browne19:31

that the emission of carbon into the atmosphere could warm up the world with unknown and probably disastrous consequences. But your colleagues in the oil industry thought you'd deserted the club, didn't they? Absolutely. Well uh when we first did this they uh said that we'd left the church, whatever that meant. What I think is most pleasing is is not the fact that BP did this, but the fact that most of the oil industry now is right alongside.

Presenter19:59

But drilling for and transporting oil is never going to be particularly environmentally friendly, is it? And accidents happen, and we know BP had one in Alaska a few months ago when two hundred tons of crude contaminated the frozen tundra. I mean, you are always ultimately going to harm the places that you

Lord Browne20:08

Indeed.

Presenter20:18

Use to drill for oil.

Lord Browne20:19

Less and less. Because technology and experience allows us to do things with smaller space more securely, there will always be an accident, but the number is coming down dramatically. The bigger question, however, is not just how we operate, how we find and develop oil.

Lord Browne20:40

But how we use oil.

Lord Browne20:42

Because it's in the use in the burning of oil, notably in power generation and things like this, that most of the carbon goes into the atmosphere.

Presenter20:50

I want to talk to you about the the future of energy, but let's have record number five before we do.

Lord Browne20:55

Well record number five is about New York which I eventually got to after having spent a couple of years in Alaska and I lived in Greenwich Village and it was around the corner from Bleecker Street and I used to go to the cafes in Bleecker Street and hear people perform, people like Jackson Brown and Bob Dylan and so forth. So I've picked a piece by Bob Dylan not actually sung by Bob Dylan but sung by Marshall Crenshaw called My Back Pages.

Speaker 421:22

Would you stand hiding my hand?

Speaker 421:26

And the mango dogs will teach.

Speaker 421:30

Fearing not that I'd become thine enemy

Speaker 421:33

In the instant that I reached you

Speaker 421:37

But that way land by confusion boats Mutiny from stern to bow Oh but I was so much older than I'm younger then

Presenter21:53

My Back Pages, written by Bob Dylan and performed by Marshall Crenshaw. You've rebranded the company a few years ago, a lowercase BP, and the sunburst over it with the motto Beyond Petroleum, and you've set about getting into alternative sources of power, wind farms and solar panels, hydrogen plants. Cynics, of course, dismiss this as a PR exercise. Can you really build a significant business in alternative and renewable energy and take care of all that pension fund money we're talking about? That's the question.

Lord Browne22:22

BP is always made of pieces, and the real question is whether the pieces are material enough to contribute to the whole. So the answer is you can't substitute BP with alternative energy. Indeed, the world will not substitute the sources of energy, substitute oil and gas, buy alternative energy in any conceivable time period. But you make it sound quite token, therefore. No, it's not. It actually would be, I think, a material contributor to BP. It has to start somewhere. We've assembled the pieces over many years, so it's now a profitable business, alternative energy, growing very fast. But I would think we're going to invest about $8 billion into this, which is a lot of money. But that's over a period of years. Over a period of years. But I see no reason why it can't be at least 5% of BP in 10 years' time. Maybe 10%.

Presenter23:03

As a pair of

Presenter23:10

Maybe ten percent. But eight billion over a period of years. I mean I mean, w what do you invest in the hydrocarbon business each year? Something like fifty

Lord Browne23:17

Something like 15 billion. But my main point is this is not tokenism, this is real business. Next piece of music. My next piece is Narrow Daylight, sung by Dana Kroll. Dana Kroll is one of the great exponents of jazz in my mind, a wonderful singer. And this will remind me of the great experience of seeing her in the Royal Albert Hall, where she

Presenter23:18

Uh

Lord Browne23:45

made this enormous cavernous place feel like a small cafe.

Speaker 423:52

Narrow daylight

Speaker 423:57

Dirt my room.

Speaker 424:01

Shining hours with

Speaker 424:07

Winter is over, summer is near, always stronger.

Speaker 424:14

Then we

Presenter24:19

Narrow Daylight, sung by Diana Krall, who wrote the lyrics with Elvis Costello, her husband.

Presenter24:25

Another huge headache in the oil business, John, is that by definition you have to deal with and in some pretty corrupt regimes. You know, oil doesn't discriminate ethically or morally as to where it occurs. And BP has hit problems in Colombia, Indonesia and Angola, to name but three. It means big money and so pretty ruthless activities can go on, innocent lives can be be put at risk. But in effect, of course, that's your problem, isn't it? You you create that risk by your activities in such places.

Lord Browne24:53

Partly, I expect, because there is always the promise of extraordinary wealth, and with extraordinary wealth it brings the worst side out of so many people. Green. Not just anywhere, but everywhere in the world. But I think in order to do our business, we have to do two things. One is we must remember our purpose. I mean we're there to serve human needs and if we lose that point then everything goes wrong. And secondly we have to do it in a way which is to the heart and values of the company.

