Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead0:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:14

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:42

My castaway this week is the writer Liz Lockhead. Poetry and plays and prose have flowed from her pen for nigh on forty-five years. A storyteller at heart, she writes, she says, for consolation and for fun. We read it and hear it and enjoy it for the fresh distinction she brings to the everyday business of life. From warrant sales to serial monogamy, her eye and ear capture moments and moods with considerable craft and heart and humour. Her use of the vernacular ties her unmistakably to Scotland. Indeed, she spent five years as its national poet. But in truth, her life has ranged far and wide. Canada, Turkey, America, and even England have at times been her home. She says of her poems

Presenter1:28

They seem as naked and as intimate as any journal, and sometimes painfully so. So welcome, Liz Love. I can't remember. You did say that. You're at that stage now in your life and also by reputation where you do collected works. And that must necessitate you looking back and reading and analysing the stuff from your early years of writing. Going back through your life, through your work, w what's the sensation? What does that feel like?

Liz Lochhead1:35

Smoke has

Liz Lochhead1:37

They've asked.

Liz Lochhead1:55

Like

Presenter1:55

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead1:56

It feels very strange. Sometimes you find things, getting ready for this programme, you sometimes find things that you can't remember and they come back very sharply to you as if you'd never written them or never connected with them in that way. But it makes me realise that all the time I have been mediating my life through making pictures with words. You know, I think they're quite visual. I hope they're quite visual because I went to art school, perhaps.

Liz Lochhead2:20

You were awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015? Well, it was for 2015, but it was in February 2016 that I was given this gong. It was fantastic. What did that mean to you?

Presenter2:28

That is fantastic.

Liz Lochhead2:31

An enormous surprise and a slightly surreal feeling as if that's not the kind of thing that happens to me. The Queen was really wonderful, she was very funny. She told me about meeting Edith Sitwell when she was really young and her and her sister. She said, My and Pat took us to poetry readings. We were far too young. She said, Margaret and I were quite naughty. We got the giggles. And she asked us, Caroline and I, did we ever get giggles in poetry readings? And we both looked at each other and said, Yes, we do. So this is Caroline Duffy. Yes.

Presenter2:59

So this is Caroline Duffy, okay.

Presenter3:02

I've read that you began to write poetry as a youngster because you couldn't sing. I don't know if that's right or not, but I wonder what you.

Liz Lochhead3:09

I wonder what what's your relationship with music? Very, very important. Remembering being told not to that I couldn't sing, you know, when Miss Pettigrew, the peripatetic music teacher when she said, Somebody's groaning and came round and listened, and she said to me,

Presenter3:19

There's a poem in that.

Liz Lochhead3:26

Just you do silent singing. Was it because your voice was deep? No, I just couldn't sing. I was out of tune. But I was singing away with great enthusiasm. I mean, you should never do that to somebody that's enjoying themself.

Presenter3:37

Let's go to the music, Liz Loughhead. Tell me then about your first one. What are we going to hear first off this morning?

Liz Lochhead3:42

Well, we're going to hear Joni Mitchell. We're going to hear the very start of Blue, you know, the album Blue. It was very hard to even pick which Joni Mitchell to have, far less pick which eight records. This just starts the whole album, and I think if I'm in the desert island and I hear that, I'll be able to sing, you know, although it'll be a silent singing inside a jukebox in my head, the whole album. I used to think I was Joni Mitchell when I was at art school. I did. Once I started writing poems, I would think to myself, Joni Mitchell is me, except my wee, rhymey things don't have music to them, and I can't sing, and I live in Motherwell, not California.

Speaker 44:22

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling Looking for something, what can it be?

Liz Lochhead4:26

Traveling, traveling.

