A A Gill

Speaker 40:00

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.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a writer. For the last twenty years or so he's entertained the middle classes with his witty newspaper columns on food, television, travel, and many other things besides. Acerbic and astute, he's also capable of turning his hand to serious stuff, and he's written a couple of novels, too.

Presenter0:45

Life before this award winning career was a rather different story. Until the age of thirty, he drifted around London and sometimes America in an aimless alcoholic existence. But he turned all that around to become the celebrated columnist he is today. There's a feeling, he says, that the rest of the world has a script that I wasn't given, a way of behaving that I wasn't told about. He is A. A. Gill. Is that i if if you'll forgive me, Adrian, the the sort of the words of a recovering alcoholic and you're looking for another excuse?

A A Gill1:16

Um well, I am a recovering alcoholic. Um yes, I don't think I do look for excuses. I'm I'm not terribly interested in in why I drank. I'm much more interested in how I avoid

A A Gill1:29

drinking again. I mean, I think I think w what it is that makes drunks drunks is interesting in an academic sense. It's not terribly useful if it that's your problem.

Presenter1:39

And the way you avoid drinking again is to remind yourself about how awful it was when you were drinking, is it?

A A Gill1:45

Yes, but the further away you get from that, th the harder it is. I mean, I I can't conjure up

A A Gill1:51

Um as graphically as I used to be able to.

Presenter1:54

Oh, I don't know, you've written some strong stuff. We'll come to it anyway. But is it as if you've had two lives you know, the life until you were thirty, and the life this award winning life, successful life since?

A A Gill2:04

Oh yeah, I mean there is a a really strong sense of having been given a a second chance. I mean I I still have a feeling that I'm gonna wake up one morning there's gonna be a recording angel at the end of the bed saying, Look, I'm terribly sorry, but um there's been an awful mistake. You've been given someone else's life. Uh you can have it gratis but I'm afraid you're gonna have to have your old one back.

Presenter2:22

I presume you remember your last drink and the precise date of it.

A A Gill2:25

Uh April the first, yes, when I was thirty and I I

Presenter2:28

What year was that?

A A Gill2:29

I'm so really bad with years, I don't know what dates are. Well, whatever I was thirty whenever it was, I was

Presenter2:34

1985, 84, something like that. Mid-80s, anyway. April the 1st. What was the drink?

A A Gill2:38

April

A A Gill2:38

I decided that I was going to have to stop drinking and I'd had a doctor who told me I was an alcoholic.

A A Gill2:46

And he said, No, you should go to one of these new treatment centers and then I got on a train with my dad and we had two bottles of vintage champagne, which we drank on the train down to um Wiltshire and that was my last drink.

Presenter3:04

And your first string? Do you remember that as clearly?

A A Gill3:07

I remember

A A Gill3:09

I remember the sort of the first drinks that that were

A A Gill3:14

important. I mean drink and to a certain extent drugs. I mean I my generation tended to do, you know, we did everything. It starts off as being the key to everything and it ends up being the jailer. People who've who've had who've had a hangover and been drunk

A A Gill3:33

think they have some intimation of what it's like to be alcoholic.

A A Gill3:36

And it's a completely different thing. Hangovers are actually funny enough one of the things that tend to go, you don't get any more. What it's mostly about is fantastic depression and amazing boredom and this terrible, terrible self-pitying hopelessness.

Presenter3:57

Make a number one. Cheer us up.

A A Gill4:00

This is um from Jeule Jim, the the song from Jules Jeime, which reminds me so strongly of my parents and being little in the sixties and I've had it in my head, one of those songs in my that's been in my head all my life and mostly songs that are in your head are really annoying and this one I'm really pleased, it's just lovely.

Speaker 44:23

Et la vet des bag, chara que doir, et ta brasset, au tour des poignet, et puis et chante, ta vet que nevoir, qui si tau man jollain.

Speaker 44:34

And avet desius, desires, no pal, quim fascina, quim fascinat, and veteran sombre.

