Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
Comedian, composer, pianist, and actor, successful in all four careers.
Eight records
Kyrie from Mass in B minor, BWV 232
This always makes my hair stand on end. It it sort of… It makes me feel very refreshed and sane after I've heard it.
They appeal to me, especially because they're jazz musicians who are working in a pop idiom and that is interesting me very much at the moment. I think pop is… giving jazz a tremendous boost in spirit and this is why I'm particularly fond of this record.
Excerpt from Kindertotenlieder
She has one of the most moving voices I've ever heard and I think it's probably for the voice as much as the music that I've chosen this particular record.
Dudley Moore (from Beyond the Fringe)
It's a satire on the Benjamin Britton style of folk song writing with a Peter Peirce type voice. I must stress, however, I do this out of absolute love and admiration for Britain with no malice of forethought at all.
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
Duke Ellington and his Orchestra
because of the fantastic feeling of what can only be called swing, but is generated. It's an Ellington record, part of the Diminuendo and Crescendo in blues with the solo by Paul González. I think it's one of the most exciting jazz records I've ever heard and you can hear the crowd getting carried away in the background.
Six Bagatelles for String Quartet
I chose this because I first became acquainted with them through the Juilliard string quartet. I know the first violinist rather well and he sort of fired an enthusiasm for chamber music in me. They're pieces that are whispers and mutterings and grunts of a man who worked in miniature with great affection and I'm not totally familiar with these pieces and I would rather enjoy getting to know them on the beach.
I've chosen it really because it myself playing with a string background and it's a memory of the the thrill that I felt when I first heard this orchestration that I'd done coming back at me and it also has very sentimental associations for me.
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 'Eroica' – Marcia funebre (slow movement)Favourite
Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra
something that, again, makes my spine go a bit peculiar. It's the Beethoven Eroica Symphony, the slow movement and specifically the fugal part of it, which really sets my hair on end.
The keepsakes
The book
Virginia Woolf (or various)
The luxury
But it'll have to be a piano, although I don't know how it's going to stand up to the hurricanes and so forth. It will be an upright piano, of course.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Apart from the loneliness, what would be the worst thing about a desert island existence?
I don't know. The loneliness actually rather appeals to me. The only thing is that I do go a bit spare after about… 12 hours on my own. I went on holiday once to Positano for two weeks on my own. In fact, I spent two days there and I just went absolutely berserk. So I have a feeling that I'd start talking to myself or screaming from the top of lonely sand dunes and doing all sorts of peculiar things.
Presenter asks
What would you want records to do for you on a desert island?
I think probably just remind me of the life I've left behind. I've chosen most of them for nostalgic reasons.
Presenter asks
And then you gained an organ scholarship to Oxford?
Yes, I had a disastrous attempt for an organ scholarship at Cambridge, in which I was so nervous that I could hardly put one finger right, or even foot, as I was playing the organ. So the next time I tried at Oxford I thought, well, I'll just relax completely and luckily I got it.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
B B C Sounds Music, Radio, Podcasts.
Speaker 1
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.
Presenter
This week, ladies and gentlemen, our castaway is someone who's doing very nicely at each of four different careers, as comedian, composer, pianist, and actor. It's Dudley Moore.
Presenter
Dudley, apart from the loneliness, what would be the worst thing about a desert island existence?
Presenter
I don't know. The loneliness actually rather appeals to me. The only thing is that I do go a bit spare after about...
Presenter
12 hours on my own. I went on holiday once to Positano for two weeks on my own. In fact, I spent two days there and I just went absolutely berserk. So I have a feeling that I'd start.
Presenter
talking to myself or screaming from the top of lonely sand dunes and doing all sorts of peculiar things.
Presenter
Do you play records a lot?
Presenter
I don't a great deal. I do it uh odd moments.
Presenter
When I can't sleep perhaps, I'll play a record. And as it's late at night, generally, I put on my headphones and pump the music in loud and strong.
Presenter
What would you want records to do for you on a desert island?
Presenter
I think probably just remind me of the life I've left behind. I've chosen most of them for nostalgic reasons. What's the first one? The first one is the Bach B minor Mass, the Kyrie Élaison.
Presenter
This always makes my hair stand on end. It it sort of
Presenter
It makes me feel very refreshed and sane after I've heard it.
Dudley Moore
He's fired.
Presenter
An excerpt from the Kerrier Eliaison.
Presenter
of Bach's B minor Mass, a performance conducted by Karl Richter. What's your secondary?
Presenter
The second record is a complete contrast. It's spinning wheels sung by a group called Blood, Sweat and Tears. They appeal to me, especially because they're jazz musicians who are working in a pop idiom and that is interesting me very much at the moment. I think pop is...
Presenter
giving jazz a tremendous boost in spirit and this is why I'm particularly fond of this record.
