Laurie Anderson

Presenter0:01

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.

Presenter0:44

My castaway this week is the artist and performer Laurie Anderson. For over 50 years, she's been using every medium imaginable to, as she puts it, tell stories. She was born in Chicago in 1947 and first came to prominence in the UK with her 1981 hit Oh Superman. Eight minutes long and inspired by an opera, its popularity was a surprise to her as much as anyone else. Originally an anthem for the dawning technological age, the song has found new resonance, recently going viral on TikTok. Technology, its possibilities, limitations, and the questions it prompts for us have often featured in her work. She started out modifying the violin she grew up playing. In the end, it could play itself. She once created an AI Bible and was NASA's first artist in residence. She must surely be the only recipient of both a Lifetime Achievement Grammy and the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.

Presenter1:41

But despite her creative success, she says I've learned the most in my life by far at the worst times, when things really fell apart, when my life was just a total mess. Maybe that's because you stop worrying about your ego and you become more open to things. Laurie Anderson, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Presenter1:59

It's so nice to be here.

Laurie Anderson2:01

Thank you.

Presenter2:02

So I know that you find beginnings in any project the hardest part, and we're at the start of the programme now. Tell us how you begin something when you're making new work.

Laurie Anderson2:13

I begin with a chart, actually. I begin with a really big um blackboard or whiteboard, and I see layout the different kinds of things I'd like to put there. And then

Laurie Anderson2:24

Figure out how to start from that. And more than that, figure out what the engine is of the story. Why are you going to tell this story?

Laurie Anderson2:34

Not necessarily how it's going to end because you can find an ending in the most unpredictable places. You know, you can have a drop-dead ending or you can have a mysterious, uh, foggy end, or or you can have a

Speaker 32:39

Yeah.

Speaker 12:39

Mm-hmm.

Laurie Anderson2:47

Da-da, sort of end, all sorts of endings.

Presenter2:50

You've had so many creative adventures, Laurie, including presenting a series of lectures when you were Professor of Poetry at Harvard. And you asked some very interesting questions of your audience. One of them was, is everything beautiful? I wondered what's your answer to that question.

Presenter3:07

That's very s

Laurie Anderson3:08

Simple, yes. Yes, everything is beautiful. Yeah.

Laurie Anderson3:11

I think for me it comes down to being able to

Laurie Anderson3:14

convince myself to be in the present and really experience what it is and not not put it on a scale of beautiful, ugly, stupid, interesting, dull, but just to being shocked to be in this present tense. So that to me is a, I would call a quote-unquote beautiful thing to be able to see things as they are, I guess.

Laurie Anderson3:39

Or try to.

Presenter3:41

Laurie, it's time for your first disc. What are we going to hear?

Laurie Anderson3:44

And what

Presenter3:44

I vitro

Laurie Anderson3:45

It today.

Laurie Anderson3:46

This is Chubby Checker singing ponytime. I was a kind of like a teenager, pre-teenager when I heard this song and it's just so much fun and I did tell you how to do it.

Speaker 13:56

Uh

Presenter3:56

Mm-hmm.

Laurie Anderson3:59

In the song, How to Dance? So the pony's the dance, right? It's the it's the pony yeah, your right fist is raised is the pony's head, and then your

Presenter4:05

Uh

Speaker 14:05

Yeah.

Presenter4:05

Right.

Laurie Anderson4:09

Hand in your hip is the pony's rump, and you're, you know, kind of line dancing. And so people would.

Laurie Anderson4:15

It wasn't that you had to get a partner. You could just dance in a room.

Laurie Anderson4:20

My uncles all had a a lot of businesses together and one of them was a roller rink. And it was a lot of fun for us because we got to make the drinks and people would come and go.

Laurie Anderson4:34

Give me a green river and you'd mix up green rivers and cokes and give them these really ridiculous drinks. Was this at the Rollerink? It was at the Roller Rink pop stand, as we called it. Yeah. The sound systems were really good and they'd be blaring all of this music while you were roller skating around. And also, because you'd be in these kind of whiplash lines. People would skate holding hands in long lines. And then you'd whip around the last person and try to make them fall. And it was really, it was brutal.

Laurie Anderson5:07

It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 35:09

Pony time. Get up!

Speaker 35:13

Hey, now that's

Speaker 35:17

Union Hall.

Speaker 35:22

Where did you do?

Speaker 35:32

Do the pony with your party brandy shoot or ever be fast?

Presenter5:38

Chubby Checker and Ponytime. Laurie Anderson, you were born in Chicago in nineteen forty seven, the second eldest of eight kids, and you grew up in the suburbs there. What are your memories of growing up as part of a big family?

Laurie Anderson5:51

That's a lot of people to be in a house, ten. And so we

Laurie Anderson5:57

We had also a lot of animals. We had so many animals. We had donkeys, ponies.

Laurie Anderson6:05

Uh we had a monkey?

Laurie Anderson6:07

Who

Laurie Anderson6:09

Bit my brother and then my mother chopped his head off and took it to Springfield, the state capitol in the south of Illinois.

Laurie Anderson6:17

to see if it had rabies. A lot of drama around animals. Uh we had cats, dogs, all kinds of birds, a toucan bird, various turtles and stuff.

Presenter6:28

Yeah. I mean, that definitely sounds like a lively household. I wonder for you growing up how easy it was to make yourself heard?

Presenter6:37

Uh

Laurie Anderson6:37

I

Presenter6:37

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson6:37

Uh

Laurie Anderson6:37

was taken care of.

Laurie Anderson6:40

Some of my siblings. So I got to be something of a voice of authority there, kind of like, you have to do this. But I also.