Presenter4:46

Jean Moreau, singing in Francois Truffaud's nineteen sixty two film Jule Jime. You obviously have a soft spot for things, French Adrian, because you can wax lyrical about a French breakfast, you know, a baguette and a dish of coffee. And when you began writing, food was very high on on the agenda. Has has your palate always been important to you?

A A Gill5:06

Yes, up to a point. I didn't come from a fantastically foody family, but but food was important because

A A Gill5:13

I suppose we were coming out of a time when there was so little of it. I I was born in the year rationing stock.

A A Gill5:19

And

Presenter5:20

Fifty-four.

A A Gill5:20

Yeah.

A A Gill5:21

And there was still that terrible English thing of buying food for quantity rather than quality and

Presenter5:28

An olive oil onion chemist to soften the colours of the colour.

A A Gill5:30

Olive oil exactly. And and if you look at Elizabeth Davids, you know, great Mediterranean food, it has a list of people in the back where you who will sell you garlic.

Presenter5:32

Look at

Presenter5:40

But your mother was a good cook, which

A A Gill5:40

Your mother wasn't a good cook, wasn't she? My mother wasn't was yes, she is and she still is. She's yes, she is quite a good cook. Um and but she liked all of those things. Um and then my my brother, Nick, just at the age of of thirteen, just said, I'm that's it, I'm going to be a cook.

Presenter5:55

And your brother went on to to earn a Michelin star. You earned a living at one point giving cookery lessons. Uh to whom and how?

A A Gill6:02

Yes, I taught cooking in my kitchen. Um but no recipe

Presenter6:05

But no recipes. You never taught them anything so much.

A A Gill6:07

No, I wouldn't let anyone write anything down. And it's v I mean, it was very, very simple. And I mean, you wouldn't ever you wouldn't you know, if you wanted to learn to play tennis, you wouldn't buy a book on how to play tennis and and and read that and then take notes. I mean you'd you'd get a a racket and a ball and you'd knock a ball back. And

A A Gill6:24

I think that's how you learn how to cook.

Presenter6:26

And you you even cooked a message.

A A Gill6:28

I mean, not by knocking a ball about

Presenter6:29

Yeah.

Presenter6:30

You even cooked, didn't you, when you were drunk? I mean you you

A A Gill6:34

Oh no, I mean that was w how I learned how to cook. I taught myself because I had no money and I realized that an enormous amount of my social security was going on food that I would then throw up and I could have been spending it on beer and whiskey. And I used to drink with a butcher and I'd go to him and say, Is there anything you're you're throwing away that I can have? And he'd go, Well, fancy a pig's ear And I'd and I'd go back and find a cookbook from Oxfam and and and learn how to do pig's ears are actually particularly disgusting,'cause you have to clean them first. And they they're very with a q tip, they're very like human ears.

Presenter7:12

Like human ears. You need that olive oil from the chemist record number two.

A A Gill7:17

Um this is Kathleen Ferrier um singing Blow the Wind Southerly. This reminds me incredibly strongly of Edinburgh and my um grandmother and my aunt Netta. They they went together and my mother who would all all sang and all sang

A A Gill7:37

quite operatically, and would all sing at me, to me, at the drop of a hat.

A A Gill7:42

Often

A A Gill7:43

while dropping me off at school or on buses or I mean, I remember just being cripplingly embarrassed by my family singing all the time. Um but this is one of the things she'd have sung.

Speaker 47:58

Southerly, southerly, Blow the wind south o'er the bunny blue sea.

Speaker 48:11

Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly

Speaker 48:18

Lovely breathes my love heart to me.

Speaker 48:26

They told me last night there were sheeps in the offing, And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea.

Speaker 48:41

But my eye could not see it Where'er might be The bark that is bare.