Speaker 3
What goes up?
Speaker 3
Must come down.
Speaker 3
Spinning wheel
Speaker 3
Got to go round.
Speaker 3
Talking bout your troubles, it's a crying sin.
Speaker 3
Ride a painted pony, let the spinning wheel spin.
Speaker 3
You got no money.
Presenter
Spinning wheel by blood, sweat and tears. Dutley, are you a Londoner? Yes, I lived most of my early life in Dagenham, just outside London, but I've lived in London since I was about 22. Yes.
Presenter
Do you come from a middle school family?
Presenter
My mother plays the piano and she came from a family of about nine or ten and everybody played within the family. Yes. Were you put to the piano as the saying is? I was in a sense. I wanted to learn the violin but my mother said that I should learn the piano first as it might give me a more complete...
Presenter
knowledge of music and I think she was right there. Were you an instinctive musician or was it a hard song to start with? I was an instinctive musician and in fact I only decided to do it
Presenter
I do music professionally when I was about 16. I wanted to be a maths teacher at first, but through sheer laziness, I think I finally turned to a subject that I did with most ease, which was music. Well, maths and music have always gone together, yes, they have, yes. You started at the Guildhall School of Music.
Speaker 1
There's music.
Presenter
Yes, mainly at school, but then at the Guildhall on Saturday mornings when I used to learn the violin and organ and all sorts of...
Presenter
Other things connected with music, oral training, history of music, and so forth.
Presenter
And then you gained an organ scholarship to Oxford? Yes, I had a disastrous attempt for an organ scholarship at Cambridge, in which I was so nervous that I could hardly put one finger right, or even foot, as I was playing the organ. So the next time I tried at Oxford.
Presenter
I thought, well, I'll just relax completely and luckily I got it. Yes. Well, we had two artistic careers.
Presenter
separately at the university, a serious one composing the music for Antony and Cleopatra and the birds by Aristophanes and that sort of thing. And you were also the university's favourite funny man.
Presenter
Well, I started doing cabaret when I was about two and a half years into my time at Oxford. I started fooling around between the acts of plays that I was appearing in and got invited to perform. And from there it took off and I went into review and that sort of thing.
Dudley Moore
Yeah.
Presenter
Good. And you came down with two degrees, your Mazbach and BA. Yes. And what was the first job they got you?
Presenter
Well, I don't know that they've ever really got me anything. I think my very first job was playing in a place called the Café des Artistes in the Fulham Road for about 10 Bob a night. You wouldn't have got as much as that if you hadn't had two degrees. No, exactly. It might have been five Bob, I think.
Presenter
And then I started doing all sorts of odds and ends, jingles, incidental music for the Royal Court, theatre, and bits of cabaret and so forth.
Presenter
You were toured the United States with the Big Lewis back. That's right, yes, and I stayed on there for a couple of weeks doing auditions for various shows, playing in a little bar in Greenwich Village and staying at the YMCA, having a thoroughly miserable time. But I came back having had a useful experience. Yes. And the next step? Next step was I joined Johnny Dankworth and I was with him for about nine months.
Presenter
And then of course came Beyond the Fringe in 1960. Yes, well we'll talk about Beyond the Fringe in a minute. Let's have your third record.
Presenter
The third record is an excerpt from Marla's Kindertoten Leader sung by Kathleen Ferrier. She has one of the most moving voices I've ever heard and I think it's probably for the voice as much as the music that I've chosen this particular record.
Dudley Moore
God of War once or twenty.
Dudley Moore
Feel spring that we are in bones of og and bleed.
Dudley Moore
Place the moves for it.
Presenter
Kathleen Ferrier, the second of Mahler's Kinter Toten leader.
Presenter
Now beyond the fringe, Dudley, how did that start?
Presenter
Well, a friend of mine who was at Oxford with me became the assistant to the director of the Edinburgh Festival and the idea came up that
Presenter
A university review should be done as part of the official Edinburgh Festival. He asked myself from Oxford and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge to perform and asked us to suggest to other people. Jonathan suggested Peter Cook from Cambridge and I suggested Hannan Bennett from Oxford and we all got together. You all provided your own material? We provided our own solo material and then wrote the community pieces together. When it opened at Edinburgh, was it a full-length show? No, it was an hour long and when we came to London some months later we'd added another hour and made a set. Before we'd only had a piano on the stage and black velvet drapes and we wore sweaters but now we even had suits and we had a set built over the piano which was all very splendid. Oh yes indeed. And it was a review of course that broke a lot of new ground.
Presenter
How long did you play in London? Two years in London and then two years on Broadway.
