Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Lauren Laverne
A writer who creates fantastic alternative realities beneath the everyday world, best known for 'Sandman', 'Coraline', and 'American Gods'.
Eight records
I was always a sucker for words. I loved words and I loved stories. So I fell completely in love with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars because it felt like there was a story. There was even if I didn't know the details. And the song that it always ended on was Rock and Roll Suicide.
The Nightmare Song (from Iolanthe)
John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
I was taken by my aunt Diane, who would die at a very young age of leukemia a couple of years later, to the King's Theatre to see Iolanthe … I would have been three years old, and the words became almost a kind of invocation if I would get too upset or too troubled, I would sing it to myself, and it's the nightmare song.
It's an evocation of of Soho in the nineteen sixties, but the Soho that I came to as a young writer in the early nineteen eighties wasn't that much removed … from the Soho that Al Stewart was singing about. And it was one of the very few times that I actually felt, ah, I'm I'm in my place, this place, this weird Denmark street, a long gone pub called the Cafe München in which all of the people interested in comics would hang out. That was where my people were and that was where my life wound up being centered.
Len Cariou and the original Broadway cast of Sweeney Todd
In about 1992 or 1993, the National Theatre put on a production of Sweeney Todd. And I just moved to America and I had the kind of flight where your flight is delayed and then it's delayed again and then the plane they were going to fly you out on didn't work … and you have this flight to the UK and you land and I just remember being so tired, so sad, so hungry and then going to see Sweeney Todd at the Cottesloe sitting in the front row getting splashed by blood and thinking this is the best thing that's ever happened to me in the theatre. This makes up for everything.
This song was actually where I found my daughter Holly's name. And years and years later, when Holly was at college, she said to me, you know, I wish you'd play me some of those songs that used to be on playlists and on cassettes when we'd go for a drive. What about Walk on the Wild Side? … And I played her Walk on the Wild Side. And as it finished, she looked at me and she said, so hang on. She said, I'm named after a trans person in a Lou Reed song. And I said, well, yes, yes, you are. And she looked at me and she said, oh, Dad, I do love you.
I was at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1991. A young man named Rance Hoseley came up to me, handed me a cassette, and said, It's by a friend of mine, and she sings about you on one of the tracks. Please don't sue her. And I played it through and then put it back on and played it through again. So I called her and said, You're brilliant. And that was Tori Amos. And the song that she sang about me on, and more importantly that she sang about the Sandman comics which she'd encountered and loved, was called Tear in Your Hand.
Bees in TreesFavourite
As I get older, there are more and more musicians, songwriters that I find it difficult to listen to because I stop and listen to the words more and more. So I find I need instrumental music … Some of my favourite music for the last thirty years has been Michael Nyman's film scores … I can put one on and it's just bliss. I smile and I start to write. So this is a track called Bees in Trees, and it's from Drowning by Numbers, which is one of my favorite films.
Like most of the songs, I think I love it because it's a story and because the edges feel permeable, and I can wonder who the people in the story are, and I can wonder about whether or not it's a love song or a ghost story, whether it's about comfort. I love the idea that there aren't really any answers there, but it always makes me wonder.
The keepsakes
The book
Gene Wolfe
it's a book that gets deeper and wiser and stranger as I come back to it older
The luxury
an antique accounts ledger and a fountain pen with unlimited sepia ink
I would obviously need a pen... and I'd like an unlimited amount of ink, preferably a sort of a sepia colour
In conversation
Presenter asks
So much of your writing features secret doorways or magical portals to somewhere else. What are you searching for, or should it be running from?
I think it's more of a searching for than a running from, a search for infinite possibilities.
Presenter asks
One of the few forms you haven't attempted yet is an autobiography, although your novel 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' infuses a fantastic adventure with details from your own early life. Why did you take that approach?
I loved the freedom of making things up, and I loved the fact that you can draw conclusions in fiction. You can take things to places that you can't ever really take them in real life because … You never get closure in real life. … I also think sometimes you can get truer in fiction than you can in real life. Partly because fiction needs to be convincing and real life doesn't need to be convincing.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the writer Neil Gaiman, the author of Stardust, Sandman, Coraline, American Gods, and The Graveyard Book. He specializes in creating fantastic alternative realities, which usually exist under the nose of the world as we know it.