Presenter8:55

Kathleen Ferrier and Blow the Wind Southerly and Memories of Your Childhood in Stanmore, North London, End of the Tube Line. Um yours was obviously a rather cultivated family. Your father, Michael Gill, started in journalism and and become a filmmaker. In fact, he made the great landmark series Kenneth Clark's Civilization, didn't he?

A A Gill9:11

Great.

Presenter9:11

What was life like at home with the girls? Was it intellectually stimulating? Was it

Presenter9:16

Hi

A A Gill9:17

Boop.

A A Gill9:18

Not for me.

A A Gill9:20

I mean it was home. It's very difficult to know about your home whether it was

Presenter9:24

What did you

A A Gill9:25

Uh

Presenter9:25

Argue and discuss this.

A A Gill9:25

argue and discuss the whole time. And I mean but not in intellectual arguments. Yes, not not throwing the plates arguments. No. Both my parents had a had a great reverence for books.

Presenter9:29

I mean, but not in

Presenter9:31

Yeah.

Presenter9:36

And you say they were very m modern, almost determinedly modern, is what you've suggested. It was progressive. They wanted to know what you thought. They would encourage you to debate with them.

A A Gill9:39

Yeah, you

A A Gill9:43

Yes, and I I of

A A Gill9:46

I think I was quite a precocious child. I had a terrible stammer.

A A Gill9:50

That's what along with everything else as a child. So I I I stammered through, you know, d um lunches and things. Um

Presenter9:58

And you had another problem, didn't you? Which was that that although you were obviously very articulate and bright I mean articulate when you weren't stammering you knew what you thought you didn't score well at school. You you were and

A A Gill10:09

No, I did very badly at school and

A A Gill10:12

They didn't really know why and they sent me off to child psychologists, psychiatrists, which I didn't particularly like. Um and they diagnosed me with a b brand new disease, which was dyslexia. I mean, it had just come from America, it was straight out of the box. Um and then that that was why I got then got sent to this very bizarre

Presenter10:30

And I

A A Gill10:35

Boarding school in Letchworth.

Presenter10:37

A special school for dyslexics.

A A Gill10:38

No, it wasn't particularly. I mean, it's still there, St Christopher's. It was one of the few schools that said that they knew what it was and that they would treat dyslectic children.

Presenter10:48

And did they?

A A Gill10:49

I remember when I left, the headmaster said, I don't think any child was ever on, you know, detention as often as you were.

A A Gill10:57

And I remember thinking at the time when I left her

A A Gill11:00

Do that says an awful lot more about you than it does about me. That you can spend eight years locking me up every Saturday and not think maybe this isn't working.

Presenter11:08

And you got no qualifications, you passed nothing.

A A Gill11:08

Yeah.

A A Gill11:10

I don't think I passed anything.

Presenter11:11

And you obviously you couldn't spell, you couldn't write.

A A Gill11:14

No, but I did have an amazing English teacher.

A A Gill11:18

I mean, you know, there is always that.

Presenter11:19

So you could read.

A A Gill11:20

Yes, no, I I read a lot, but I read incredibly slowly. And I I'm one of those people who reads with their mouths, you know, and my finger.

Presenter11:29

Record number three.

A A Gill11:31

This is Chris Farlow out of time. This is just a great, great, great pop song. There are an enormous number of songs that are written for about and for people who've been dumped.

A A Gill11:43

And there were very few about people who were doing the dumping, and this is one of the best.

Speaker 411:48

Ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 411:51

You don't know what's going on.

Speaker 411:54

Been away for far too long

Speaker 411:58

You can't come back.

Speaker 412:00

If you're still mad.

Speaker 412:04

You're out in touch now, baby.

Speaker 412:08

I'm old-fashioned.

Speaker 412:12

I say baby, baby, baby, it will happen.

Presenter12:18

Chris Farlow and out of time. You are a man of contradictions though, Adrian. I think you've said yourself, you know, you're a food writer who can't drink and a dyslexic who's a a brighter. Here's another one. You know, you set out, you've left school with very little to show for it, as you said, and you set out on kind of whatever it was, really. I don't think you know, do you twelve, thirteen years of drink, drugs and misery, self-loathing. Yeah, I must say But but great happiness, you say as well.