Presenter
And the show, of course, was only a small part of your day. After the theatre, you would go and play piano at a club? Yes, when we were doing it in London, I played at the Establishment Club, which Peter Cook had started up in, I think, about 1961. And I had nine glorious months there, playing until about five in the morning as a trio. And in the daytime, you were composing music for plays or ballets? Yes, ballets. I did several ballets. I did a ballet for the Western Theatre.
Dudley Moore
Uh
Presenter
Ballet Company and various other bits and pieces, especially with Gillian Lynn.
Presenter
And it was after Beyond the Fringe that you and Peter Cook teamed up for your first television series? Yes, we'd come back from America and I went along to see a pilot show at the BBC and happened to bump into
Speaker 1
And about
Presenter
Joe McGrath asked whom I'd worked with.
Presenter
with on a television program.
Presenter
And he said he had an hour slot for the BBC. Would I like to do a show? And who would I like to have as a guest? And I suggested Peter.
Presenter
We did the show and a series followed from that.
Presenter
Let's have record number four.
Presenter
Record number four dates from my Beyond the Fringe days. It's called Little Miss Britton. It's a satire on the Benjamin Britton style of folk song writing with a Peter Peirce type voice. I must stress, however, I do this out of absolute love and admiration for Britain with no malice of forethought at all.
Speaker 3
Moon is my
Dudley Moore
Oh my god.
Presenter
An item from beyond the fringe.
Presenter
I since you're television teaming, you and Peter Crook have done several films together. Yes, we did Bedazzle together.
Presenter
which we wrote and appeared in and
Presenter
Then we've done Monte Carlo or bus.
Presenter
The bed sitting room, which hasn't come out yet.
Presenter
And we started off in fact with the wrong box. Peter's just done a film on his own and I did a film.
Dudley Moore
Uh
Presenter
Some years ago on my own. Yes. Thirty is a Dangerous Age Cynthia. And you've written the scores for a number of other films as well. Yes, I did the scores for Cynthia Bedazzled and I did the score for Inadmissible Evidence and The Staircase. Yes.
Presenter
And now of course you're in a straight play. Play it again sir. Yes, I'm enjoying this.
Presenter
In fact, 200% more than I ever thought I could possibly enjoy doing somebody else's material. Of course, it's by Woody Allen, the American comedian. Yes, you adapted it yourself, though. Yes, yes, put it into an English setting. And I'm on stage for most of the two hours, in fact, so it's quite an exhausting part, but I really love doing it. Are you happy with all these careers, Darlie? You don't want to specialise?
Presenter
Not really. No, I'm not happy unless all these things that I do are simmering at the same time.
Presenter
I find that if I'm performing in a play, I have a yen to compose and play jazz.
Presenter
If I'm
Presenter
exclusively playing jazz, I then have a yen to...
Presenter
perform on television or something like that. So they go together. Is there any one particular long-term ambition in any field? You talked about writing an opera at one time. Yes, I did. I talked about that till I bored myself stiff with it. I've never got round to writing it. And so I've dropped the idea, hoping that the notion will creep up on me without my being aware of it. Because if I promise myself to do something, I obviously never will.
Presenter
Let's have a record number five.
Presenter
Record number five is a record that I've chosen because of the fantastic feeling of
Presenter
what can only be called swing, but is generated. It's an Ellington record, part of the Dominuendo and Crescendo in blues with the solo by Paul González. I think it's one of the most exciting.
Presenter
jazz records I've ever heard and you can hear the crowd getting carried away in the background.
Presenter
The Duke Ellington band at the Newport Jazz Festival, Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. Watch number six.
Presenter
Number six is an excerpt from the
Presenter
Anton Weber Bagatelles for String Quartet. I chose this because I
Presenter
First became acquainted with them through the Juilliard string quartet.
Presenter
Uh
Presenter
I know the first violinist rather well and he sort of fired an enthusiasm for chamber music in me. They're pieces that are whispers and mutterings and grunts of a man who worked in miniature with great affection and I'm not totally familiar with these pieces and I would rather enjoy getting to know them on the beach.
Presenter
One of Weben's six bagatelle for string quartet played by the Proati Quartet.
Presenter
How well could you cope on this island in a practical sense?
Presenter
Very badly, I think. I can scarcely cope in normal society in a practical sense. So goodness knows what will happen on the island. I think I shall make do with...
Presenter
They odd berries and I don't think I could fish or do anything like that. What about shelter? Shelter, I just
Presenter
Try and find a a shady nook somewhere. I don't think I could build myself anything at all. A shady nook. And
Presenter
By batching broke, perhaps.
Speaker 1
Bye-bye.
Presenter
And the prospect of escape?
Presenter
Uh
Presenter
I wouldn't know how to approach it at all, unless I got into a fever of carpentry in which I could build myself a raft. Let's make it easy for you. Let's assume a raft was washed up on the beach. Would you take off on it?