Presenter
You could say he's pulled off this trick in his career too. His comic books clinched literature's highest prizes, his fantasy stories slipped into the mainstream, and his children's books, once deemed too terrifying to publish, have become family favourites. Yes, there is another world inside our own, one in which forty-five million Neil Gaiman fans have enjoyed a welcome break from the humdrum through one of his books, and many more via his stories on stage, film, and television, including Good Omens with David Tennant and Michael Sheen. Growing up in East Grinstead, stories were an escape for him too. Back then, he could usually be found in his local library, and when he was obliged to attend family functions, he had to be frisked for books on entry to ensure he didn't disappear as soon as he found a quiet corner. He says, I never feel the past is dead, or that young Neil isn't around any more. He's still there, hiding in a library, looking for a doorway that will lead him somewhere safe, where everything works. Neil Gaiman, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you so much. So, Neil, so much of your writing features secret doorways or magical portals to somewhere else. What are you searching for, or should it be running from?
Neil Gaiman
I think it's more of a searching for than a running from, a search for infinite possibilities.
Neil Gaiman
When I was a kid, we we lived in the servants' quarters of a big old house which had been divided into two. But because it had been divided into two, we got one nice room, which was the original drawing room, and it had a door on each side. One door would have led to the kitchens that the servants would have used, and that was open. One door would have led into the fancy main house, and that was bricked up.
Neil Gaiman
And I used to try and sneak up on the door. I'd I'd approach it without looking and open it suddenly, and it would always be.
Neil Gaiman
a brick wall. But I was convinced that if I just approached that door right, and opened it correctly, it would take me somewhere.
Presenter
One of the few forms you haven't attempted yet is an autobiography, although your novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, infuses a fantastic adventure with details from your own early life. Why did you take that approach?
Neil Gaiman
I loved the freedom of making things up, and I loved the fact that you can draw conclusions in fiction. You can take things to places that you can't ever really take them in real life because
Neil Gaiman
You never get closure in real life. The people that you'd really like to talk to and get answers from are often dead. And I also think sometimes you can get truer in fiction than you can in real life. Partly because fiction needs to be convincing and real life doesn't need to be convincing. I think anybody who takes a a sort of clear-eyed look at the last two years on the in the world, it's incredibly unconvincing. It just happened to have happened.
Presenter
Time for your first disc then, Neil Gaiman. What's it gonna be?
Neil Gaiman
I was always a sucker for words. I loved words and I loved stories. So I fell completely in love with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars because it felt like there was a story. There was even if I didn't know the details. And the song that it always ended on was Rock and Roll Suicide. It seemed to be the story of a ghost, whether a living ghost or a post-death ghost, I could never quite tell. But I felt like I was in a story, and I felt like, again, there was infinite possibility.
Speaker 1
Time takes a cigarette.
Speaker 1
Puts it in your mouth.
Speaker 1
Uh Along your finger.
Speaker 1
Then another finger, then cigarette.
Speaker 1
But what the wall is called
Presenter
Falling
Presenter
It lingers, then you forget.
Presenter
Oh, ho, ho, ho, you're a rock'n'bolt suicide.
Presenter
David Bowie and Rock and Roll Suicide. Neil Gaiman, I want to take you back to yourself as a little kid. By your own account, you were scared a lot, and fear often stalks your stories as an adult. What were you frightened of as a little boy?
Neil Gaiman
You name it. I can uh you know, what have you got? Definitely the dark?
Neil Gaiman
shadows, witches, anything that really did exist, and anything that didn't.
Presenter
And that overactive imagination, obviously, you couldn't switch it off when you needed to.
Neil Gaiman
I used to r genuinely envy kids who didn't have imaginations, who weren't populating the shadows with things. I knew I couldn't switch it off, and I thought of that as my big weakness, and did not realize that one day I'd grow up and that will be my superpower.
Presenter
You were born in Portchester, in Hampshire, and the eldest of three kids. Your father, David, was a shopkeeper, and your mother, Sheila, a pharmacist. How well do you think your parents understood you, this bookish, comic loving, often frightened kid?