A A Gill12:45

Well the thing about the the the the you know, the drink and drugs and and misery is an awful lot of it was fantastically good fun.

Presenter12:52

Boom.

A A Gill12:52

But it's like jumping off a very tall building and it you know it's fun until you hit the bottom.

Presenter12:57

This took place at art colleges various St Martins to start with and and the Slade later did in and various kind of fetid squats in and around London.

A A Gill13:05

Yeah, I I must have lived in pretty much every borough of London at some point or another.

A A Gill13:11

What I remember mostly

A A Gill13:13

Was the bathrooms were always the same. Those those towels that smell like five dogs have died in them. Everything being clammy and damp and gritty. Successions of sleeping bags with

A A Gill13:26

Bits of old underwear at the bottom of them.

A A Gill13:28

Um

A A Gill13:30

I d yes, I it was quite exciting. I quite liked it. I mean, I felt I did love being in London. I had a great, great time. And then I also spent a um a year in New York and that was that was also wonderful.

Presenter13:42

You you fetched up in America at one point uh drinking moonshine. I don't know whether I'm conflating two stories here, but drinking moonshine and directing porn movies, is that right?

A A Gill13:51

There's a yeah, two separated by a number of years. I I I ran Moonshine. I drank Moonshine and I ran Moonshine in Kentucky.

A A Gill13:58

Um

A A Gill13:59

The county I l lived in was still dry, still had Prohibition, very religious and very old time, hillbilly.

A A Gill14:07

And and I had a very good time. And of course, being all of those things, people got roaring drunk and made the ill i ill illicit, illegal liquor, moonshine, out of corn.

Presenter14:13

Yeah.

A A Gill14:17

Yeah.

Presenter14:17

But you made the The pawn

A A Gill14:20

Movie Somewhere Else.

A A Gill14:24

Yes. I mean, I must say that. Should you admit this? I should say I wrote and directed it. I didn't appear in it, but I did it for a story for a magazine.

Presenter14:24

Uh

Speaker 414:24

Uh

Presenter14:24

Uh

Speaker 414:25

Yeah.

Presenter14:27

Two minutes.

Speaker 414:27

This

Presenter14:35

It would be hilarious though if it weren't so grim,'cause I gather one of the female

Presenter14:39

Star porn stars objected to your script on religious grounds.

A A Gill14:44

Oh yes, no that was yes, no she did. She didn't want to have um have sex in in front of a crucifix'cause she said that was a sin. You can't say any do you think God's not watching if if you if um if you take the crucifix away. I I had I think I'm the only person in the in in the porn industry who's ever used their real name. I mean it I am there as an A. A. Gill writer and director. I'm an auteur. And I've never seen it.

Presenter15:11

You ended up admiring them as you've written about it.

A A Gill15:14

Yes, no, I had a I liked them a lot. And I I had i an incredibly good time. I mean, I don't mean that in a salacious way. I just laughed and laughed and laughed.

A A Gill15:24

And there were some very, very funny stories and and it it's it's a it's a very bizarre thing, but they were in general they were far nicer to each other than actors in Hollywood up the road are.

Presenter15:35

Pickle number four.

A A Gill15:37

Uh this is squeeze um and cool for cats. This is just is so evocative of getting ready to go out in the evening and and

A A Gill15:46

I love these particular sort of English patter songs. And this is also about television, which has to be a big bit, it was always a big bit of my life.

Speaker 315:54

To change the mood a little I've been posing down the pub I'm seeing my reflection, I'm looking slightly rough I fancy this, I fancy that I wanna be so flash I give a little muscle and I'll spend a little cash But all I get is bitter and a nasty little rash And by the time I'm sober I've forgotten what I've had And everybody tells me that it's cool to be a cat Cool for cats

Presenter16:22

Squeeze and cool for cats, that's from nineteen seventy nine. You say, um, Adrian Gill, that there were two kinds of drunk, there's the the binge drinker and the topper upper, and you were the latter, the topper-upper, so presumably a lot of people never knew you were drunk, they just thought it was Adrian.