Dudley Moore
Bruh.
Presenter
I don't know. I think I'd be rather hopeful that somebody would come across in a modern machine and pick me up rather than go out on some primitive raft. I think I'd stay put until rescued. Very confident of being rescued by them. Yes. Good. You are an optimist. Yes.
Dudley Moore
Do we call it?
Presenter
Fine. Let's have record number seven.
Presenter
Record 7 is an excerpt from the soundtrack of Bedazzled, Lillian Lust. I've chosen it really because
Presenter
It
Presenter
myself playing with a string background and it's a memory of the the thrill that I felt when I first heard this orchestration that I'd done coming back at me and it also has very
Presenter
sentimental associations for me. Lillian last in the film was Raquel Welsh. Yes, she was one of the seven deadly sins that I encountered through the film.
Presenter
Lillian Lust from the soundtrack of Bedazzled, which brings us to your last record. Yes, I've left out innumerable friends, of course, in my selection. But this particular record is something that, again, makes my spine go a bit peculiar. It's the...
Presenter
Beethoven Eroica Symphony, the slow movement and specifically the fugal part of it, which really sets my hair on end.
Presenter
The slow movement of Beethoven's Oreica Symphony, Otto Klempera conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Presenter
If you could take just one of the eight records you've played us, which would it be?
Presenter
Well, I think it'd have to be the Beethoven. I would feel rather lost without that particular one. And one luxury to take with you to the island?
Presenter
But it'll have to be a piano, although I don't know how it's going to stand up to the hurricanes and so forth. It will be an upright piano, of course. So with an upright piano, we'll let you have a cover. And perhaps a tuning key. And a tuning key. Oh, good. Thank you. And one book?
Presenter
This is a terrible decision. I thought of collected works of Virginia Woolf, which would be a great luxury for me. But then I thought maybe I better have some sort of comprehensive study of psychology so that I could keep my sanity in check as my mind went off into.
Presenter
Rather peculiar places in the long winter evening.
Presenter
All right, and thank you, Datlimore, for letting us hear your desert island disc. Thank you very much, Roy. Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye.
Presenter asks
Now beyond the fringe, Dudley, how did that start?
Well, a friend of mine who was at Oxford with me became the assistant to the director of the Edinburgh Festival and the idea came up that a university review should be done as part of the official Edinburgh Festival. He asked myself from Oxford and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge to perform and asked us to suggest to other people. Jonathan suggested Peter Cook from Cambridge and I suggested Hannan Bennett from Oxford and we all got together. We provided our own solo material and then wrote the community pieces together. When it opened at Edinburgh, it was an hour long and when we came to London some months later we'd added another hour and made a set. Before we'd only had a piano on the stage and black velvet drapes and we wore sweaters but now we even had suits and we had a set built over the piano which was all very splendid. And it was a review of course that broke a lot of new ground.
Presenter asks
Are you happy with all these careers? You don't want to specialise?
Not really. No, I'm not happy unless all these things that I do are simmering at the same time. I find that if I'm performing in a play, I have a yen to compose and play jazz. If I'm exclusively playing jazz, I then have a yen to perform on television or something like that. So they go together. Is there any one particular long-term ambition in any field? You talked about writing an opera at one time. Yes, I did. I talked about that till I bored myself stiff with it. I've never got round to writing it. And so I've dropped the idea, hoping that the notion will creep up on me without my being aware of it. Because if I promise myself to do something, I obviously never will.
Presenter asks
How well could you cope on this island in a practical sense?
Very badly, I think. I can scarcely cope in normal society in a practical sense. So goodness knows what will happen on the island. I think I shall make do with they odd berries and I don't think I could fish or do anything like that. Shelter, I just try and find a a shady nook somewhere. I don't think I could build myself anything at all. And the prospect of escape? I wouldn't know how to approach it at all, unless I got into a fever of carpentry in which I could build myself a raft. Let's make it easy for you. Let's assume a raft was washed up on the beach. Would you take off on it? I don't know. I think I'd be rather hopeful that somebody would come across in a modern machine and pick me up rather than go out on some primitive raft. I think I'd stay put until rescued.
“The loneliness actually rather appeals to me. The only thing is that I do go a bit spare after about 12 hours on my own.”
“I wanted to be a maths teacher at first, but through sheer laziness, I think I finally turned to a subject that I did with most ease, which was music.”
“I had a disastrous attempt for an organ scholarship at Cambridge, in which I was so nervous that I could hardly put one finger right, or even foot, as I was playing the organ.”
“I'm not happy unless all these things that I do are simmering at the same time.”
“I think I'd be rather hopeful that somebody would come across in a modern machine and pick me up rather than go out on some primitive raft. I think I'd stay put until rescued.”