Presenter25:20

But the unexpected

Lord Browne25:21

The unexpected always happens, but if it does, then you need to say it's happened and you need to do something about it. I think we've learnt a lot from our time in Colombia, where we had a a tough time at a very difficult place to work, where we're now, I think, much more used to it, where we protected ourselves by building our facilities behind barbed wire and used the army to protect us. We were the proponents of having principles established where communities could police themselves, communities could provide security. And we've applied these things now in Indonesia and in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. And things are very different.

Presenter25:52

And we

Presenter25:59

Very different. But it doesn't stop in many of these places, some lives being lost or people being threatened or local people suffering at the hands of, as you say, greedy security forces, greedy military.

Lord Browne26:11

Every case needs to be looked at separately, everything needs to be chased up, and one uh always is trying to get perfection, but you never will. The real question is whether or not we can do it better than the person who would otherwise do it.

Presenter26:24

Because it's got to be done is implicit in what you're saying.

Lord Browne26:24

Got to be done.

Lord Browne26:26

In effect it has to be done, because in the end there is always benefit if it's done right for the country involved there is great benefit for the world. There is the possibility of opening up great potential and development.

Presenter26:41

So there is no country in which BP would not invest because of human rights.

Lord Browne26:47

Actually there are, but I won't give you the list.

Presenter26:50

So what's worse about them than those that you do go into?

Lord Browne26:53

where we can clearly not actually be transparent about what we're doing or where we are ordered to do things that are not appropriate according to our values, where there are direct orders, we will not tolerate that.

Presenter27:09

So there are fundamental dilemmas, really, is what we're saying, whether we're talking environmentally or ethically. That's what you have to struggle with the whole time, isn't it? That there is a fundamental dilemma between your need to serve your shareholders well and to service these pension funds well, which I keep mentioning, and to behave ethically and morally. It is an eternal dilemma, and it actually there is no solution to it, is there?

Lord Browne27:34

No, I think it is a microcosm of the issues with the world at large. There is difference, there is uh things are not perfect, everything, if you will, is a work in progress, and I think B P is a microcosm of just that. Number seven is a piece from La Traviata, a really great opera by Verdi. In the end, this will remind me of my small home in Venice, in a place which uh is a great place to be. It has a wonderful past, but actually it still teaches us lessons about the future, about how empires can go wrong if they lose the plot.

Speaker 428:11

What if you need me? So let me snow.

Presenter29:05

Undi Felice Eterea from Act One of Verdi's La Traviata, sung by Anna Netrepco and Rolando Vigliasson, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Carlo Rizzi. So you've worked for B P forever, as we've said, so in a couple of years time it'd be what nearly forty years, won't it? And you retire.

Lord Browne29:22

Retire is the wrong word. I always pick people up on this. People change jobs nowadays.

Presenter29:29

You're going to work at something, aren't you?

Lord Browne29:31

Absolutely. I'm going to have a business life. I had to do it.

Presenter29:33

I mean you don't but you don't need to earn any more money. You've got plenty of that.

Lord Browne29:35

That's not the point. Well, you can always earn money and give it away, and that's a tremendously pleasing thing to do.

Presenter29:41

You have to retire, do you, in two years' time? Is that a company rule? Because you don't really want to go by the sound fit.

Lord Browne29:47

Well, no, no. To me it's very important as a chief executive to build a great team to succeed you, and then one of them is chosen to succeed you. But after all, you can't just leave and you can't say, Well, I'll stay on forever, because you damage motivation.

Presenter30:02

And there's a time.

Lord Browne30:03

And there's a time.

Presenter30:04

in the affairs of men.

Lord Browne30:05

Absolutely. Last piece of music. It's a piece from Strauss's Four Last Songs. It is a setting of a poem by Hermann Hesse, a great piece, which talks about the soul moving away from the body and seeing everything around it. I think it's a wonderful piece of music sung by a great singer, René Fleming.

Speaker 430:40

Two.

Presenter31:26

The end of the third of Strauss's four last songs by Ms Schlaffengen on Going to Sleep, sung by Rene Fleming with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christophe Eschenbach. If you could only take one of those eight records, John, which one would you take?

Lord Browne31:39

Uh I'm obviously going to take Kusi Fan Tuti.

Lord Browne31:43

Because it will remind me of how I really began to love music. And it's got lots of exciting different bits in you. And it's fun. That's right.

Speaker 431:50

And it was fun.

Lord Browne31:53

You know, being by myself on a desert island, while I like my own company and I've got used to it, none the less I think I'd like a bit of a laugh.

Presenter32:00

And your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare.

Lord Browne32:02

Well, I I don't want to cheat, uh but I'd like the largest possible anthology of poetry, because I read poetry very often before I go to sleep. Uh I'd pick uh pieces by TS Eliot, James Elroy, Flecker, to name but two. So I'll probably pick Wavell's Other Men's Flowers. I think it's a really good anthology by a really great man.

Speaker 332:20

But I think it's

Speaker 332:24

And your luxury.

Lord Browne32:25

Well, that's obvious too. I'd probably take a lifetime supply of great cigars, and probably have one a day, as the sunset was happening, and I could listen to some of this music probably Chan Chan.

Presenter32:38

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

Lord Browne32:42

Thank you.

Speaker 332:49

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