A A Gill16:36

Yes, I mean there were people when I stopped drinking who said, I can't believe why have we we've never seen you drunk and and the truth was that they'd never seen me sober. I mean the last thing I'd do at night would be to pour the drink that I would drink first thing in the morning so that the drink that I would need to get up and

Presenter16:53

Isn't it also to do with the shakes, though, that you uh wouldn't be capable of?

A A Gill16:57

Yeah.

Presenter16:57

Yeah.

A A Gill16:59

Do all those things like winching the glass up over my shoulder with a s scarf so you have to tie a towel round your wrist and pull it with the other arm. Otherwise I'd bash my teeth with the glass.

Presenter17:11

But how is it possible to say how mu when you know when you really got to the bottom, how much would you have been drinking by the day?

A A Gill17:18

It's A, it's not anybody who knows about drink will tell you it's not about how much.

A A Gill17:24

But only to be two both

Presenter17:24

But are we talking two bottles of whiskey? What are we talking about?

A A Gill17:26

Yeah about that. Two bottles of whiskey, six or seven cans of special brew, um, and then go to the pub for, you know, pints in the pub. I mean I and drugs on top of that? And and yeah, whatever. Drugs, yeah.

Presenter17:36

And drugs on top of that?

Presenter17:40

Like what?

A A Gill17:42

What would you fancy?

A A Gill17:44

I did I I did heroin speed uh speed is what I really liked.

A A Gill17:50

And then I'd get terrible paranoia and I'd have to go and get a drink.

Presenter17:55

But this is accompanied by, as we understand, the the misery waking up in the morning crying, because in those moments you know, or you sort of have a glimpse of the depraved existence that you're living, do you?

A A Gill18:06

No, I don't think depraved is depraved is quite a grand word. I don't think I've thought of myself as being depraved. You're I was just depressed. I actually did call it my angst,'cause if you say it in German it sounds better. It was a hopeless depression. It was it's i i mixed with awful self-loathing and terrible guilt about

A A Gill18:27

you know, what you said and what you did the night before. I don't there's huge amounts I don't remember. I constantly lived in blackouts. I would constantly walk into pubs and have people come up to me and say, How dare you show your face in here again? And I'd have no idea. I mean, I would sit in pubs praying for an incurable disease. I I mean, I of course didn't realize that I actually had one, but um but wanting, you know, a a sort of a

A A Gill18:55

cancer or or or something cataclysmic, because then I would have an excuse, I would have a real reason for being the way I was. I simply didn't understand how it was that my friends, that people I knew, people I'd grown up with, all got on. They got jobs, they got wives, they they had cars, they had holidays, they had mortgages, they had clothes that, you know, hadn't come out of Oxfam or they hadn't stolen off their friends. I mean, I never understood how any of that worked.

Presenter19:23

And then you meet a GP who tells you you're an alcoholic, as you say, one in a long line, but suddenly.

Presenter19:30

This does it for you. What did he say that made him that did he tell you you were gonna die if you didn't stop?

A A Gill19:37

Yes, but that isn't it.

A A Gill19:40

I don't know, there's a moment and and all recovered drunks or recovering drunks have this moment where something clicks.

A A Gill19:49

And he was very calm and he just said and he asked me that there were there were a classic twenty questions and if you answer I think three of them yes then the likelihood is you've you've got a problem and I only answered two no and they were did you drink whilst pregnant and has drink affected your job and single I didn't I hadn't had a job and I I mean that was everything else I was and he just said you're you know you're lucky in the sense that you're absolutely straight down the line you are a classic alcoholic. I actually honestly didn't believe there was any other way. I didn't believe that I would ever have any other sort of life. I was just I would have done anything just to have stopped the the intensity of the unhappiness that I had.