Speaker 44:32

Oh, I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some. Oh, I love you when I forget about

Speaker 44:44

I wanna be strong, I wanna live alone, I wanna belong to the living of live alive, I wanna get up and drive, wanna wreck my stockings in some

Presenter4:56

Poetry indeed, Leslocher. That was Jenny Mitchell singing All I Want. Let's talk for a moment about the preoccupation that people often have, and it seems to begin in schools of decoding poetry. Let's find out what the poet was really talking about. What do you make of that?

Liz Lochhead5:12

Rubbish. And of course they're talking about other things as well, but if the story and the surface doesn't make sense, I mean I met a wee boy once and he said, See when you wrote that poem about that bull, what were you really trying to say?

Liz Lochhead5:25

Well, that really that's what you're doing, you're trying to write poetry, you're trying to get it into the words that of course I know that that particular poem was about repression and sexuality and darkness and light and so on, but if it wasn't about a bull and a wee girl looking at'em, it wouldn't be about anything. Metaphors have got to work as a plain story first.

Presenter5:44

Is your resistance to it also maybe based on the fact that you feel it puts a lot of people off? Or maybe I can't work out what this is about?

Liz Lochhead5:51

Yes, when people feel that they're wrong, they're right. It's not the teacher that's right saying I mean, some people have told me that they you know, people have said this and that and they've said, I asked her, and she said it wasn't that at all, you know. I definitely think poetry is about um communicating.

Liz Lochhead6:08

First of all, to myself and then to other people, I suppose. I mean, if people couldn't make head or tail of something, I would still be glad I'd written it, but I probably wouldn't read it in public or but you know, like when I look at The Guardian on a Saturday, maybe a two out of five poems I can't make head or tail of what they're trying to do. I don't have the clue in. And I see that there's wordplay, but

Liz Lochhead6:31

The wee clue that could have taken me there is missing, and the other three surprise me and delight me.

Presenter6:36

Your next uh piece of music then, Liz Loch.

Liz Lochhead6:38

Tell me about your second one today. What are we going to hear? This is Burns. This is probably one of Burns's most beautiful songs ever. And that was a man that wrote a hell of a lot of beautiful songs. A man who wrote songs when he stopped being able to write poetry towards the end of his life. The last ten years of Burns's life, he only wrote one poem, one major poem, which is Tama Shanta. But he wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs. He rode around Scotland with a fiddle and it was this kind of recording thing. He would learn tunes and then he would play around with them in the inn and begin to write songs to fit that tune and so on. Oh, and it cheers me up. He was apparently not a good singer at all, but he wrote great songs. And this is my friend Michael Mara, who also wrote truly wonderful songs and isn't nearly as well known as he should be.

Speaker 47:34

There's nought but care on every hand

Speaker 47:39

Every year that passes oh

Speaker 47:44

What signifies the life of man?

Speaker 47:50

Twelve me for the last easy

Speaker 47:55

Clean growth of rushes old.

Speaker 48:01

Beamo the rushes oh

Presenter8:05

That was Michael Marrow with Mr McFall's Chamber and Green Grow Le Rachiseaux. After the war was the dull country I was born in, so went your poem, Liz Lockhead. Um tell me a bit more then about your background. It was Boxing Day, nineteen fourteen

Liz Lochhead8:19

Yeah.

Presenter8:19

Seven, yep. Yeah.

Liz Lochhead8:20

My mother thought she had uh indigestion um after eating a whole jar of piccolilly. It was her that was her pregnancy, whatever, uh, on and the Christmas dinner. But I wasn't born until Boxing Day.

Presenter8:31

Your parents then not even a home of their own. They were living with which grandparents? Which grandparents?

Liz Lochhead8:37

At that time they were living with my dad's mum and dad and uh various unmarried brothers and sisters, well two or three of them, in a Wee Council house in Craigenook, uh Lanarkshire.

Presenter8:37

As

Presenter8:49

So you were around about sort of five-ish when your your parents moved into their own home. It was their own it was their a council house, their first home.

Liz Lochhead8:56

And their last home, they lived there all their life.

Presenter8:58

That must have been a remarkable sort of flowering of the family, to be able to have their own home.