Neil Gaiman
I was kind of a cuckoo in the nest, and one though that they adored and they loved me for me. It honestly wasn't until my son Michael grew up and became a hockey playing kid and I saw the incredible amounts of pride with which my sporty father
Neil Gaiman
Regarded my sporty sons, and I thought, oh, I never got to see this thing. That never happened with me. I was the kid who could never score a goal or a run or actually accurately catch a ball or anything. You know, I wasn't that kid. I was very good at dropping balls and I was also very, very good at daydreaming on a football pitch until something large, wet, and leathery hit me in the side of the face and people shouted because I should have been paying attention. And wherever I was, I wasn't really there.
Presenter
One thing you did have in common with your father by the sounds of it, though, was an ability to tell stories. Your father was a raconteur, and he loved to hold an audience. How do you picture him in your mind's eye when you think back to that?
Neil Gaiman
The kinds of adult parties that I would get to creep into. And I would head over to him, and the rooms would always be completely filled with cigarette smoke. And I would creep in, avoiding the cigarettes, and he'd make everybody lean in and listen. And as long as you're interesting, I realized you could set your own pace.
Presenter
Your mother taught you to read when you were four. What type of books did you enjoy?
Neil Gaiman
She ordered books for me from the local bookshop.
Neil Gaiman
And then we'd go together to pick them up. One time it was a children's Hiawatha. One time it was an illustrated I think the illustrator was Margaret Tarrant, Pied Piper of Hamlin. And then she got me a children's mikado after I became a tiny Gilbert and Sullivan in PCS. So I would have been three. But she got me these big illustrated books and they were my delight. They were my lifeblood.
Presenter
If I would have been
Presenter
It's time for your second piece of music, Neil Gaming. What are we going to hear?
Neil Gaiman
Rather unsurprisingly, it's a piece of Gilbert and Sullivan. I was taken by my aunt Diane, who would die at a very young age of leukemia a couple of years later, to the King's Theatre to see Ayalanthe
Neil Gaiman
I would have been three years old, and the words became almost a kind of invocation if I would get too upset or too troubled, I would sing it to myself, and it's the nightmare song.
Presenter
When you're lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety. For your brain is on fire, the bentos conspire, of usual slumber to plunder you. First, you counterbane goes and uncovers your toes, and your sheet slips demurely from under you. Then the blanketing tingles you feel like mixed pickles, so terribly sharp is the pricking. And you're hot and you're cross and you tumble and toss till there's nothing twixt you and the ticking. Then the beddles will creep to the ground in a heap and you pick them all up in a tangle. The Nightmare Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, performed by John Reed and the Doily Cart Opera Company, conducted by Isidore Godfrey. Neil Gaiman, you've written, I was not a happy child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else. What did books give you that the real world couldn't?
Neil Gaiman
I want
Presenter
Yeah.
Neil Gaiman
Yeah.
Neil Gaiman
Comfort friends. I wasn't very good at friends as a kid.
Neil Gaiman
Books didn't let you down, books wouldn't make fun of you, books were sensible.
Presenter
And did people let you down and make fun of you?
Neil Gaiman
I think sometimes I definitely felt like an outsider and I probably was. It wasn't until I'd been a father three times that I finally came to the conclusion that actually kids don't automatically alphabetize their bookshelves. That was just me.
Presenter
I mentioned in the introduction, Neil, that you had to be frisked for books before family gatherings. I mean, that is pretty hardcore. Who would who would do the deeds? Who would kind of pat you down?
Neil Gaiman
My dad, always my dad, and he would literally pat me down because I had been known to hide books between, you know, under my jumper and he would lock them in the car. And it never really worked, because wherever we were, I could normally find something to read. It just wouldn't have been what I wanted to read. But suddenly, you know, I'd be at a family gathering and I'd be off in the corner reading The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Roston or something, because it was the book that I found.
Presenter
Time for some more music, I think, Neil Gaiman. Disc number three, what are we going to hear and why are you taking this with you to the island?
Neil Gaiman
It's an avocation of of Soho in the nineteen sixties, but the Soho that I came to as a young writer in the early nineteen eighties wasn't that much removed.