Laurie Anderson6:50

Loved taking care of my especially my little brothers who were

Laurie Anderson6:56

Very odd. They're super odd. And I love that about them.

Presenter7:00

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson7:01

Wynne Brothers, right?

Presenter7:01

And

Laurie Anderson7:01

Yeah, and I tried to to cheer them up because they weren't they weren't naturally happy. They were naturally sad little boys.

Presenter7:01

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson7:08

And so I would have, like, do comedy shows for them, mostly cooking shows, and I would just.

Laurie Anderson7:15

Tried really hard to make them laugh.

Laurie Anderson7:18

So that's

Presenter7:18

That's interesting. So you were putting on comedy shows and cooking shows for them and I think you used to tell your little sister stories too, didn't you?

Laurie Anderson7:25

Yeah, and it was a series called Judy Marie and she had her own plane and she would fly around and

Laurie Anderson7:32

She stored it in the garage. She would ch take it out almost every day, fly around the neighborhood and what she saw from her plane.

Laurie Anderson7:40

It was really fun making up adventures for her.

Presenter7:44

So it sounds like as a little girl you had quite a lot of responsibility.

Laurie Anderson7:48

For your younger siblings?

Presenter7:54

How did that sit with you?

Laurie Anderson7:55

Well, that's one reason I didn't have a family myself. That I've been mom

Presenter7:59

Should I

Laurie Anderson8:00

Since I was eight, so I think I'm gonna give up on that on that job.

Presenter8:01

It's a

Presenter8:05

Can I ask a bit about your mum and dad? Your your father, Arthur, was a paint salesman. Were the two of you close?

Laurie Anderson8:12

Oh yeah, and

Laurie Anderson8:13

He was a salesman, but what he did really was marry the boss's daughter. And he became... They gave him this job of salesman. He was very...

Laurie Anderson8:23

happy guy. So he would people love to see him. You know, he'd come in with the his paint charts and stuff and like hey art hot and he was genuinely friendly and uh genuinely interested in other people. So I would tag along and watch him do that and I was like, whoa, that's

Laurie Anderson8:42

That's a wonderful way to be really, really open, yet at the same time he's selling them stuff.

Laurie Anderson8:48

How's he doing that? That's a pretty good trick. Very silly, too. He would do little dances that were.

Laurie Anderson8:55

really made me laugh. I just got this very warped impression about who men were from him. All the women in my life were

Laurie Anderson9:04

The authority figures, the teachers and moms telling you what to do to your homework product. And my father was just like this carefree guy who was, let's go and have ice cream, let's do little dances. And I thought, wow, men are so fantastic. They're like carefree and silly. And what about your mother, Mary Louise?

Laurie Anderson9:26

She went to the University of Chicago and graduated when she was a kid, basically like 16, and caught, like uh many women in her generation, not really allowed to.

Laurie Anderson9:38

Do much was her education.

Laurie Anderson9:40

But she was a reader and I remember much of my childhood waking up in

Laurie Anderson9:46

walking around the house like at three or four in the morning, and there there she'd be, reading.

Laurie Anderson9:50

She read everything.

Laurie Anderson9:52

And she would just go on kicks of reading um Marcus Aurelius and she was a book club of one. You know, she just wanted to teach herself things, and that that made a huge impression on me.

Presenter10:06

Was she loving? Was she did you feel close to her?

Laurie Anderson10:10

You know, w it depends on what you call loving. She didn't like touching people, particularly. Does that mean she's not loving? It means she's not physically expressive.

Laurie Anderson10:20

Uh she was not, and quite formal really.

Laurie Anderson10:24

And um

Laurie Anderson10:26

I would say she admired her children rather than loved them.

Laurie Anderson10:30

How did you feel about her? I admired her.

Laurie Anderson10:33

She was Confucian, and she was a very tough, tough lady.

Presenter10:37

You're close to your dad, but with your mum it sounds more complicated. She sounds like a more complicated person.

Laurie Anderson10:42

I wouldn't say complicated. She was just different from he. They were a m weird mismatch. But

Laurie Anderson10:49

When they were old people, I I saw them once and I thought, oh, they're not even how are they relating to each other? And they were out.

Laurie Anderson10:56

tromping around in the snow, holding hands and laughing and I was like

Laurie Anderson11:00

I could be totally wrong about these two characters. What do I know?

Presenter11:03

Yeah.

Presenter11:04

Uh It's time for your next disc, Laurie. What are we going to hear and why have you chosen it today?

Laurie Anderson11:09

Viola Tapara Gracia Salavida.

Laurie Anderson11:13

I think it's a very important moment, always.

Laurie Anderson11:16

To

Laurie Anderson11:18

Be grateful, and this is a a thank you for everything that life gives you. Not just lovely things, but

Laurie Anderson11:26

difficult and horrible things that it gives you to and how do you accept those.

Speaker 111:32

Gracienza la vinda.

Speaker 111:37

Leave me alone.

Speaker 311:37

Hello damn.

Speaker 311:41

Radio was the floor.

Speaker 311:45

Qui pueno losado.

Speaker 311:49

Perfectorist Being Board.

Speaker 311:53

Lo Negro del Blanco.

Speaker 311:57

Yen el altosi elo si fonbre.

Speaker 312:03

Uh

Presenter12:03

Gracias Alavida, Violeta Para. Laurie Anderson, when you were 12, you had a terrible accident. What happened?

Laurie Anderson12:10

This story is about diving, so-called diving into a pool and missing the pool. And I broke my back and spent a lot of time in the hospital where I learned a lot of things about loneliness and pain from other children.