Liz Lochhead9:03

Unit 4. On the two buses with my mum to get there. I remember saying to mum, Will there be children there? And she said, Oh, yes, there'll be lots of children. And indeed, there were. And I said,

Liz Lochhead9:15

Will the children like me?

Liz Lochhead9:17

And they didn't much, really. I don't blame them. I didn't really know how to be a child properly. Because you'd been surrounded by adults and I'd been fascinated by listening to grown-up conversation, you know, for four years. But I remember my mum, you weren't allowed for some reason, the walls were distempered and or plastered or something. They were still drying out, so you weren't allowed to put wallpaper on, or you were not encouraged to. So I remember my mum

Presenter9:19

I don't really know.

Presenter9:21

Because you'd been surrounded by adults.

Liz Lochhead9:41

two trays of um uh tinted d distemper, one orange and one green. Oh, I haven't thought about that. And she've a pa a sto a pair of stockings, one in each hand with this tennis ball in it, and she was rolling back and forward in this thing and then whacking them back and forward on the walls, and you get a lovely Art Deco effect. It was

Speaker 49:48

Hi

Presenter9:48

But

Presenter10:00

Beautiful. You're saying one orange, one green. The significance of that, of course, is coming from the part of the west of Scotland that you came from. It was notably sectarian.

Liz Lochhead10:07

It was. I was just connecting that just now, but that was obviously not so for my mum, and it never was, because she liked both orange and green. But round about where we lived, I grew up in a family who were my mum and dad were both Christians, and they were

Liz Lochhead10:22

Defiantly anti-sectarianism. They thought it was the poison of the West of Scotland.

Presenter10:26

You're ten by the time you

Liz Lochhead10:27

Uh

Presenter10:27

Uh

Liz Lochhead10:27

Your sister was born. I was just, yeah. What were your feelings about that at the time? Oh, enormous delight.

Presenter10:27

System is born.

Presenter10:29

What we have

Liz Lochhead10:33

She's still my closest friend.

Liz Lochhead10:35

I was I remember being terribly offended because everybody you know how people talk in front of kids, they'll be, oh, the older one will be jealous, she'll be very jealous, she's been used to being the only one.

Liz Lochhead10:45

And I remember being mortally offended, but of course you couldn't speak up to adults because I just was delighted, you know, with this me thing, you know, who'd turned up. It was wonderful. More music, Liz Lockhead. Let's hear your third one. Tell me about this.

Liz Lochhead10:59

Oh, this is one of my favourite songs. And this, I picked this because it reminds me, in a way, of being sung to by my dad, because he could sing, unlike my mum and me. Kirstie, trying to pick eight Bob Dylan's would be so difficult, far less. But I love this one because I get two for the price of one. I get Johnny Cash singing in it as well. And it's a girl from the North Country.

Speaker 411:23

Remember me.

Speaker 411:27

To one who lives there.

Speaker 411:32

For she wants one.

Speaker 411:35

A true love of mine.

Speaker 411:40

See for me that her hair's hanging down.

Speaker 411:48

It curls and falls.

Speaker 411:51

All down afresh.

Presenter11:53

Yeah.

Speaker 411:54

Uh

Presenter11:54

Uh

Presenter11:54

That was Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, girl from the North Country. Your poem 1953 is an interesting one. It writes very energetically about these grown-ups in this new estate, in this new part of chapter of their life opening up, and they're making paths and gardens, and they're heaving great sort of stone slabs to make pathways, and they're making curtains, you say, fit to hang on Coronation Day. Did your parents' post-war optimism extend to what they wanted for their daughters? Were they aspirant?