Speaker 1
What
Neil Gaiman
from the Soho that Al Stewart was singing about. And it was one of the very few times that I actually felt, ah, I'm I'm in my place, this place, this weird Denmark street, a long gone pub called the Cafe München in which all of the people interested in comics would hang out. That was where my people were and that was where my life wound up being centered.
Presenter
Rainstone, brainstorm, faces in the maelstrom Huddle by the panels in the shadows where the dreams drum Hot talks, wet pots flicking up the sidewalk Feet disappearing into the blue shop Rainbow Q stun down by the new stand Waiting for the late show
Presenter
Embossed in our minds in free fall Chocolate colour ladies naked eyes through the smoke ball So how we need us to say
Presenter
I'm alone on your streets on a Friday I've been here all of the day
Presenter
Soho, Needless to Say, by Al Stewart. Neil Gaiman, you've said you didn't connect with your classmates, and some of your teachers didn't know what to make of you either. I'm thinking in particular of your English teacher, mister Wright.
Neil Gaiman
Actually, that was sad because he was a teacher that I really did connect with. And he took me aside somewhere in my first term and just said, Look, you are answering the questions and you know all the answers and you're great at this and you're going to get into trouble. Don't try and answer the questions and you should just be fitting in. And I went, Oh, okay, that's interesting. I thought it was my job to get fabulous marks on things, but obviously it isn't. I'm getting this entire thing wrong.
Presenter
Do you think he thought you were gonna get picked on? Probably.
Neil Gaiman
Blink? Yeah.
Neil Gaiman
I'm not sure that he was wrong.
Neil Gaiman
It's very hard for me to look back at decisions and things that happened and go, Well, that was a bad thing, because without those things happening, I wouldn't have become me.
Presenter
When you were a teenager, you attended Whitgift School. Now that's High Church Anglican, but you yourself had Jewish ancestry and parents who were Scientologists with senior roles in the church. What impact did those contrasting religious doctrines have on you, personally? I think
Neil Gaiman
The great thing for me was you always felt on the outside of everything. It's not a bad place to be when it comes to religion or when it comes to anything for a writer. You know, I loved religion. I still do. I love religions. I love myths. I love systems of belief. And I can love them without ever feeling that I'm 100% a part of them.
Presenter
It's time for your next Disc Nail Gaming What's It Gonna Be and Why?
Neil Gaiman
In about 1992 or 1993, the National Theatre put on a production of Sweeney Todd. And I just moved to America and I had the kind of flight where your flight is delayed and then it's delayed again and then the plane they were going to fly you out on didn't work and finally it's two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning and a plane turns up and just before they take off they apologize because no food. It was meant to have been delivered, it wasn't delivered, but they're flying anyway. And you have this flight to the UK and you land and I just remember being so tired, so sad, so hungry and then going to see Sweeney Todd at the Cottislow sitting in the front row getting splashed by blood and thinking this is the best thing that's ever happened to me in the theatre. This makes up for everything.
Presenter
But tend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
Presenter
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
Presenter
He shaved the faces of gentlemen Who never thereafter were heard of again. He trod a path that few have trod. Did sweetie todd.
Presenter
A dave and barber of Fleet Street.
Presenter
He kept a shop in London town.
Presenter
The Ballad of Sweeney Todd, performed by Len Carioux, and the original Broadway cast for the musical Sweeney Todd, composed by Stephen Sondheim. Great tickets by the sounds of it, Lee Gabon. Front row.
Neil Gaiman
Front row
Neil Gaiman
Yeah.
Presenter
Neil Gaiman, after leaving school, you decided to try your luck as a journalist, but you didn't know any editors. How did you get started?
Neil Gaiman
I I cheerfully lied appallingly, and I would pitch them articles and pitch them stories, and they would say, Well, sounds good. Who else have you written for?
Neil Gaiman
And I didn't have any credits at that point, so I would lie. I've written for Time Out, I've written for City Limits, I've written for The Sunday Times magazine. And actually, over the next five years, I did make it a point of honor to write for everybody that I said that I had written for. So it wasn't a lie in the long run. Well, but I was chronologically challenged, but.
Neil Gaiman
That was absolutely a lie. But you couldn't do it now. You would be googled.
Presenter
You began writing books around this time, too. One of your early ones was a companion to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that job sent you in another direction, didn't it?