Presenter20:34

Picker number five.

A A Gill20:36

This is just one of the best pop records ever as common people by pulp and and uh it starts off in St Martin's which is where I started off.

Speaker 420:48

In Greece she had a thirst for knowledge She studied sculpture at St. Martin's College, as well I

Speaker 421:02

She told me that the dam was loaded

Speaker 421:05

I said in that case I was room, Coca-Cola, she said fine.

Speaker 421:10

Uh

Speaker 421:11

And then in thirty seconds time, she said

Speaker 421:15

I wanna live my

Presenter21:17

Uh Pope and common people. So all this time, Adrian, you purported to be an artist, you were doing some painting and so on and illustrating. But then you metamorphose into a writer and a very good one from the off. You said you were you kind of emerged fully formed.

Presenter21:32

It was Tattler in the end, wasn't it, who actually and I know there was a little bit before that, but it was someone on Tatler who said, you can write.

A A Gill21:41

When I started writing.

A A Gill21:43

I realized that all of the things that I'd been trying to do in pictures, really I wanted to do in words.

A A Gill21:53

And it was just like coming home. I just started doing it and I went, This is just brilliant.

Presenter21:59

Well, as we've said, not that you could spell or anybody could read what you've written, so what did you do? You wrote it and then dictated it?

A A Gill22:07

Yeah.

Presenter22:07

Yeah.

A A Gill22:08

And I still do that. I d I I have um I have copy takers I phone them up and they go, Oh, you again.

Presenter22:15

Which is presumably why it's in the first person, so it's very immediate and you hear it.'Cause and and you can hear if a sentence is lumpy or lacking rhythm.

A A Gill22:23

Yes, I can hear that. I mean and that's the last edit I do is when I is when I say it. And you just tell, you can tell with the rhythm of a of a piece. I d I mean, I do think that words on a page are are dried speech. You know, they're desiccated speech. You should be able to add your own head and what what you should get back is a voice.

Presenter22:27

Release.

Presenter22:37

You should

Presenter22:41

Which means that you split infinitives and break all kinds of grammatical rules. I mean, I take it that way.

A A Gill22:42

Which means

A A Gill22:46

I demand any grammatical rules. I mean that all that's nonsense. I loathe all that.

Presenter22:47

Yeah, all that.

Presenter22:50

What they eat shoots and leaves.

A A Gill22:50

And it it's it's that thing of o of of other people

Presenter22:53

I mean

A A Gill22:57

Owning the language, of saying, This is ours. We know how to do it properly, and if you want to use it, then you have to come to us and we'll teach you or we'll tell you or we'll, you know, suck our teeth at you if you get it wrong, or we'll snigger and and and laugh and we'll talk dismissively about estuary English. And I mean, I every week I get the dullest letters from people saying, Can't you tell the difference between, or don't you know, or you can't start a sentence with. It's all, all of it nonsense.

Presenter23:28

Legal number six.

A A Gill23:30

Um as his nana with ninety-nine loftable lawns.

Presenter23:35

Neuin Neuzi du Valonz.

A A Gill23:38

This is for real aficionados, Reina. You have to have the it's in the original German.

Speaker 423:50

No non self valent. Iron beks on hovitzom. Jimanso fossaire. Alla tuke ban van sera pai vand am ho witzon. Ne no non seslof balant.

Presenter24:14

That's Nena and Neun Neunsische Luftballoons, ninety-nine red balloons, which you say is on your computer and comes up with enormous regularity.

A A Gill24:21

My s my small secret embarrassing vice is that I'm a solitary dancer and and I would never dance in public, but but when this comes up, I I comes on, I tend to get up and jig about.

Presenter24:32

You started writing for the Sunday Times in the nineteen nineties, first table talk and then uh the te the television column. All of this, though, would have impressed your father, wouldn't it?'Cause it ge you end up writing about the medium that that that he excelled in. You know, did it bring you back together again?