Liz Lochhead12:25

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead12:26

Aspirational, were they? Incredibly aspirational. But not in a pushy way, you know. I remember my mum saying to me when w I was going down to sign up for primary school, I remember splashing in a puddle, I can just see my Wellingtons, and my mum said, And your dad and I want you to know that if you want to go into university, we'll make every sacrifice

Presenter12:43

And it was Uh

Liz Lochhead12:44

Well, I suppose it wasn't so much of a sacrifice because I'm one of that lucky generation who was actually paid a grant to go to further education. I mean, people of my generation, we don't know we had it made. I mean, nowadays people are writing to their relatives to try and crowdfund their education and so on. And the aspirational working class, you know, was just such a strong thing. They'd come back after the war and, you know, they really wanted things to be better.

Presenter13:15

Did they read poor?

Liz Lochhead13:16

What should

Presenter13:16

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead13:16

Yeah.

Presenter13:16

Uh

Liz Lochhead13:16

My mum spoke poetry, you know, but the new bits of Burns. My dad didn't. My dad read to me. My dad read me things like Tangle Wood Tales before I could read. My grandmother, her mother, had been a maid in an elocutionist's house and she heard all these things and learned them off my heart, presumably while cleaning the stairs. And she said them to me when I was wee. So when I stayed with my grand and granddad, my granddad sang and when I was three and four, I adored him, I'd be on his chest and I would say, Sing me a sad song, granddad, and he would sing things like the drunkard ragged wayne and I would cry away. I mean I enjoyed already then I enjoyed

Liz Lochhead13:56

Let's have some more music, Liz Loch in.

Presenter13:58

This is your fourth.

Liz Lochhead13:59

This is the great Michael Mara again. Michael and I used to do a show together, and he's just one of my best friends. He died almost four years ago at the age of 60, far too young. Michael wrote this song. In fact, this is the first time I met Michael. About 30 years ago, he wrote this song to go on a show called A We Home From Home. And I find it ironic and rather lovely that the iconic Glasgow song is written by a Dundonian. How could I not put Mother Glasgow in? Because Glasgow's my home, and this is Michael singing it.

Speaker 414:33

In the second city of the Empire, Mother Glasgow nurses all her wings.

Speaker 414:43

Working hard to feed her little starlings Unconsciously she clips their little wings

Speaker 414:54

And Mother Glasgow's sucker is for bitch you will nestling the belly and the tem

Speaker 415:05

Dream that took a dand

Speaker 415:07

Uh

Presenter15:08

That was Michael Murray, your good friend, saying their mother Glasgow Leslie. To be an art student in the mid sixties must have been well rather a thrilling thing, I expect. What were your concerns? What were your preoccupations as a student?

Liz Lochhead15:19

Poor.

Liz Lochhead15:23

Yeah.

Presenter15:23

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead15:23

Well, I was an art student and I did want to paint. I wanted to be a painter. It had never occurred to me that I would write things. I found out that I was often not pleased with my drawings, so I started writing long thin things down the side. And then I would think, well, when I'd type them up, or my when my mum would type them up, I would think

Liz Lochhead15:42

They don't have to go to the end of the line. And then I would think, what are they? Well, I suppose they're re-poemy. They don't have a tune. And they're not prose. I suppose they're poemy things. But I did start writing almost immediately I went to art school and it gradually took over with me. But I mean, I was preoccupied with getting my hair right and getting a date for Saturday night and things like that. Like all girls of that age, I was very self-conscious. I thought I just was wrong for 60s. I didn't look right. I felt you know the wrong kind of figure and I wasn't like twiggy. And you know, when you look back, you think, God, you know.

Liz Lochhead16:17

Sex and looks are wasted on the young, you know. I was quite lazy in some ways at art school, but I was really, really searching and thinking about the kind of painter that I would like to be, and was floundering desperately. And writing things was I wasn't floundering in the same way. I felt I was finding out something. I remember my best friend Doreen, she's still one of my very, very best friends, says that the first time she met me, I was hiding, I was on the floor under the coats at the art school, and I was on the floor scribbling away. And she said, What are you doing? And she said, I looked up and I said, I'm writing a poem. And she said, She thought,

Liz Lochhead16:58

You know, how pretentious. And then she realised, once we got friends, about six months later, she thought, oh, she was writing a poem.