Neil Gaiman
After I'd written the Hitchhiker book, I thought, well, I sh I wonder if I could write one of these myself. And I started a book. I wrote the first five thousand words of a book. At the time it was called William the Antichrist.
Neil Gaiman
And then suddenly Sandman happened. And somewhere in, I think about the sixth month of writing Sandman, when the phone rang, and it was my friend Terry Pratchett. And he said, Yeah, that thing that you sent me, are you doing anything with it? And I said, No, I'm currently up to my eyes in Sandman and stuff. And he said, Well, I know what happens next. So I think either you should sell me the chunk you wrote, or we should write it together. And I said, We should write it together, because that for me was honestly the equivalent of Michelangelo ringing you up and saying, Here, do you want to paint a ceiling together this weekend? I just thought I'm never going to get the chance to have.
Neil Gaiman
Essentially, an apprenticeship.
Neil Gaiman
On a book, and that's what I'm gonna get with Terry.
Presenter
And that collaboration became Good Omens, which was published in nineteen ninety. Let's turn to the music Neil Gaiman, your fifth disc today. What have you chosen and why?
Neil Gaiman
This song was actually where I found my daughter Holly's name. And years and years later, when Holly was at college, she said to me, you know, I wish you'd play me some of those songs that used to be on playlists and on cassettes when we'd go for a drive. What about Walk on the Wild Side? You used to play that. And I said, yes, in fact, you were named after that. And I played her Walk on the Wild Side. And as it finished, she looked at me and she said, so hang on. She said, I'm named after a trans person in a Lou Reed song. And I said, well, yes, yes, you are. And she looked at me and she said, oh, Dad, I do love you.
Speaker 2
Holly came from Miami, FLA.
Speaker 2
Hitchhiked away across USA.
Speaker 2
Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved her legs and then he was a she She says hey babe take a walk on the wild side
Speaker 2
Said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.
Presenter
Lou Reed and A Walk on the Wild Side. So Neil Gaiman, you'd always read comics from childhood and by the mid eighties you started writing script and graphic novels with your friend, the illustrator Dave McKean. What is the appeal of the form to you?
Neil Gaiman
Particularly in the 80s, the biggest appeal was the idea that you had an art form which was mostly untouched. That there was this amazing art form, but people had written it off as being solely for children or sub-literates. And there was something gloriously perverse in the 80s about going, I think I want to do, I want to become a writer and I want to do it in comics where nobody's looking. I want to be... This isn't even gutter literature. This is way below the level of the gutter. We're looking up and we can see the gutter above us. And this is where we want to make art.
Presenter
By 1989, Neil, you'd started writing the Sandman series for DC Comics, and Sandman changed everything for you. Norman Mailer called it a comic strip for intellectuals. It outsold Superman and Batman. It was the first comic ever to win a major literary award. Did you enjoy the fame that came along with all that success?
Neil Gaiman
I was definitely worried about disappointing people.
Neil Gaiman
A sort of feeling of going, well, I'm I'm not very interesting, but I think I'll be somebody who wears dark glasses in a big leather jacket so that at least people have an idea in their heads of what a Neil Gaiman looks like, and he can wear dark glasses in a big leather jacket.
Presenter
That when they
Neil Gaiman
The uniform happened. That was the beginning of the uniform. Well, the uniform had the always in black uniform had happened in my late 20s. It just seemed incredibly simple. I looked at myself one day and I thought, black t-shirt, black jeans, black sweaters, black jackets. You don't really ever have to worry about what you're going to wear in the morning. The only problem really is if you're living out of a suitcase and everything is black.
Presenter
The uniform black.
Neil Gaiman
You're kind of doomed. You're grabbing for things and holding them up to the light to try and figure out where the underpants are or the socks.
Presenter
I think we better have some more music, Neil Gaiman. Disc number six. What is it?
Neil Gaiman
I was at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1991.
Neil Gaiman
A young man named Rance Hoseley came up to me, handed me a cassette, and said, It's by a friend of mine, and she sings about you on one of the tracks. Please don't sue her.
Neil Gaiman
And I played it through and then put it back on and played it through again. So I called her and said, You're brilliant. And that was Torre Amos. And the song that she sang about me on, and more importantly that she sang about the Sandman comics which she'd encountered and loved, was called Tear in Your Hand.
