Benny Green

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:31

If I told you our castaway is a columnist, broadcaster, musician, lyricist and novelist, that would only be half of the story. He's also written biography, musicals and has had his own show on television. In between times, he took it upon himself to read every word of the 123 editions of Wisdom. He is of course Benny Green. Benny, I've known you many, many years but didn't realize that in fact you're a Yorkshireman.

Benny Green0:53

Yes, sir. My father was what they call a strolling player in the twenties and he strolled to Leeds because there was a job there playing a saxophone. He met my mother, got married. Therefore, I have a birth qualification and play for Yorkshire, and I'm still waiting for the call.

Presenter1:06

It could come the state there in that.

Presenter1:09

Oh your father was a musician, so that's obviously where your interest in music started.

Benny Green1:10

Don't be afraid.

Benny Green1:11

Yes, indeed. He taught me to play. He was a saxophone player and he taught me to play the saxophone and the clarinet. And more important, uh, presented me with the instruments. Yes. Uh, I was uh thirteen at the Yeah.

Presenter1:21

And what about ambition then? I mean, was it was it always likely that you were going to be a a a musician?

Benny Green1:26

No, not really. Before that, when I was in single figures, I always wanted to be what I used to call a reporter. I I'd always be seen in little photographs to this day when I was a kid uh with notebook and pencil. I was always writing. And I was going to be a writer. And it wasn't until I was thirteen years old that it suddenly hit me that um I might like to be a musician instead.

Benny Green1:47

But I was surprised by that myself when I became enamored of music because I'm not very musical, strangely enough. I have found it very difficult. I wasn't a natural musician. I didn't have an ear.

Benny Green1:58

I didn't have much aptitude and it took me a long, long time to reach any state of proficiency at all.

Presenter2:03

Let's have a first choice of record.

Benny Green2:04

Well, the first choice is is connected with these uh pre-war years when I was a little boy. My father was a great lover of London, and he took me around with him all over London.

Benny Green2:14

not just to the tourist places, but just wandering about the streets. And I have this picture in my mind of London fixed in the in the pre war period, a very smoky, quite dark and foggy and

Benny Green2:26

hurrying city, uh looming up with things like, I don't know, the Euston Station Arch and all those big buildings. And it seemed very romantic to me and Londoners seemed to me to be tremendously romantic. And this record by Stanley Holloway seems to me to symbolize the sort of typical romantic Londoner of my father's childhood.

Presenter2:46

Jones looked very serious.

Presenter2:48

As he shouted to the crowd.

Presenter2:54

Oh I must go home tonight, I must go home tonight I don't care if it's snowing, blowing, and going I only got married this morning and it fills me with delight I'll stay out as late as you like next week but I must go home tonight Oh I must

Speaker 13:11

How do you go? How are we going?

Presenter3:14

Wonderful performer, Stanley Holloway. Let's go back to your early days. What about school? Did that have much of an influence one way or another on your life?

Benny Green3:21

Well, yeah, I uh I I would like to write a book about the schools I've been to one of these days because they were all so different. Up to eleven I went to a wonderful school about two hundred yards from the B B C, which was bombed and there's no more. I then went to a grammar school when the war started, evacuated to Cornwall.

Benny Green3:38

with us at Maryland Grammar School. That was a nightmare. Why? But the school and I had different ideas about what education was and uh the school had the bigger weapons. So I left after eighteen months and came back to London. This was in the middle of the Blitz and I was thirteen.

Benny Green3:52

And uh there weren't really any schools.

Benny Green3:55

until the Government acknowledged the fact that London was full of kids who didn't want to be evacuated, and I went to a place called the North London Emergency Secondary School, which is really the William Ellis School in Parliament Hill Fields in London.

Benny Green4:07

And there I had a magnificent education.

Benny Green4:11

But by then, by the time I was at this school, I'd uh got the jazz bug and uh my father had persuaded me to learn the saxophone.

Benny Green4:19

And without realizing what I was doing, I was able to improvise before I could read music.