Presenter17:04

That's what she was doing. Liz Lockhead, we're gonna hear some more of your musical choices. Tell me about this. This is your uh your fifth disc. Oh, this is Dusty Springfield.

Liz Lochhead17:13

And I think it speaks for itself.

Speaker 417:18

Back to the things I learned so well.

Speaker 417:25

In my you

Speaker 417:31

I think I'm returning to

Speaker 417:35

Those days when I was young enough

Speaker 417:40

To know the truth

Speaker 417:45

Bye.

Presenter17:47

That was Dusty Springfield and Going Back. Uh, Liz Loched, you first earned a living as an arts teacher. Were you a good arts teacher?

Liz Lochhead17:54

Appalling. It was really appalling. I was always coming back on a milk train from Dumfries or something like that and going straight into school with last night's mascara still tangled on my having been down doing a reading somewhere and slept in somebody's floor, you know, and wearing the same m um imitation Biba dress. So but by that time you were trying to combine r

Presenter18:12

Because of

Liz Lochhead18:14

Biting and performing with teaching.

Presenter18:15

Single.

Presenter18:16

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead18:17

Yeah, teaching was just what I had to do to earn a living. I mean, art school ending and having to go to teacher training at Jordan Hill, that was a bit of a shock. I knew it was coming, but I just I got very depressed at that point. I found it very difficult to get go into teacher training college.

Liz Lochhead18:33

Yeah.

Presenter18:33

You've said that in times past poetry was meant to be written as the when I'm quoting you directly here: you were posh, grown-up, male, English, and dead.

Presenter18:43

The choice, as you so often have throughout your career, to write in the vernacular and to say, I'm not going to imitate those people who've been well regarded and gone before, but I'm going to do it my way.

Presenter18:53

That takes a lot of confidence, and I'm wondering where your confidence came from to begin doing that.

Presenter18:58

It isn't fine.

Liz Lochhead18:59

Feels confident. I just wanted to do it, you know, and I'm still not confident. You know, I was interested in the vernacular of the posh male English and dead as well. I mean, but I look back, I look back at a lot of the things I did, and I think that was dumb. You know, how dumb to make your first play about Byron Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley's half-sister and a maid, and the monster. You know, pretty difficult to stage that. But and how difficult to write, you know, witty people like Byron. I was staffed, really, you know. I didn't do that thing that they said that you should do, which is write what you know.

Presenter19:34

But in your poetry, you said, you know, writing in the vernacular, you use words like skelp and drich and that sort of thing.

Liz Lochhead19:40

Only when it's that's the right thing for that piece of work. I don't hold any brief for Scots, you know, as such. No, it's just language like any other language. I am Scottish and that's a big part of my identity. But I don't think and you know accept it and

Presenter19:47

Don't s

Liz Lochhead19:56

God, do I love the west of Scotland, you know, and the beautiful bits. But it's just one option among others. Tell me about your next piece of music then, Liz Lockhead. It's your sixth. This is my philosophy of life, I think. I mean, it's I think one of the funniest songs I've ever heard, and it has to represent all the great American song, right? You know, I'm devastated that I've not got Gershman or Lawrence Hart or any of my favourites or Cole Porter, but I do love Hoagie Carmichael and I just love this song. But it just sums up something very important to realize about life.

Speaker 320:31

Ain't no fish, ain't no flounder, ain't no tuna, ain't no f ⁇.

Speaker 420:36

Holy mackerel, some days there just ain't no fish Ain't no perch Ain't no flounder You flounder for fish Ain't no fish And although at times you get a messful Other days are less successful Some days there just ain't no fish

Speaker 321:00

Ain't no fish

Speaker 421:01

Yeah. Some days will start mighty fine.