Presenter
All the world just stops moving
Presenter
So you say you don't wanna stay till
Speaker 2
No.
Presenter
Together anymore
Presenter
Have it take a deep breath, babe.
Speaker 2
Uh
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 2
If you need me in any way
Speaker 2
Hanging out with the Dream King Guess you'd hide by the way
Speaker 2
I don't believe you
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Presenter
A Tear in Your Hand by Tori Amos. Neil Gaiman, you wrote your first children's book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, in 1997. Where did the idea for that come from?
Neil Gaiman
The idea, like most of my children's books, was stolen from one of my children. In this case, my son Mike, he would have been four, maybe five years old.
Neil Gaiman
And I'd said something to him that he didn't like, like possibly suggesting to him that it was actually possibly his bedtime. And he looked up at me with a fury that only a small boy can generate. It's a special kind of fury. And he just said, I wish I didn't have a Dad. He said, I wish I had.
Neil Gaiman
And then he paused because he hadn't thought that through, and and then he said, I wish I had goldfish and he stomped off.
Neil Gaiman
And I just thought that is brilliant.
Presenter
And your daughter Holly inspired Coraline, which you wrote a few years later about a little girl who discovers a frightening parallel world behind a bricked up door.
Neil Gaiman
I started it for Holly when she was about four or five years old because those were the stories that she would tell me. She'd come home and make up these nightmarish stories about little girls having their mothers kidnapped by evil witches who would pretend to be their mothers and then imprison the little girls and they'd only have to escape. And I thought, this is what she likes, I'll write her one. And I started writing it. I showed it to my then editor, a lovely man named Richard Evans at Golanx. And he said, oh, it's wonderful. He said, it's one of the best things you've ever written. It's unpublishable. And I said, why is it unpublishable? He said, well, you're writing something aimed at both children and adults. And I don't know how anybody could publish that. And it's horror for children, and that's not publishable. Before people make fun of him, in context of 1991, he was absolutely right.
Neil Gaiman
and I stopped writing it for some years, and then one day I looked around and realized that Maddie was four years old and the same age that Holly had been. I thought, well, if I don't finish this book, she'll be too old for it too. So I I got down to work and finished it.
Presenter
Fear is an essential component of the book's message, isn't it?
Neil Gaiman
I tried.
Presenter
I just wanted
Neil Gaiman
To be able to tell myself as a seven-year-old terrified of the dark, refusing to walk home from another kid's house to our house, insisting that my parents come and get me because it was dark on the way and anything could happen. And I was terrified. I wanted to go back and say, No, it's okay to be scared. Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared.
Neil Gaiman
Being brave means you're scared and you go on and you do the right thing anyway.
Presenter
Time for some more music, Neil Gaiman. Number seven, what have you got for us?
Neil Gaiman
As I get older, there are more and more musicians, songwriters that I find it difficult to listen to because I stop and listen to the words more and more. So I find I need instrumental music. But I need instrumental music that isn't going to stop me working, that I can enjoy as an environment to work in. I hate writing in complete silence.
Neil Gaiman
Some of my favourite music for the last thirty years has been Michael Nyman's film scores, especially his Peter Greenaway.
Neil Gaiman
I can put one on and it's just bliss. I smile and I start to write. So this is a track called Bees in Trees, and it's from Drowning by Numbers, which is one of my favorite films.
Presenter
BEES INTREES by Michael Nyman, from the soundtrack to Drowning by Numbers. Neil Gaiman, you're married to the musician Amanda Palmer, and the two of you have an open marriage, and you've been very open about that, but do you have any regrets about that honesty?
Neil Gaiman
Oh, all the time, yeah.
Neil Gaiman
We both have boundaries.
Neil Gaiman
And
Presenter
Are they in the same place?