A A Gill24:48

Um, we never really fell out, Daddy and I. I mean, that th we were very close and and part of being very close was that there was a period where we argued a lot. Um

A A Gill24:59

But we n were never not we were enormously similar. And he he had always said to me, you know, you should be a journalist and I'd always been furious with him and said, But I can't write.

A A Gill25:10

And he said, No, but that's not necessarily what it's about.

Presenter25:13

But he would have suffered terribly in all those years what, twelve, thirteen years of you being.

Presenter25:18

completely out of it. But he lived he died about six months ago, didn't he? But he did live to see you win these awards and Critic of the Year and Columnist of the Year and all the rest of it. So he he would have been very proud.

A A Gill25:22

Do

Presenter25:29

I'm sure.

A A Gill25:29

Um, yeah, I think he was. I bet. Well, I think we were proud of each other.

Presenter25:34

But he and your mother had a a double burden to bear, as it were, didn't they?'Cause not only did they have you drunk for all those years, but also their other son, your younger brother Nick, who won the Michelin star,

Presenter25:47

Sort of just decided to disappear some years ago, didn't he?

A A Gill25:50

Yeah, yeah, he just he just left went.

Presenter25:53

And did did did you know he was going?

A A Gill25:56

He came and told me. Yeah, I s I saw him. He

A A Gill25:59

He'd had a bad time, and he was

A A Gill26:02

unhappy and um and he came and said, I'm I'm gonna go and disappear.

A A Gill26:12

And I said don't, you know, keep in touch.

A A Gill26:16

Um

A A Gill26:18

He came and talked and we talked a lot about being children together. We talked a lot about our childhood and

A A Gill26:23

It was it was actually very nice. It was one of it was we hadn't had that sort of conversation for a long time. And I gave him some money and a coat.

A A Gill26:33

Um and that was the last I never saw of him.

Presenter26:35

That was about eight years ago, I think, something like that.

A A Gill26:37

Yeah.

Presenter26:38

No one's ever heard from him since.

A A Gill26:40

No.

Presenter26:41

You just wha wha what do you believe?

A A Gill26:44

You know, and y you can you can believe all sorts of things and I I choose to believe that he's happier and that he's found

A A Gill26:56

something that you know, I think it's everybody's right in a sense to cash in their the hand they're dealt and say, I want a completely new hand. I think yes. I think everybody I think if you believe in freedom

Presenter27:06

Do you hear?

A A Gill27:10

then you must have the freedom to say, I I I want a completely new life. I was given one, you know, I mean, I was given one through having to stop drinking and I got a new start.

A A Gill27:23

And I understand that Nick wanted a new start and that the what he had around him was too painful and too uncomfortable. It doesn't stop me I miss him enormously. Um I'm also furious with him.

Presenter27:38

I mean a hive.

A A Gill27:41

I feel angry because of my mum and he's got hippies of his kids and um

Presenter27:41

Feel like

A A Gill27:48

But I do sort of understand.

Presenter27:51

Number seven.

A A Gill27:54

Oh, this is the birds and turn, turn, turn. It reminds me very strongly of a trip that that Nicola, the guy I live with, and I made up the Pacific coast. We drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco up the Pacific in an in an open top car and we had this on the on the stereo and and it was one of the best trips. It was just it was brilliant. We had such a nice time. It'll remind me very very strongly of her.

Speaker 428:26

Everything turned turned There is a season turn turned

Speaker 428:36

And they are time to every purpose, undeveloped.

Speaker 428:43

A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plan, a time to read, a time to kill, a time to heal.

Presenter28:55

The Birds and Turn, Turn, Turn. You wrote a book recently, Adrian, called The Angry Island, the thesis of which was that the default setting of We English was was anger. I noticed that one reviewer suggested it was more about you than the English per se, that the the you know, your anger about the class system or public schools or the way we speak, and we've heard a bit of it this morning. I mean, do you think of yourself as an angry man?