Presenter12:24

How much bill?

Laurie Anderson12:26

I wasn't there for

Laurie Anderson12:28

Oh, a couple of months, I guess. And so if you're in the like I was, in the Bernward, it is children being brought in every night who are dying.

Presenter12:38

And why were you why were you there? Why were you on

Laurie Anderson12:40

It was a trauma word, and so I

Presenter12:40

Ruising

Laurie Anderson12:42

I was there with when a lot of children died. It it was a uh

Laurie Anderson12:48

Profound experience for me to be there.

Presenter12:50

So were your family able to come and visit you?

Laurie Anderson12:53

Yeah, I guess they did. It was like, um

Laurie Anderson12:56

But I don't remember that very well.

Presenter12:58

But you remember the loneliness. You you mentioned

Laurie Anderson13:01

I remember thinking how idiotic doctors were.

Laurie Anderson13:04

They would say, You're never going to walk again, I thought you're an idiot.

Laurie Anderson13:08

Of course I'm gonna walk. And I did. I mean, I I never once believed one of those guys.

Laurie Anderson13:15

Who said, would come in and go, oh, I'm so sorry about what happened to you, but they even asked.

Laurie Anderson13:22

I got better things to do here, think about, than you.

Presenter13:25

That's such an interesting response, though.

Laurie Anderson13:26

Adults were idiots. They were sad and they were all twisted in their own problems and you like felt sorry for them.

Presenter13:29

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson13:38

Uh

Presenter13:38

As you say, you of course learned to walk again, but not just that, I think you were a cheerleader, you were voted girl most likely to succeed in high school, you were excelling in everything. It sounds like you got out of that experience and really pushed yourself.

Laurie Anderson13:51

Yeah, well I did.

Presenter13:54

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson13:55

I flick through.

Presenter13:55

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson13:56

Yeah.

Presenter13:56

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson13:56

Okay. But it's true. That's true, isn't it? It is. I was an overachiever.

Presenter14:02

I think so, yeah. And after you came out of hospital, you got involved in politics at your high school and you became interested in John F. Kennedy's story. So around that time he was campaigning to become President and he actually helped you get elected as President of your student council. How did that happen?

Laurie Anderson14:19

I fell for JFK like a lot of people. He was supposedly some kind of golden boy and he was coming to Wisconsin. He was a senator from Massachusetts. He was running for president and I

Laurie Anderson14:32

I fell for the Kennedy aura and I wrote to him saying, Dear Senator Kennedy, I think you're running a wonderful campaign. I'm running for student council myself, and can you give me a few tips? And he sent me a long letter.

Laurie Anderson14:45

Find out what the students want and promise it. I thought, okay.

Laurie Anderson14:49

Don't be an idealist. Be a representative. That was his idea. Did you follow his advice? I did, won the election, and then a couple of months later when I had some time, I wrote to him saying, Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner.

Laurie Anderson15:03

Uh I won the election thanks for your advice and and best of luck in your own

Laurie Anderson15:08

Election

Laurie Anderson15:09

You know, insufferable kids. So, um

Laurie Anderson15:13

Then he, being the golden boy, sent me a telegram of congratulations and a dozen roses, which was of course in the

Laurie Anderson15:24

front page headlines of the little newspaper in our town. And

Laurie Anderson15:29

All the women fell for him too. He was a consummate politician.

Presenter15:34

And what about you, student politics? How did it suit you when you were elected?

Laurie Anderson15:40

Where did I get that one that people wanted? I think people wanted a...

Laurie Anderson15:44

A different lunchroom that I arranged to get. So we we got some stuff done in our administration.

Laurie Anderson15:53

Yeah.

Presenter15:53

It's time to go to your next disc, Laurie. Your third choice today. What are we going to hear and why are you taking it to the desert island with you?

Laurie Anderson16:01

Tusen Tanker by Chiakil.

Laurie Anderson16:04

is one of the most lovely

Laurie Anderson16:07

Pieces about

Laurie Anderson16:09

longing and nature and so I thought that would be a really nice thing because it is very balanced. It's a very no typical kind of sad love song, but it's uh it has its feet on the ground and I really I love that about it.

Speaker 116:24

Yogori to Santang

Speaker 116:34

Yoga Skarden, you're gay confu.

Laurie Anderson16:36

Garden

Speaker 116:43

So we divide and bang.

Speaker 116:52

Oh stop.

Presenter16:56

Triarchal Tusantanco. Laurie Anderson, you were a very creative child. You drew, you painted, you told stories and you played the violin since you were five, I think. When it came time for you to apply to college, you studied art history in New York and then I think later you moved from painting to sculpture. When you graduated had you decided by that point that you wanted to be an artist and if so, what kind of artist did you imagine you would become?

Laurie Anderson17:26

I went to a school called Barnard and it was not possible to do actual painting or sculpture in school.

Laurie Anderson17:35

You could study about it, but you couldn't do it. So I I had it when I was in college, I had a studio downtown in New York where I would go and and I went to school kind of on the side in a way. And I I did teach art history also. It's the only job I ever had, actually, the only one. And I got fired from it.

Presenter17:54

What did she get fired for?

Laurie Anderson17:56

I was gonna be an artist and I needed to.

Laurie Anderson17:59

Get a studio so I have this job teaching.

Laurie Anderson18:02

Egyptian architecture.

Laurie Anderson18:04

It was night school, so everyone was exhausted, and it was dark, and these pictures of pyramids would come up, and I was like,

Laurie Anderson18:13

I would just make things up, you know. And, um

Laurie Anderson18:17

About this or that pharaoh, you know, and students would write it down, and I would test them on it.