Benny Green4:24

Now, today I understand that it's difficult to improvise, and a lot of great musicians can't do it.

Benny Green4:29

But when I was uh thirteen it seemed easy to me and it was really music that was difficult.

Benny Green4:34

I learned to improvise by listening to improvisers on record. During the war it was very hard to get jazz records because, A, they weren't L P's, and B, you only bought three minutes at a time. The H and V and Parlophone series, for instance, were five shillings and fourpence halfpenny per record, and once a month they issued four.

Benny Green4:53

That meant that you'd have to wait the equivalent of about four months to get one LP.

Benny Green4:57

The first record I ever bought, I didn't really buy it. My father bought it for me because he was influencing my opinions. I didn't have any opinions. I liked jazz and I wanted to hear some good jazz. So he said to me, you ought to listen to a saxophone player called Frank Trumba. And I said, fine. And he said, I'll tell you what, I'll try and buy this record. And he bought this record and perversely I didn't like the Frank Trumba saxophone player match, but it was the trumpet playing that took me.

Benny Green5:24

I must have had fairly good taste for thirteen because the trumpet player was Leon Vick Spiderbeck, who was the first great white jazz player.

Benny Green5:32

But he's a tragic figure, and I shall never forget him for this reason. His family thought that being a jazz musician didn't count. Lots of families like that. They thought that he was a disgrace to the family. He went away to New York and became worshipped by all his contemporaries. And he got into Paul Wartman's orchestra, which was a lousy orchestra, but it was a symbol of success. And every time he made one of these records, like the one we're about to hear, he sent the copy home to his parents as if to say to them, Look, I'm not a wastrel, this is what I can do.

Benny Green6:02

And when he was very ill and dying, he went home to Davenport, Iowa to die really, and uh he was rousing around the house and he found all the records he sent unopened.

Benny Green6:11

They were not even interested. And so that's a tragic thing. And if there's a musician who's symbolic of the Jazz age.

Benny Green6:18

With that kind of joy in the moment and sadness underneath, it's Leon Bismarck Big Spider-Vick. And what's the record then? The record is I'm Come in Virginia.

Presenter7:24

Benny, what was your first job as a professional musician?

Benny Green7:27

It was in nineteen forty nine I went to Sherry's Bore in Brighton.

Benny Green7:31

To play with a band called Owl Field and his orchestra, which I imagined to be a huge orchestra and turned out to be a quartet, plus me. And I was very excited about going to play at Sherry's because I'd done an enormous amount of reading by this time, and I'd read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. And in Brighton Rock, Graham Greene describes Sherry's Boreham as a pit of iniquity. And I thought, wonderful, can't wait to get there.

Benny Green7:52

And it I've never been so bored in my life. Nobody came in.

Benny Green7:56

The band was kind of just nondescript dance band. There wasn't there was no sin that I could see, and I looked very hard for it, believe me. And it was the first lesson I got that you mustn't believe every lurid novelist that you read.

Presenter8:08

But what followed on from that then? I mean how do you get into the jazz situation?

Benny Green8:11

Well, in the winters one gigged around and got what work one could, dance halls, municipal Saturday nights, firms dances, weddings, that kind of thing.

Benny Green8:21

And then in the summer you got a resident job somewhere. And gradually you got to play, if you were any good, with better players. And then you gradually drifted into specialist work, which would be in a jazz club where you would be booked to be a guest. And you'd be booked to be a guest in some provincial or suburban club, which was kind of small beer. And instead of getting two pounds, which you probably got for a night's work, if you were the special star guest, they gave you three pounds. So it was worth being better, you see. And I very, very slowly graduated into this life.

Benny Green8:55

I don't quite understand it to this day. I I don't want to think about it too much. I think luck plays a great deal in it.

Benny Green9:01

It was during this period when I worked in my first professional bands for people like Ralph Sharon.

Benny Green9:07

and Kenny Baker.

Benny Green9:09

and Roy Fox.