Neil Gaiman
They're not in the same place. So, you know, I think she's had to pull in from where her natural boundaries would be, in which she would love to be telling everybody everything. And I've had to walk several hundred yards beyond where my boundaries end into a world of going, okay, well, I guess I'm going to have to talk about this stuff, which, as far as I'm concerned, is private life, and I don't really want to talk about it, but Amanda is, so I have to too. And I think overall, looking back on the last, whatever we've been together now, 13 years, I'm really glad that we did. Because I think it's probably very good for me to be dragged out of my comfort zone over and over. Although I think Amanda always assumed that if she dragged me out of my comfort zone,
Neil Gaiman
I would eventually go, actually, it's fantastic here out of my comfort zone. Whoa, I love it here. I'm here in this fabulous party place with you, and this is a place that, why was I in that comfort zone? And instead, I think after 13 years, she's gone, no, he really likes it back in that comfort zone. That is actually his comfort zone.
Speaker 1
Whoa, I love it here.
Presenter
He really liked
Presenter
That sounds like a place of progress for both of you.
Neil Gaiman
I think it is.
Presenter
So Neil, I am about to cast you away from your comfort zone, of course. You are adept at creating fantasy worlds. I wonder if you have a vision of the island that awaits you.
Neil Gaiman
I read Robinson Crusoe at a very young age and Swiss Family Robinson and several of those books. So I think I assumed by the time I was seven or eight that at some point in my life I would definitely get cast away on a desert island. I used to make sure that I traveled with a tiny book that I picked up in a second-hand shop called Survival, which was the US Air Force Guide.
Neil Gaiman
to surviving if you were shot down, whether it was on Arctic tundra or in on a desert island or in Africa or whatever, and it showed you how to harvest breadfruit. I will always get lonelier than I think I'm going to get.
Neil Gaiman
But I also love the idea of getting down to work on my own schedule and assuming that there is recognizable breadfruit
Neil Gaiman
And so forth. I think I'll be okay.
Presenter
Well, one more disc before you get to find out, Neil Gaiman, what's going to be your final choice today?
Neil Gaiman
Like most of the songs, I think I love it because it's a story and because the edges feel permeable, and I can wonder who the people in the story are, and I can wonder about whether or not it's a love song or a ghost story, whether it's about comfort. I love the idea that there aren't really any answers there, but it always makes me wonder. And it's a song by English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore, and it's called Holding Your Hand.
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 2
Oh no chill
Speaker 2
I'm gonna haunt you
Speaker 2
Through the playgrounds, through the files You'll be saluting at the stars And I'll be holding your hand
Presenter
Thea Gilmore and holding your hand. All right then, Neil Gaiman, it's time. I'm going to send you away to the island. I'm giving you the books to take with you, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can also take a book of your choice. What will that be?
Neil Gaiman
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Gene died a few years ago. He was a friend of mine, an inspiration, and it's a book that gets deeper and wiser and stranger as I come back to it older. And it would also bring me back my friend Jean, who's no longer with us.
Presenter
Well, it'd be a pleasure to give you that. You can also choose a luxury item, Neil. What would you like?
Neil Gaiman
So my luxury item unsurprisingly is also a book. And this particular book I bought almost thirty years ago now in
Neil Gaiman
A very strange kind of bookshop. It was actually a converted hospital outside of Minneapolis, owned by a man called Macosh. And it was called Macosh's House of Books. And I bought an accounts ledger published, I think, in about the 1870s. And I bought it and I took it home and I went, I'm going to write a novel in you one day. And I'm going to write a novel in you, and it will be written longhand in ink.
Neil Gaiman
With a scratchy old fountain pen.
Neil Gaiman
And I would obviously need
Neil Gaiman
A pen, probably not a scratchy old fountain pen, but preferably maybe a 1920s Waterman Flexi nib pen to go along with it, so that I could at least make my handwriting look interesting. And I'd like an unlimited amount of ink, preferably a sort of a sepia colour, because it needs a sepia colour. It needs to look like it was all done back in Dickens's time.
Neil Gaiman
Of course he may have that.
Presenter
And finally, which one track of the eight that we've heard today would you save from the waves?
Neil Gaiman
I think I would take bees in trees with me, not because I love it the most.
Neil Gaiman
but because I could write to it the best.
Presenter
Neil Gaiman, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
Neil Gaiman
Thank you.
Presenter
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Neil. We're going to leave him to start that novel in the accounts ledger now. I hope you'll find some breadfruit to hand when he gets peckish. We've cast away many other writers, including Kate Atkinson, Zadie Smith, and Jilly Cooper. You can find their episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sounds, along with Neil's friends Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. Next time, my guest will be the writer and naturalist, Helen MacDonald. I do hope you'll join us.