Laurie Anderson18:22

There was one particular one in which I told the students that there it was what looked like a mailbox slot on the outside of one of the pyramids, and it really is something that nobody really quite knows why it was there. So I said, you know.

Laurie Anderson18:36

speculating you could imagine it was

Laurie Anderson18:39

A shoot in which a

Laurie Anderson18:41

Certain time of year the sun would come down the chute and into the center of the pyramid and

Laurie Anderson18:47

into the mummy's eyes and wake him up. And that was, you know, a solstice situation'cause it was all sun-based. They'd write it down out of, yeah.

Laurie Anderson18:55

So

Laurie Anderson18:56

I guess it was some supervisor who had been told this theory, and I got fired.

Presenter19:02

He got rumbled.

Presenter19:04

Tell me about your first productions, your your early work as an artist. One of those featured an orchestra made of cars. How did that idea come about?

Laurie Anderson19:15

I was living in a commune.

Laurie Anderson19:18

in Vermont and every Sunday there was a concert in Gazebo in a town park.

Laurie Anderson19:25

And people would drive to the concert because everyone w lived on farms and

Laurie Anderson19:31

They would park around the gazebo and they would honk their horns in applause. It was one of these cases in which the applause definitely sounds better than the concert, because it was and then honk, honk, honk, honk, because beautiful, beautiful sound of all of these different pitches. And so I decided to reverse the situation, have the audience in a gazebo and the performers as the cars.

Laurie Anderson19:58

And I described this thing. I put a notice in the local paper. Nobody wanted to do it.

Laurie Anderson20:04

So I th I thought, Oh, okay, competition. So I put a notice, Does your car honk at C sharp? If it does, you might have a chance of being in the Carhorn Orchestra. They they came in droves. You didn't have to read music, so it was just the scores were colors and just hold my

Speaker 120:16

Maybe

Laurie Anderson20:24

Iridescent garden glove hands over these different colors for different lengths of time and it'd be red, red, red, blue, blue, blue, yellow.

Presenter20:33

Uh

Laurie Anderson20:33

Rebrew, you know, so it was um it was lovely.

Presenter20:38

There's always been so much playfulness in your work, Laurie, and and I wonder about the scene that you were part of at that time, the the downtown New York arts scene back then. It was so much smaller than it is now.

Presenter20:50

How do you remember it and who were your contemporaries that you were hanging out with?

Laurie Anderson20:55

Uh

Presenter20:56

Uh T

Laurie Anderson20:56

Time uh when I started, which was around seventy two, we were doing

Laurie Anderson21:02

stuff that was

Laurie Anderson21:04

Contemporary, we never thought for one second about any kind of commercial aspects of this. We lived in lofts, we did everything ourselves, we all had pickup trucks, we had constant parties. I was part of a scene, it was Phil Glass, the choreographer, Tricia Brown, Gordon Madda Clark, Susie Harris. And Phil Glass was one of the people that I especially

Laurie Anderson21:30

Loved because his music went on forever?

Presenter21:32

And I think that takes us to your next music choice quite nicely, actually. Why have you chosen this?

Laurie Anderson21:37

Philip Glass's music in twelve parts is one of his

Laurie Anderson21:41

Most I hate the word iconic, but it is iconic. It is really.

Laurie Anderson21:46

sums up his work.

Laurie Anderson21:48

uh in many ways the purity of it and

Laurie Anderson21:52

When was it? Because it was the pandemic that we wanted to give him a birthday party. He was he was 80 something and we wanted to have a party that you could actually have'cause there was everything was canceled. So we had it at um

Laurie Anderson22:06

Rockefeller Center's Ice Rink, and I got to be the DJ of this party. So I got to play, oh, maybe 50 pieces by Phil. And I have to say that there is no piece that Phil has ever written that you cannot ice skate to. So people were gliding around with their muffs and their hats, and they're suddenly free of the pandemic. And it was so beautiful to see how you move to that music. It's a different way, because the rhythm is something else.

Laurie Anderson22:40

It's a body rhythm that that is uh

Laurie Anderson22:43

half mental. It's a really interesting body-mind.

Laurie Anderson22:48

way that you move when you hear this.

Presenter23:50

Part One of Music in Twelve Parts, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Presenter23:56

Laurie Anderson, in nineteen eighty one you released an eight minute track called O Superman. You recorded it in your hallway and you pressed just a thousand copies at first, but it went top ten in the UK. How did that go down with you?

Laurie Anderson24:08

I didn't really know what the charts were, frankly. So, you know, when you...

Laurie Anderson24:13

Get something that you weren't dreaming of necessarily. It's a different thing than getting something that you always wanted. So I was like, Oh, that's cool. And then um they were going, No, you should really be excited. I was like, I'm excited. And uh

Laurie Anderson24:28

Then they said, Well, we need a whole lot more records than you have in stock, which is about 800 at that point. Anyway, um

Laurie Anderson24:35

That was the beginning of working with Warner Brothers Records and because they had been coming to shows that I was doing saying do you want to make a record? And I said, no, no, really, not really. And why? Because really because I was a snob and I was an artist and I was like, pop music was not interesting to me particularly. I know that sounds obnoxious. It was obnoxious, but...

Laurie Anderson24:55

I asked them to press these records and they said, that's not how we do things at Warner Brothers Records. You have to sign a contract. I was like, really?

Presenter25:03

Can't we just do a handshake kind of thing and no? So after Superman came out, you released the album Big Science, that was hugely influential on the emerging electronic music scene. Where does your fascination with that technical engineering side of sound come from?