Speaker 321:02

Some

Presenter21:06

Hogey Carmichael, some days there just ain't no fish. And I was having a little wonder, Liz Lockhead, during that. Is that about professional life? You know, you put out your net there, you're trying to find the words to write the poem, but it's maybe a a little bit of the professional, a bit of the personal too.

Liz Lochhead21:19

It is it's also on the island it'll be true, literally true. You know, it's what I was saying about metaphors, they've got to be literally true as well. You know, sometimes you can't get any fish, but definitely, you know, sometimes you can't get somebody to give you a job in the theatre or sometimes in your thirties you can't find a decent boyfriend. Sometimes when writing, you're trying and trying and trying. Some days it's not working and you're not in control. I suppose it's a song that says you're not.

Presenter21:45

In control of your life. So then, Liz, you were I think you were around about thirty-eight when you met the man who would become your husband. You met Tom, an architect. T tell me about how you met, because honestly, if you'd been writing a play, you may have written this as the opening scene. It was it was Hogmanay, wasn't it? Was it New Year's Eve?

Liz Lochhead22:02

Yeah.

Presenter22:03

But that It's the first time we'd got together.

Liz Lochhead22:06

If you know what you mean I do know what you mean.

Presenter22:06

If you know I do know what you mean.

Liz Lochhead22:08

You met before that? But I just met him three months before that and we just like talked to each other. I met him really at the end of our drawing class that he went to with my best friend Jerry from art school. I just went to meet Jerry for a drink in a pub and he was talking to the most gorgeous man I'd ever seen in my life. I knew I fancied him at the time very, very much. And when I got together with him I thought, this is great, but I didn't know I'd I didn't know we would live together for the rest of his life.

Presenter22:08

Before that.

Presenter22:33

Uh

Liz Lochhead22:33

Yeah.

Presenter22:33

Right.

Liz Lochhead22:33

Uh

Presenter22:33

And so you had this kiss on New Year's Eve on Hogman Day, and that was it. You were talking about it. A bit more than an 30 of it. I know, but it's Radio 4. There are children listening with lots of it. I've got to be, you know.

Liz Lochhead22:38

A bit more than that.

Liz Lochhead22:43

The great thing was, I remember after a couple of days, Tom said, I've got to go home tomorrow because.

Presenter22:43

Neatly encompassing it.

Liz Lochhead22:50

I've definitely got to have a clean shirt and clean my teeth with my own toothbrush. So we made a date for the following week to go to the cinema and stuff like that. And I thought, that'll be fine, we'll just calm down about this. And on the way out the door I said, although this was in Edinburgh, you could come over to Glasgow to my party on Saturday night. And he said, Oh, you're having a party. Well, I was from then on.

Liz Lochhead23:11

I had to go back in Hoover.

Presenter23:14

So a long relationship with its well, as you described with its ups and its downs, like any long relationship. We never ever fell out of love with each other. We never changed our mind.

Liz Lochhead23:17

Essentially

Liz Lochhead23:20

Aya.

Liz Lochhead23:21

Yeah.

Presenter23:26

You you were asked to become Macker, which is we know is Scotland's version of the Poet Laureate, not long after your husband had died after a short and brutal illness, and I wonder.

Presenter23:37

Why you decided to take that job on? Because that was a big, big professional responsibility.

Liz Lochhead23:41

Yes, it was just six months after Tom died and um

Liz Lochhead23:46

I thought, Oh, God you know, I thought, Oh, hell, you know, when they said, Would you like to be the national poet? And it was my sister that said to me, and she can't remember this, she said, I said, Well I'll do this and she said, What would Tom say?

Liz Lochhead23:59

Which is what you do.

Liz Lochhead24:01

I never ever wanted to write about grief, but as part of the macardom, you know, I just would be asked to do all kinds of things. And, you know, for the National Book League in Scotland, I was asked to do a poem about favourite place. And so I was trying to do my job properly. And I kept not being pleased with what I was doing. You know, I would try and write about this place that we go, Tom and I went to all the time, and I still go to.