Benny Green9:11

those sort of people, and Lewestone.

Benny Green9:14

That I first came to grips with the greatest orchestra of its kind that's ever been. Now, up to now, I'd always thought that you either played in a dance band, all this awful stuff you played for dancers, or else you played jazz. And when I first was prevailed upon by some other musicians to study Duke Ellington a little more closely, it came home to me that dance music could be beautiful jazz as well. And this is a great revelation. Duke Ellington's band could play, and indeed did play, tunes like Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? And it sounded like marvellous jazz. The reason was Ellington had this magical system, which nobody's ever worked out, I don't think, of scoring for the orchestra in such a way to make the sounds exquisite and beautiful, and yet very simple to listen to. The next record I've chosen, I think, illustrates this. It's a song he wrote in 20 minutes during a tea break in a recording session one day, 1938. And it's just dance music, but it's also beautiful.

Presenter11:12

Now here you are in this time, going around playing your way through the music world. But at the same time you have that the writer's gift of observing and and storing up stuff for the fast.

Presenter11:22

How good an area was it for you, the writer, to to mingle with these because musicians are a particular and peculiar breed of people, aren't they?

Benny Green11:28

They are and it's the probably the best university you could ever hope to find. Uh I haven't written much at length about them for a long time now. I have a diffidence about it. After all these years I think it's in a way almost a an intrusion of privacy which is ridiculous because some of them have even died since then. But I haven't really written fully about that life and it was an extraordinary life, a riotous life and full of characters that one would never have kind of

Benny Green11:58

Believe

Presenter11:59

The ex

Benny Green11:59

Okay.

Presenter11:59

Are there any that spring readily to mind as being larger than life?

Benny Green12:03

Yeah, uh one of the most lovable men I I met in the music business, uh a wonderful musician and a lovable man was a trumpet player called Jimmy Watson. And all I can tell you about his eccentricities, which which extended across the world, is that um if you went up to him and you said to him, Jimmy,

Benny Green12:19

Oh, the dancer, the Kerry Pipers. He would start crying immediately and insist that he was happy. And there was another one who I better remain nameless, called Art Baxter, a singer who was in Ronnie Scott's band. And you used to wake up one morning and you'd say, wait a minute, my hairbrush has gone. My white shirt disappeared. And then you'd forget about it. Three months later, you'd go into a hotel room and find that on Baxter's sideboard and you'd say, What are you doing with my hairbrush? And he would say, Look, it was here all the time for you if you wanted it.

Benny Green12:50

It's that kind of barefaced impudence. And they were always, always penniless. Always. And when I first came into this group of hard specialists, I didn't realise their sense of humour. And the late Ken Ray, a Manchester trombone player, who was a lovable man, it was always broke, met me for the first time. We played together. And the next day we were sitting in a cafe and he said to me, Lend me a quid. And I didn't realise that was a joke because nobody had a quid. And I actually lent him a quid and he went white. And he was so shocked by this that he actually paid me back. And I was a babe in arms in this environment. This was in Ronnie Scott's band for three years. And it was wonderful. It was a great education. We were a cooperative band, and I used to help work out the wages because nobody else could divide by nine. And it was a great time for three years.

Benny Green13:40

I'll never forget it, and I should write about it, and I probably will.

Presenter13:43

You moved away from it, you backed off it, you you sought a new career. Now was that because the music was changing? Because we're now talking when you left music I think nineteen sixty, wouldn't it? And that was about the time when rock and roll was starting, the jazz was fading a little bit from the side.

Benny Green13:56

Well, I must I must say that I had a hand in in the rock and roll thing because uh

Benny Green14:01

In nineteen fifty eight, in debt to the income tax, I took a job with the worst band I think I'd ever played in, and it was the only band I ever I got any money from. And it was Lord Rockingham's Eleven.

Presenter14:11

Oh, that's a buff mountain, yeah.

Benny Green14:12

Yeah, and when we went to the first rehearsal, the producer said to us

Presenter14:12

Yeah.