Laurie Anderson25:18

I do love electronics because they have a warmth that I think you can pull out of them. If you use them in a synthy way, they can be really cold and chilly. But I think they can also translate things very well. That particular record was based on one syllable, ah.

Laurie Anderson25:37

The first syllable they teach you in a Montessori school. How do you say A? You go A.

Laurie Anderson25:43

Uh

Laurie Anderson25:44

Ah, this is a wow, it's a wow

Laurie Anderson25:47

So it was a wow soundtrack, you know, repeated thousands of times.

Speaker 125:49

You know

Laurie Anderson25:52

as the basic track, as the drum, as the heartbeat of that song.

Laurie Anderson25:58

I like spoken language. I love the melodies of it. I like.

Laurie Anderson26:03

language unfolding over

Laurie Anderson26:06

Beats like that. That's my style.

Presenter26:08

Yeah. It was very much what that album was about. And I wonder what your fellow artists on on this downtown arts scene in New York made of your commercial success because Oh, Superman was a huge hit.

Laurie Anderson26:21

At first they sort of felt sorry for me. Like, what are you doing? Oh, that's so low lowbrow. And then it was called Crossing Over. And then everybody wanted to do it.

Laurie Anderson26:32

Who knows?

Presenter26:33

You've always embraced new technology, Laurie. As you say, you were doing it with big science and from then on. I think you've worked with AI in the past, but I wonder how you feel about it today. How do you feel about it now?

Laurie Anderson26:46

Let's talk about different aspects of it as a tool. I love it.

Laurie Anderson26:50

I'm working with a group in Toronto now.

Laurie Anderson26:52

That is creating imagery out of language, spoken language, instantaneous imagery. So as you say something, it appears as an array of visuals. It's frightening. It's like

Laurie Anderson27:05

Having somebody invade your dreams or be able to see what you're thinking or dreaming, it's wild.

Laurie Anderson27:12

I also recognize that it's

Laurie Anderson27:14

It's the end of the world kind of thing. It's horrible. You can impersonate anyone. You could win an election with something like this.

Laurie Anderson27:21

You could start a war with something like this.

Laurie Anderson27:25

We depend on a certain amount of um authenticity that gets stamped, but we don't know who's saying what anymore at all.

Laurie Anderson27:34

So the success of certain aspects of um

Laurie Anderson27:38

Let's say intrusions into social media, you know, let's say disinformation is enormous. It is dismantling our world.

Presenter27:48

Laurie Anderson, I think we'd better take a break for some music. Disc number five. What have you gone for next and why?

Laurie Anderson27:54

Ken Nordine Fliberty Jib, what a great story. It's a story about a guy who hoodwinks a bunch of people. He comes to town and he like does a little song and dance routine and everyone's like...

Laurie Anderson28:06

Well, we gotta follow this guy.

Laurie Anderson28:08

And I think it's a very contemporary story, so that's why I chose it.

Speaker 328:12

The only light was on him.

Speaker 328:15

We

Speaker 328:16

Waited in the dark.

Speaker 328:19

Then out of his tallness came the chanting.

Speaker 328:23

First is a whisper we could hardly hear

Speaker 328:28

The flippity chip on the pippity pop, the flippity chip on the pippity pop.

Speaker 328:35

Didn't make any sense.

Speaker 328:37

We were caught up in something we didn't understand.

Speaker 328:41

He had trapped us without our knowing it.

Presenter28:43

Flippity Jib by Ken Nordine, featuring the Fred Katz Group. Laurie Anderson, in nineteen ninety two you met the musician and songwriter Lou Reid. What were your first impressions of him?

Laurie Anderson28:55

Hmm, I

Laurie Anderson28:57

Talk to Lou about microphones.

Laurie Anderson29:00

We went to the AAS convention together because we both loved

Laurie Anderson29:05

tube mics,'cause they had this warm sound and

Laurie Anderson29:08

I didn't think this was a date, but it turned out that it was a date. He knew it was a date.

Speaker 129:13

In

Laurie Anderson29:14

Um he'd ask me out on dates and before

Laurie Anderson29:18

But I was never in town. So this time I said, let's go to the convention. So we went.

Laurie Anderson29:23

And after the convention we went out uh to

Laurie Anderson29:27

I don't know, bar I guess? He said let's...

Laurie Anderson29:29

Why don't we have dinner? And I said, okay. And he said, after that, why don't we go to a movie? And I said, okay. And after that, we can take a walk. And I said, and.

Laurie Anderson29:38

We just weren't apart for twenty-one years after that.

Speaker 329:40

Uh

Speaker 129:40

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson29:41

Yeah, yeah, so what did I think? I actually didn't really know his music at that time. How did you not know his music? You know, it was just that the music scene in New York is and was complicated. And we call them worlds, music worlds. So you have the upper world, you have the...

Speaker 129:58

So you're in a different form.

Laurie Anderson30:00

The pop world, the the experimental world, these worlds intersect in little ways, but

Laurie Anderson30:08

Mainly not. I thought that the Velvet Underground was British, actually. So I was surprised when he said he was a...

Laurie Anderson30:16

I know that sounds like an idiot.

Laurie Anderson30:22

It was I just was in my own

Laurie Anderson30:24

Bison.

Presenter30:26

The two of you went on lots of creative adventures together and as a couple you came up with three rules for life. I wondered if you'd share them with us.

Laurie Anderson30:34

Yeah, there are rules that are

Laurie Anderson30:37

That we mean because sometimes we don't have time to think.

Laurie Anderson30:40

And you have to make a snap decision. And you think, what would be right to do in this case?