Liz Lochhead24:29

It's turned out to be. I just wrote about what we would be doing and at the end what we were what was not happening.

Liz Lochhead24:36

And they'll speak to me about this all the time in buses and tell me their sad stories and so on. And I'm glad that I wrote it, but it's probably all I want to I don't know, but I think it might be possibly all I want to

Presenter24:37

And this is a

Liz Lochhead24:51

Write about grief.

Liz Lochhead24:54

I think the thing is about writing poetry, you're trying to get the words down as accurately as you can.

Liz Lochhead25:04

not in a flowery way, but as simply and as truthfully as you can.

Liz Lochhead25:08

I'm glad that that poem is helpful to other people, but sometimes at poetry readings people ask me to read it, and I can't.

Liz Lochhead25:16

But

Liz Lochhead25:19

I'm glad I wrote it.

Presenter25:22

And in that five years, uh as you say, Sat things were required of you, being Macker, in that period after the shock and the loss and everything that you were dealing with.

Liz Lochhead25:26

Yeah.

Presenter25:33

When that five years came to an end, and when you had worked as I presume you must have been working extremely hard and turning up and doing readings and doing everything that was professionally required of you,

Liz Lochhead25:41

Everything that

Presenter25:45

At the end of that five years, what shape did the grief have in your life at the end of that period of intense activity?

Liz Lochhead25:49

And that

Liz Lochhead25:53

It can still floor me.

Liz Lochhead25:56

Drawing was the first thing that came back.

Liz Lochhead25:59

In Grief for Me. Before the writing. Ah, I couldn't write for ages. Just.

Liz Lochhead26:04

But I remember even a month after being up at the caravan, I don't mean I could draw well, but I mean I could lose myself in drawing. I do love performing and I do love being outgoing, but I also need a lot of time to myself and to write, and I do spend a lot of time by myself. So I'd probably be

Liz Lochhead26:25

Quite used to some of the aspects of being on a desert island. Before we get to.

Presenter26:30

I want you to tell me about this then. This is your seventh piece of music.

Liz Lochhead26:33

Well, this is um when I invented a party to invite my husband, who I didn't know was going to be my husband. Uh when I invented a party for him to come over to, um, this is uh the thing he danced to. It's Marvin Gay's I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Speaker 426:54

Oh, I bet you wonder how I do

Speaker 426:57

I'm chosen man.

Speaker 427:01

What's up with the girl?

Speaker 427:03

New before

Speaker 427:05

Two of us guys, you know I love you more

Speaker 427:09

It took me by surprise I'm a safe

Speaker 427:14

When I found my casting over

Presenter27:23

That was Marvin Gaye, and I heard it through the grapevine. You said, Liz Lockhead, that was played at the party that was invented.

Presenter27:30

We've come this far and we really haven't talked at all about all the plays that you've written. You've you've penned original things for the stage, including Mary's Queen of Scots Got Herhe Chopped Off, there was the Olivier-nominated Perfect Days, but you've done lots of adaptations too, and you know, Moliere and Chekhov and so on. Difficult, tough, big things that are known and have reputations. It must be a much more collaborative uh process when you write for the stage, and that seems very different to me from the process of being a poet alone struggling with the word.

Liz Lochhead27:31

Get Tom along to the flat.

Liz Lochhead28:02

With the words. Well, your own writing your own original plays is not so very different. I mean, in a way, Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off as a big poem, in a way. Right. I mean, there's a story in it and all that. Well, working with um Euripides is very good because you've got all the hard work done, you just get the language stuff and the fun. I've done three Molaires, for instance. They're all written in in rhyme in French, so I think they should rhyme when you translate them into English, or in my case, very strongly Scots inflected English.

Presenter28:32

Do you think experience makes your writing richer?

Liz Lochhead28:36

Oh yes, it's got to, hasn't it? Well, there's got to be SOME consolation.

Presenter28:37

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead28:42

For your boobs going on National Geographic, hasn't that?