A A Gill29:20

Um A, I think that's a perfectly fair criticism.

Presenter29:23

So you're an angry man.

A A Gill29:24

And I think that all books, in a sense, are as much about the author as they are about anything else, and that's obviously involved. And particularly a book which is comes, I mean, it's all stuff that's just out of my head. I mean, it's stuff that I think. So, yes, of course, it's about me and the things that I choose to write about. It's more than grumpy old.

Presenter29:40

It's more than grumpy old man stuff, isn't it? It's stuff that really gets you going. I mean, there is a kind of and that's why you can do the wit and be cruel with it as well.

A A Gill29:48

I think there's an there's an in there is a in the book there's a chapter about about humour and and that the English English humour is particularly cruel and I think it is particularly unkind and I think yes, I've spent quite a lot of my life being quite angry about things and and that I'm sure that that's part of it. I don't I don't have to try I'm not a contrarian. I don't have to go and say, well what's it feel like to say the opposite of that on purpose. I mean I do I ha

A A Gill30:17

All my life I found myself pointing up the down escalator.

Presenter30:21

Hmm.

A A Gill30:22

It's just me.

Presenter30:23

But that you are at pains to write it originally, as we say, avoid the clichés, to to hone it, to make it clever, to make witty clever.

A A Gill30:31

Avoid t-shirts like The Plague.

Presenter30:33

Yes, quite. But that same reviewer, and it was Simon Heffer, in fact, wrote this, and what do you think of this? He says that if he was you he he thinks you should drop the clever bastardry, give up the exhausting effort to find the ultra-smart phrase, and consider something more serious as a showcase for his undeniable talent. So there we are, this is a sort of backhander. But there's something in that, isn't there?

A A Gill30:56

I think there is something in that, and I think the thing in that's in that is something about Simon Heffer.

Presenter31:01

Come on Should not you just stop trying so hard and stop being quite so clever, stop getting people's goats in the way that you do, and actually get down to it and write a serious piece of something?

Presenter31:14

Wouldn't you like to do that actually?

A A Gill31:16

I I would be sorry if you didn't think that a lot of what I wrote was serious. I don't think that there's a r that because you can be funny or smart or witty or and s occasionally glib and bloody infuriating

A A Gill31:30

doesn't mean that they're not serious. I think one of the things that you do, one of the reasons you get people to read you is by making what you have to say entertaining. And I don't think I don't have to make an apology for that. That doesn't diminish the importance of what it is you're writing.

Presenter31:45

Last record. You've been writing this list forever, I know. I don't know how you got to eight, but any

A A Gill31:50

I d I th this is one of the most the most painful things I've ever had to do is make this is make this list. I've been doing this since I was twelve. This last one I will never regret. This is the most beautiful love song ever from one of the most astonishing voices. And

A A Gill32:09

This this is just it. Poor Robeson's love song from a really dreadful movie, Sanders of the River.

Speaker 432:37

You save me ball.

Presenter32:44

Paul Robeson and Love Song from the 1935 film Sanders of the River. If you could only take one of those eight records, Adrian.

A A Gill32:51

Oh, I think it would have to be that.

Presenter32:53

Mm-hmm.

Presenter32:55

You've got the Bible, complete works of Shakespeare. What's your book?

A A Gill32:59

Um there's a book by Mervyn Peake called Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, and it terrified me so much.

A A Gill33:10

As a child I had to have it hidden under all the other books in my bedroom.

A A Gill33:15

But I think I'm going to have to take it with me.

Presenter33:18

And a luxury.

A A Gill33:20

I would take my children's pillows.

A A Gill33:24

Because if you've ever slept out, you know that the one thing you really miss is a pillow and um and I'd want to have theirs.

Presenter33:32

A. A. Gill, Adrian Antony Gill, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

A A Gill33:37

Thank you.

Speaker 433:45

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