Laurie Anderson30:46

And so the first one is don't be afraid of anyone.

Laurie Anderson30:51

And we thought, what would it be like if you weren't afraid of anybody?

Laurie Anderson30:55

Nobody. So that's very important. Number two.

Laurie Anderson30:58

is um get a good bullshit detector.

Laurie Anderson31:02

And even more important, learn how to use that.

Laurie Anderson31:05

Who's shining you?

Laurie Anderson31:07

Number three, be really tender. That's it. And

Laurie Anderson31:11

You really you really don't need anything else.

Laurie Anderson31:14

Fearlessness and love. So, those things are really can help you out, you know. So, try it out when you're.

Laurie Anderson31:22

in a situation next time. They really do help.

Laurie Anderson31:25

And Loo followed his own rules.

Presenter31:26

In other ways, too, didn't he?

Laurie Anderson31:29

Oh yeah.

Laurie Anderson31:30

He was a Tai Chi master.

Laurie Anderson31:32

Lu is known in China.

Laurie Anderson31:34

more for his tai chi than for his music.

Laurie Anderson31:39

Towards the end of his life he said, You know,

Laurie Anderson31:41

I like music, but I'm done with it. I'm just gonna.

Laurie Anderson31:44

Do tai chi every day, all day.

Laurie Anderson31:46

And that's what he did. He di still did one thing with Bob Wilson over Kalulu. He did some recording with Metallica, but basically that was it was sort of on the side.

Laurie Anderson31:57

And he basically

Laurie Anderson31:59

did Tai Chi all the time and I so much admire that because you know there comes a time in your life you kind of go okay I'm at the end here what do what is it how do I want to really spend my time do I stay on this same track that I'm doing I mean that's a lot of fun but um he decided not to

Presenter32:12

Do it.

Presenter32:20

You got married in 2008, and it was quite a spur-of-the-moment thing, I think. How did it happen?

Laurie Anderson32:22

It was

Laurie Anderson32:27

Oh, I just um was thinking of things I hadn't done in my life.

Laurie Anderson32:32

I was talking to Lou on the phone at the time and I said, didn't learn German, he didn't do this, he didn't do that, never got married. He'd asked me to get married about 500 times. I just didn't see the point. And so then suddenly I saw the point. So he flew out to Colorado. I was there doing some shows. So we he flew out that night and we got married the next day.

Laurie Anderson32:55

We are

Laurie Anderson32:56

Got married in a friend's backyard and it is legal, you know. Signed a book and

Laurie Anderson33:03

Yeah, it was very romantic, sort of.

Laurie Anderson33:06

Uh

Presenter33:06

But

Presenter33:07

It's time for your next piece of music, Laurie Anderson. What's it gonna be?

Laurie Anderson33:11

I love this song called Doing the Things That We Want To because that is so important. Not the things that you should or think you should do, but doing the things that you want to.

Laurie Anderson33:23

You're never gonna go wrong.

Laurie Anderson33:26

If you really want to do that, so do it.

Speaker 333:28

It reminds me of the movie this morning made up out New York.

Speaker 333:34

Those frank and brutal movies that are so brilliant.

Speaker 333:40

True love beneath the wagon book.

Speaker 333:47

They're very inspirational, I love the things they do.

Speaker 333:53

Doing the things that I want to

Laurie Anderson33:59

Marty's still making movies about New York. It's amazing.

Presenter34:04

Lou Reid, doing the things that we want to. Laurie, you you talked about um Lou's approach at the end of his life, deciding that he just wanted to focus on Tai Chi because he loved it so much. I wonder about, you know, that period. He was in in poor health for a while before he he died in twenty thirteen.

Presenter34:21

You were together at home in the end when when Lou died.

Presenter34:26

Yeah. And you you practice as a Buddhist. Did that inform the way you approach those last days together?

Laurie Anderson34:37

Yes, it did, of course. And then um

Laurie Anderson34:41

What I believe as a Buddhist and what I believe as an artist is the same. There's for me no difference. And there's only one rule in both of those things, in being an artist and being a Buddhist, and that is be aware.

Laurie Anderson34:53

That's all. It d it doesn't ask you to believe anything.

Laurie Anderson34:57

It doesn't ask you to

Laurie Anderson34:59

Act a certain way.

Laurie Anderson35:01

And uh one of the things

Laurie Anderson35:03

that I kind of went along with in in uh in Lou's death was um basically listening to those teachings about death. And so the number one teaching in terms of that is that there is a transition period.

Laurie Anderson35:19

This um

Laurie Anderson35:21

Place or maybe phase, maybe it's a time rather than a place, called a bardo and a bardo todol, and in which they consider a disintegration period of 49 days. So, there's a bardo is a typically a period of 49 days when your energy goes into something else. It's a transformative process. So, the first rules for the living who are with a person who is dead is: do not cry. That is the number one rule. No crying.

Laurie Anderson35:52

Zero crying. And why is that? Why is that? Because you don't want to call the person back.

Laurie Anderson35:58

In one way. And you enthusiastically do that. You do not cry. Do not cry.

Presenter36:04

And you did that.

Laurie Anderson36:04

You did that.

Laurie Anderson36:06

I did.

Presenter36:06

Was it hard?

Laurie Anderson36:07

It was um

Laurie Anderson36:09

It was exhilarating. Particularly there's a um a teacher called Bob Thurman who has a really wonderful series of talks about liberation and what happens at death.

Laurie Anderson36:22

What happens to energy and love?

Laurie Anderson36:25

And those are really wonderful teachings.