Benny Green14:16

This is no good. The four saxophones, you're not playing in tune. Now, I want you to tune up out of tune. And I thought, well, this is silly. For 30 years, I've been trying to play in tune. Now they're going to give us £30 a week just to play out the tune. And of course, they got to the top of the hip parade and they stayed at the top of the hip parade for three weeks. So we sold 650,000 copies of my fee for that was £6. Yeah, so don't tell me that the music business is romantic. But it was about this time that I began to extend my musical interest. In Ronnie Scott's band, there was a lot of scholastic approach to music in spite of all that slapstick villas that went on. They were actually, they'll hate me for saying this, they were all very learned gentlemen.

Benny Green14:58

And they used to talk about and listen to and study a lot of classical music. And this was something I knew nothing about. Bartock particularly, they went into in great detail. And Debussy and Ravel, and you can see where we're leading, because they went for the composers who used what you could call modern harmonies. And they were amazed to hear somebody like Ravel had been using certain chords that modern jazz musicians of the 50s thought were very avant-garde. And Ravel had been using them in 1900. So this gave us a kind of comparative picture of jazz. We saw that what we thought was development in jazz was only a tiny corner, and it had already occurred in other corners. And I even went to see Daffys and Chloe at Common Garden. This is how serious we all got. I bought a record in 1953 or 4 when I was with the band, and it moved me so much that I never ever forgot its contents. Now, you can tell from the sound of my voice that I ain't never been learnt to talk proper, and that includes French. So if I say that this recording is Ravel's Waltz is Noble and Sentimental.

Benny Green16:07

and that the orchestra is the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra and the conductor is André Cuiton.

Benny Green16:13

I hope there's not too many Frenchmen listening.

Presenter17:15

Benny, how do you actually start writing yourself? How do you make the transition from being a jazz musician to being a writer?

Benny Green17:21

Well, just before I joined Ronnie Scott, I was introduced to the editor of the New Musical Express, which in those days was a paper much more committed to jazz than it is now.

Benny Green17:31

They talked to me and I said, Well, I'd like to try and write something, and they were so astonished that they could find a musician that could read and write, because they were very snobbish about that sort of thing.

Benny Green17:41

They said, we'll have a try.

Benny Green17:43

And I wrote a short story about a musician that sneezes every time

Benny Green17:47

He takes a deep breath. It was very profound, and uh the sneeze turns out to be uh the notation of a of a decent tune. It was very profound stuff, and they paid me three guineas for it.

Benny Green17:57

And they said, Would you like to write occasional pieces? And I started like that. I see. I wrote humorous sketches of the life I was living, lampoons, jokes, and it wasn't for some years that I'd attempted any

Presenter18:00

Uh

Benny Green18:09

What you might call serious criticism of jazz.

Presenter18:12

But do you have a mentor, if at all, as a

Benny Green18:14

Well

Presenter18:14

Uh

Benny Green18:14

I had a mentor in a sense uh because this was all sort of parochial stuff until I joined the Observer as a jazz critic in nineteen fifty eight and I did that as a result of an accidental meeting with Kenneth Tynan.

Benny Green18:27

I went to a jazz club one night one went to jazz clubs every night and this was a a jazz club in um either Frith Street or Greek Street, and uh I was with a girl, one of those girls that always embarrasses you by doing something stupid.

Benny Green18:41

We wi we left the building and uh we slammed the door and she got her coat caught in the door and we couldn't get the door open, we couldn't get the coat out and I said I lived in Euston Road, you see. I said, Look, I'll go home and get a pair of scissors and I'll come back and cut you free. This is about one o'clock in the morning. And I went home and I got the scissors and came back.