Presenter28:48

Um tell me then, how do you imagine your island? Because surely you will have imagined it.

Liz Lochhead28:54

Oh yes. I'm very lucky in my island. It's the kind of island where breadfruit bakes itself in the sun and falls out of the trees onto your lap and there's lots of lovely fruit. And these fish are dying to jump into this improvised net that I've had to make out of an old pair of tights or whatever. If I can keep my energy and my creative bit going, then I'll be able to keep my optimism alive that I'm going to be rescued because I am going to be dying to be rescued. I don't know, I'll be having my second childhood in the island, but all the time I'll be hoping to be rescued and taken back to where I can go to the movies, you know. Tell me about your final piece of music, Liz Lockhead. Well, my final piece of music, it's got to stand in for all the Mozart I love, and that's got to stand in for all the Sebelius and all the Philip Glass and all the Kutwell and all the things I couldn't put in. But after my mother died, my dad and I began to kind of go out a wee bit. Now and again, not nearly enough, because he died.

Presenter29:32

Yeah.

Liz Lochhead29:51

Very unexpectedly, just about a year after my mum died, and that was very tough for both my sister and me. But um but we went to the opera. We went to the opera and um um we had a ticket for for going back to the opera again to another one that we never made. I mean it tells me to keep doing things when it's time. But we went to see Don Giovanni in the Theatre Royal and um it was great, you know, because my dad was you know a a good singer, you know, just just an ordinary tenor voice. But um we went to see Don Giovanni and we both enjoyed it very, very much indeed. And my dad said afterwards, thank you for your company.

Speaker 430:29

Oh not divine bliss.

Speaker 430:37

Any other

Speaker 430:41

Oh but it's beyond the

Speaker 431:01

Shiva Solomon

Presenter31:06

Oh good love.

Speaker 431:07

Hallelujah.

Presenter31:17

That was Laci darem La Mano from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, sung by Ferruccio Folanetto with Joan Rogers. The music was played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Daniel Barrambon. And that was the most beautiful

Liz Lochhead31:30

Beautiful love song sung by the most faithless rogue ever born. And that's what we should always remember. We only know part of the story.

Presenter31:38

Let's turn then, Liz Lockhead, now to the books. I give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Liz Lochhead31:39

The text

Liz Lochhead31:45

Duke is a king

Presenter31:45

James Bible, if you so wish.

Liz Lochhead31:48

Definitely. None of that New English Bible flat thing. No, The King James, please. Righto, and you get to take another book along with you. What's it going to be? Well, it's, I wish it could be a fantasy book. I wish it could be the collected stories of Alice Monroe, who I first read in Canada 40 years ago. And she just has remained my favourite writer. But if you're going to make it a real book, because all our collected stories would be huge, there's two selected Alice Munro short story books, and one called Lying Under the Apple Tree, which was just a few years old. And she was the first person that I could read again in the depths of grief. And I've re-read all these things. So I won't be reading anything new on the island, but I will be because every time I read an Alice Monroe story, it is like a book, and there's always something new. And I would use her to try and teach myself how to write short stories. And what about your luxury? Oh, my luxury, that was easy. It's a big kiddies' art kit, full of cheap felt-tip pens, and also these wonderful big fat pencils that they do just now, which are kind of chubby things. Lots and lots of paper, and also glitter and gloy, because I couldn't make anything useful, but I would like to mix sand with glitter and different colours, and just to play about like a kid with both words and stuff, and to have to kind of become the kind of child I was whenever I got into that bedroom of my own New York Till when I was four.

Presenter33:24

Okay, that great big art kit then is yours. And wh which of these discs would be the one that you would save?

Liz Lochhead33:24

Okay.

Liz Lochhead33:30

Gosh, I think it would have to be Green Grow the Rashes O by Michael Mara.

Presenter33:36

It's yours. Liz Loched, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you so much, Kirstie.

Presenter34:26

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.

Liz Lochhead34:59

This is the B B C.