Presenter36:28

And is that the exhilaration that you're talking about, that just that the intensity of love for that person?

Laurie Anderson36:33

And their love for things as well, which you feel as well, a very intense release of that.

Presenter36:35

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson36:39

It's also a great honor and privilege to feel all those things and to try to understand them. I mean, it's it's um

Laurie Anderson36:49

It's awesome.

Laurie Anderson36:52

Since his death in in 2013,

Laurie Anderson36:55

I've been the

Laurie Anderson36:57

head of the archive and it was like a fifteen story building falls on you.

Laurie Anderson37:02

Because he doesn't have to take care of all of those things. And I wasn't prepared for that, really.

Speaker 137:05

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson37:09

Um we'd never really talked about anything. We had we did talk about

Laurie Anderson37:12

Having something called the L ⁇ L Art Ranch and that was going to be when we were really old and no one wanted to come and hear us anymore and we were going to have a kind of bar where he could play every night and we just like do whatever we wanted and and that was the plan. But the plan wasn't for him to die and then I would just have to do what?

Laurie Anderson37:32

And what we've done and I say we because I asked a lot of people to help me and it's been a privilege to kind of go, well, look at this, it never came out. And we get to put that out. And

Laurie Anderson37:46

The physical archive is in the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library. All of his tapes, all of the rehearsals, everything is in there. And anybody, if you're starting a band or you just want to hear what it's like to have a really weird rehearsal, you can go and listen to all of his stuff. All of it. Anyone can. And that was really important to me, that his work would be accessible and not in some kind of mausoleum.

Presenter38:15

It's time to go to the music, Laurie Anderson. Your seventh choice today. What are we going to hear next, and why are you taking it with you to the island?

Laurie Anderson38:23

I'm taking Magnetic Fields Washington DC to the islands so I can dance. It's just so crazily infectious. And it's um it's a cartoon version of Washington, D. C. And it's a love story in the nation's capital.

Laurie Anderson38:41

I just need to be cheerful about the nation's capital right now and think of it in a way that's light-hearted for a second. Cherry Blossom Central and all the things that you sort of love-hate about your country, the sort of dopey clichés, that are also very endearing. So it's a happy love song.

Speaker 338:58

Washington DC, it's paradise to me It's not because it is the grand old seat

Speaker 339:08

Of precious freedom and democracy, no no no It's not the greenery turning gold in fall, The scenery circling them all

Speaker 339:21

It's just that's where my baby lives, that's all.

Speaker 339:25

Washington DC is the greatest

Presenter39:30

The Magnetic Fields and Washington DC. Laurie Anderson, dogs have played quite a big part in your life and work, and I think Lou was a dog person too, wasn't he?

Laurie Anderson39:40

Oh yeah.

Laurie Anderson39:41

Yeah. We often went to the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden and rooted for the Terriers because they were our favorite breed. So yeah, we had a really special dog named Lola Bell who is a big part of our little family and she was a singer, piano player and a kind of an overall jokester. So always fun to hang out with her.

Presenter40:05

Holy f

Presenter40:07

She only started playing the piano when when she got older, right?

Laurie Anderson40:10

When she went blind, actually. When she went blind, she

Laurie Anderson40:14

She stopped moving. She just froze. She gave up.

Laurie Anderson40:18

And I found this dog trainer. I said, What can we do for our dog? She won't move it. She said, I taught my dog to play the piano I said, Good for you And I said, What do you mean? She said she says to me, Well, maybe

Laurie Anderson40:32

Um maybe that would help. So we

Laurie Anderson40:35

Taught Lola Bell to play the piano, which is

Laurie Anderson40:39

Not that hard, especially if she played the keyboards like I do. It's mostly like kind of a lot of automated arpeggios. And also what happened then was every day she would have a concert for us at lunchtime. So we would all, people in my studio would come around and she would, and she got this feeling like people are there and she was performing. She was like, that's okay, great. So everyone is like, Lola Belle, that was so great. And she got all the warmth that performers, many of us crave from the audience. And so she was very, very happy and she lived for a couple more years after that.

Presenter41:22

So you have organised concerts for dogs. The one that you put on into the Sydney Opera House, the grounds of the Sydney Opera House, was very impressive. How did it all come about?

Laurie Anderson41:31

Yeah.

Presenter41:31

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson41:33

Was a graduation ceremony

Laurie Anderson41:38

And I was supposed to give the commencement speech and um Yo-Yo Ma was there and everything was late, so we were just in a daze of boredom and heat and I was just saying to Yo-Yo, you know what I

Laurie Anderson41:52

Sometimes when I'm playing a show, I look out and I think the whole audience is dogs. And he said, I have that same fantasy too. I said, are you kidding? I said, whoever gets to do concert for dogs first will do it. And you invite the other one. So we did this concert, and it was crazy. It was at the Sydney Opera House, and it was on the...

Laurie Anderson42:14

On a Saturday morning, we thought maybe a hundred dogs would show. Thousands of dogs showed up with their owners. They were just like sitting all over the steps of the Sydney Opera House. And I had was playing with a little band, playing music really that we thought would be in the frequency ranges that they liked and not low stuff.

Laurie Anderson42:35

What I noticed was that there were a lot of Australian dogs who just loved to rock.

Laurie Anderson42:43

And they were like, yo, oh, I love this.

Speaker 142:43

Yo.

Laurie Anderson42:45

And then my favorite are always the droolers. They're in the in the front rows and they're like the droopy dogs that are like I don't know what to

Laurie Anderson42:54

I don't know why I'm here. It's a lot like, you know, when you find yourself at a concert as a human, you don't often know why you're there. Your friend said it was good. You say you're there. You know, you don't know why, particularly.