Benny Green18:59

And she was gone, and there was a piece of torn coat in the door. And I thought, well, that's the end of that. The place is dark and shuttered and locked. And I was just going to leave when somebody came down the stairs. And it was Kenneth Tyner. I don't know what he was doing now. To this day, I don't know. But we got talking, and he walked me home, and then I walked him home back again, and we walked and walked. And he turned out he was very interested in jazz. He was obsessed with jazz and he didn't understand it. He said, What do you do when you stand up and play? What is the process? So we got to know each other like that. And then a couple of years went by, and he out of the blue phoned me and said, Would you like to be the jazz critic, the observer? You see? And I said, Yes. And he said, Well, if you submit some work.

Benny Green19:40

Maybe, because Kingsley Amis, who was the first Jazz critic in the series papers, is going to Harvard to lecture. I didn't know it then, but I was only one of several runners. I didn't know that. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have entered,'cause I have a defeatist attitude to these things.

Benny Green19:55

But I gave them some stuff and I became uh the jazz correspondent of The Observer and and swiftly won a reputation among readers who didn't know me as an old man.

Benny Green20:04

When they met me, they said, Gosh, we we imagine a much older man, which meant I wrote in a boring way, of course. But I stayed there nineteen years, which is a long time. And I think that finally kind of got me going. And by the end of the nineteen years, I'd long since stopped playing.

Presenter20:18

What about another choice of record?

Benny Green20:20

Well, when I stopped playing, I got more interested in the history of the music, which is a funny way round to do it, but it wasn't until I stopped playing and began writing that I started to think about all the stuff I'd played. Now

Benny Green20:34

I noticed on the head of the music when we played that the same few names kept recurring.

Benny Green20:40

And it finally got home to me that there was this kind of aristocracy of of composers in the field that I was uh talking about. Of course I knew about George Gershwin.

Benny Green20:50

But I don't think one can get to know them intimately until you've played all their music many times. And it seemed to me that Gershwin's music, you couldn't really.

Benny Green20:59

make it tired. It was always fresh and it was always

Benny Green21:03

New and exciting. And the other thing was, in my childhood, I hadn't liked Fred Astaire very much. It seemed to me he had a funny head, and I didn't really kind of follow the romances of Ginger very closely, and I couldn't even do a waltz, so the tap dancing meant nothing to me. As I got older, I changed. I well, it would be nice to have been a tap dancer. Isn't Fred good at enunciating the lyrics? And I gradually came round over the years to the realization that in many ways Fred symbolized a lot of my life for me because when I hear him to this day I think of Top Hat. When I was about nine I saw Top Hat and all the rest of the damsel in distress, all of them.

Benny Green21:40

They were again music from my childhood, so I'm not sure I can judge this music dispassionately. I think it's wonderful and I think he's wonderful, but I wouldn't know. I think it's part of me. And this medley, you can hear Fred singing three songs of Gershwin and it seems to me the three songs are as beautiful today as they were when he wrote them.

Presenter22:00

The British Museum

Speaker 222:02

Had a loss. Uh

Presenter22:03

Uh

Speaker 222:03

Looks like

Presenter22:04

Shop.

Speaker 222:06

How long I wonder for?

Speaker 222:08

Would this thing last?

Speaker 222:10

Uh

Presenter22:10

What the Age of Miracles?

Presenter22:14

How do you think?

Presenter22:16

For Son and me, I saw you then.

Presenter22:21

And through foggy London town the sun was shining.

Presenter22:27

Every

Presenter22:28

Yeah.

Presenter22:29

You met Frederister, didn't you, Merny?

Benny Green22:31

Yes, I did. I I wrote a thirteen part life of Fred and uh, oddly enough, met him afterwards. He was a little bit disconcerted that anybody should make thirteen hours of radio out of his life,'cause he's very humble and modest. He keeps that well, I only did my job, only went to work. He's a charming man, and I think that uh

Benny Green22:48

That type is probably dying out in the urbane, well-mannered, suave gentleman.

Presenter22:54

The next guy you've chosen, Sinatra, plays a part in our history too, doesn't he? I mean, we're of the same generation. Yes, indeed. What does he remind you of? What's what's Sinatra about?

Benny Green23:01

He reminds me of the romance and the the pains of disappointment of the late teens and the twenties. He is the great romantic troubadour of our generation, and he deals in the small talk of love and romance and unrequited passion.