Presenter
Hello, I'm Professor Steven Pinker. We all want to reason more clearly and to make better choices about everything from life and love to medicine and money. But even the best of us get
Neil Gaiman
Things wrong.
Speaker 1
I would have twice as many billions if I'd just made a different decision.
Neil Gaiman
I mean of course one can always learn from other people's mistakes.
Speaker 1
It's ideal to do that.
Neil Gaiman
Each episode is a conversation with an expert on rationality and someone who deals with our corresponding irrationality in real life.
Speaker 2
Rarely do we sort of walk around living out probabilities. Oh my god, wait, 90% prevalence. It's hard to sort of hold on to that in real life.
Neil Gaiman
I hope you'll join us as we try to make sense of making sense and hopefully to make better decisions.
Neil Gaiman
That's Think with Pinker from BBC Radio 4.
Presenter
Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.
Presenter asks
By your own account, you were scared a lot, and fear often stalks your stories as an adult. What were you frightened of as a little boy?
You name it. I can uh you know, what have you got? Definitely the dark? shadows, witches, anything that really did exist, and anything that didn't.
Presenter asks
You wrote your first children's book, 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish', in 1997. Where did the idea for that come from?
The idea, like most of my children's books, was stolen from one of my children. In this case, my son Mike, he would have been four, maybe five years old. … And I'd said something to him that he didn't like, like possibly suggesting to him that it was actually possibly his bedtime. And he looked up at me with a fury that only a small boy can generate. … And he just said, I wish I didn't have a Dad. He said, I wish I had. … And then he paused because he hadn't thought that through, and and then he said, I wish I had goldfish and he stomped off. And I just thought that is brilliant.
Presenter asks
You're married to the musician Amanda Palmer, and the two of you have an open marriage, and you've been very open about that, but do you have any regrets about that honesty?
Oh, all the time, yeah. … We both have boundaries. … They're not in the same place. So, you know, I think she's had to pull in from where her natural boundaries would be, in which she would love to be telling everybody everything. And I've had to walk several hundred yards beyond where my boundaries end into a world of going, okay, well, I guess I'm going to have to talk about this stuff, which, as far as I'm concerned, is private life, and I don't really want to talk about it, but Amanda is, so I have to too. … I'm really glad that we did. Because I think it's probably very good for me to be dragged out of my comfort zone over and over.
“I used to r genuinely envy kids who didn't have imaginations, who weren't populating the shadows with things. I knew I couldn't switch it off, and I thought of that as my big weakness, and did not realize that one day I'd grow up and that will be my superpower.”
“The great thing for me was you always felt on the outside of everything. It's not a bad place to be when it comes to religion or when it comes to anything for a writer. You know, I loved religion. I still do. I love religions. I love myths. I love systems of belief. And I can love them without ever feeling that I'm 100% a part of them.”
“Particularly in the 80s, the biggest appeal was the idea that you had an art form which was mostly untouched. That there was this amazing art form, but people had written it off as being solely for children or sub-literates. And there was something gloriously perverse in the 80s about going, I think I want to do, I want to become a writer and I want to do it in comics where nobody's looking. I want to be... This isn't even gutter literature. This is way below the level of the gutter. We're looking up and we can see the gutter above us. And this is where we want to make art.”
“I was definitely worried about disappointing people. … A sort of feeling of going, well, I'm I'm not very interesting, but I think I'll be somebody who wears dark glasses in a big leather jacket so that at least people have an idea in their heads of what a Neil Gaiman looks like, and he can wear dark glasses in a big leather jacket.”
“Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. Being brave means you're scared and you go on and you do the right thing anyway.”
“I read Robinson Crusoe at a very young age and Swiss Family Robinson and several of those books. So I think I assumed by the time I was seven or eight that at some point in my life I would definitely get cast away on a desert island. I used to make sure that I traveled with a tiny book that I picked up in a second-hand shop called Survival, which was the US Air Force Guide to surviving if you were shot down, whether it was on Arctic tundra or in on a desert island or in Africa or whatever, and it showed you how to harvest breadfruit.”