Speaker 143:03

There, you know, you don't know

Laurie Anderson43:06

And um so at the end I said, Okay, dogs, you gotta make some noise. So got some of the middle ones howling, and then it started spreading and then

Laurie Anderson43:18

Thousands of dogs were howling. And I thought, kill me now,'cause this is like the best experience of my life so f up to this point, like epiphany. Just this is absolute

Laurie Anderson43:33

Joy of Animals

Laurie Anderson43:35

been beaten with animals and and music.

Presenter43:38

So Laurie, I'm almost ready to cast you away. How will you spend your time on the island?

Laurie Anderson43:43

I would try to get uh in alignment with the night sky a little bit more. I've gotten very lax about that. I don't even know where the moon is half the time. There was a really bright moon.

Laurie Anderson43:57

This morning at nine o'clock, full moon, and I I took some pictures of it. I was like, th it's still up and what is it doing over there? You know, it's always in a new place. So maybe I'd be able to keep track of where the moon is and what phase it is. That would be nice to be more in some natural rhythms like that.

Presenter44:16

And of course, you'll have your music to keep you company, including your eighth choice, your last disc today. Tell us about it. What are we going to hear?

Laurie Anderson44:23

Soul coughing is one of my favorite groups and I love the groove in Chicago.

Laurie Anderson44:29

is not Chicago.

Laurie Anderson44:31

I like titles like that, with the kind of question in them like, what is this supposed to be about? And it puts the voice way in front.

Speaker 344:34

Prison.

Laurie Anderson44:39

And you get to know the person who's telling you the story. You don't know what the story is exactly. I don't need to know the story. I mean, even though I'm somebody who tells stories, I like the roundabout way of telling stories. I don't like things that resolve. My life isn't resolving ever, so I like things that are just leaving you to go, well, let's see.

Speaker 345:02

A fool's ball is in the room.

Speaker 345:06

Bennett's Bell is in a row

Speaker 345:11

Palmyra is in the room.

Speaker 345:16

It's Chicago.

Speaker 345:20

Is not Chicago.

Speaker 345:25

It's Chicago.

Speaker 345:30

It's not Chicago.

Laurie Anderson45:34

Is that even me?

Presenter45:36

No idea. Is Chicago? Is not Chicago? Soul coughing. Soul, Laurie Anderson, it's time to send you away to the island. I'm going to cast you away, but with the books, I'll give you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take another book of your own choice. What will that be?

Laurie Anderson45:53

I chose a book called

Laurie Anderson45:56

Speak Memory by Nopolkov.

Laurie Anderson45:59

I do see the value in giving voice to some of your memory, and I'm a diarist.

Laurie Anderson46:07

I write down so many things and it's valuable to me. Once in a while I do come across something that I wrote and I was like, whoa.

Laurie Anderson46:14

That's not what I remember thinking. And those things are very valuable to me.

Laurie Anderson46:21

Because we just have

Laurie Anderson46:23

these bits of things that happen to us and and we keep revising them.

Laurie Anderson46:28

And you realize, oh, I thought I was really happy. Then you go back to that and you're like, I was miserable.

Laurie Anderson46:35

Don't idealize that thing. You are miserable. Or, oh, that was a much happier time than I thought.

Laurie Anderson46:42

Your memory's tricking you all the time and you're tricking it. And so I thought, well, how do I to see it through somebody else's lens for a second? And Nabokov is wonderful.

Laurie Anderson46:55

You can also have a luxury item. What will that be? My little dog's collar with her name on it and uh

Laurie Anderson47:02

Lola Bell's colour is a totem of happiness and freedom for me and of love because it reminds me of all the the uh

Laurie Anderson47:11

ways that you can poke your nose into things. And she did that walking along the street. I'm gonna sniff that shit. I think I'll go over and sniff that bush. And it reminds me of Lou and of curiosity and being able to

Laurie Anderson47:24

run out into the world was a really great

Laurie Anderson47:27

what's up next kind of thing. She she was just happy every day, happy every day to kind of go out and see what was going on. And I I n need to keep that and love keeping that as a way to live.

Presenter47:38

That's the perfect approach for the island.

Presenter47:41

And finally, Laurie, which track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves if you only had time to rescue one? Really? Oh, gosh.

Laurie Anderson47:50

Yeah.

Laurie Anderson47:51

Um Gracias Olavida.

Presenter47:53

Why?

Laurie Anderson47:54

Mm,'cause it's it's a thank you song.

Presenter47:58

Laurie Anderson, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Laurie Anderson48:03

Big fun.

Presenter48:26

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Laurie. We'll leave her sniffing the island air and looking out for the moon. We've cast away many artists, including Marina Abramovich and Damien Hurst, and Laurie's fellow dog enthusiast, Yo-Yo Ma is in our archive too. The studio manager for today's programme was Sue Mayo. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky, the production coordinator was Susie Roylands, and the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the lawyer, Harriet Wistrich. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 349:12

Hello, I'm Robin Ince and I'm Brian Cox and this is the Infinite Monkey Hedgerow. He was unable to write a funny joke for the introduction. That's basically the point. The new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage. Science with funny bits. Science with bits. Funny science plus bits. So the reason that the Neanderthals died out, you're claiming, is because they weren't astronomers.

Speaker 349:37

That's

Presenter49:38

Yeah.

Speaker 349:38

Yes, exactly.

Presenter49:39

Can't wait.

Presenter49:41

This is how we investigate cybercrime. We look for the yachts.

Speaker 349:43

The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.