Benny Green23:15

And he does it better than anyone ever did or ever will. You hear the conversational.

Benny Green23:20

Exchanges that we've all indulged in. In a way, it's being taught how to make love, to live, to converse.

Benny Green23:28

to enjoy the minor pleasures of life, and it's a major contribution.

Presenter23:32

Difficult too choosing one sonata record. What is that?

Benny Green23:34

No, it's not difficult, it's impossible. I've chosen the one I have, partly because it's it's sung uh so well it's silly, secondly because it's written by somebody that I'll talk about in a few moments. It's written the words are written by Johnny Mercer, but Sinatra's performance is incredible.

Presenter23:51

We're drinking my friend Uh

Speaker 223:55

To the end.

Speaker 223:58

Of a brief episode?

Presenter24:05

Make it one.

Presenter24:07

For my baby

Presenter24:11

And one more for the road.

Presenter24:20

You're the only man I know who's read every one of the hundred and twenty three editions of Wisdom, and from it you've compiled four wonderful anthologies. How did that idea start?

Benny Green24:30

I'll tell you how it started. I was reviewing books for The Spectator in the 70s, about 73 or 4, and I got given the That Year's Wisdom Review.

Benny Green24:38

And I reviewed it as if it had been a novel, tried to find out who the hero was and who the villains were. And I said at the end of the review, all it remains now is for wisdom or have the sense to reissue all the wonderful past wisdoms that we are not able to get hold of, and thought no more of it. I got a letter from the high executive of Ford Motor Company saying.

Benny Green24:58

We will subsidise an anthology of the best of wisdom.

Benny Green25:02

I went to Wisdom and they said uh

Benny Green25:04

What a good idea! At which the Ford executive disappeared to Europe and his successor wasn't interested. But after that, I pursued the idea.

Presenter25:11

Uh Yeah.

Benny Green25:12

Dovin's out

Presenter25:12

How long did it take

Benny Green25:12

You to read them.

Benny Green25:14

About five years. Five years. Yeah. And as I say, before I started it, I had twenty-twenty vision. And now I've got twenty-twenty pairs of glasses. Uh it really did do for my eyesight'cause it's a lot of small print. But it was a great self-indulgence. It's more than just a history of cricket of course, isn't it? It's a social history of England. You can extract from it everything from I mean I found in it the a man who saved Charles Dickens from being hit on the head with a cricket ball.

Benny Green25:39

To the king of Tonga, who had to make it illegal to play cricket in the islands six days a week because they weren't bringing in the harvest.

Benny Green25:46

One man died of blood poisoning as a result of a nail in his cricket boot.

Benny Green25:50

One man decreed that he be buried in the coffin, wearing his umpire's coat, with a cricket ball in one hand and six stones in the other.

Benny Green25:57

All kinds of extraordinary people and situations. Wonderful.

Presenter26:02

Wonderful.

Presenter26:03

Let's have another choice of record, Benny.

Benny Green26:05

Well, in the last uh ten years I've read a great deal of uh English literature for the second time, particularly the Victorians, and became more in love with that century and uh

Benny Green26:18

I was struck by the parallels between some of the stuff I read and some of the music of Edward Elgar. I know one is not supposed to read into the music all these parallels, but I can't help it.

Benny Green26:30

When I hear Ravel, I think of the Impressionist painters. And when I hear Elgar, I hear that tremendous pageant of England that was.

Benny Green26:36

Really marching to its doom in 1914. I think of it as a kind of

Benny Green26:42

Farewell wave to some vision of pastoral England that I never knew, which I did.

Benny Green26:48

and the sadness and the beauty and the sweetness of the violin concerto

Benny Green26:53

strikes me in that way and uh the version I've chosen is by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Nigel Kennedy playing the violin.

Presenter28:01

Venny, people make much of the amount of work that you do and and you really are have an extraordinary output in radio and newspapers, magazines, uh television, stage, whatever, you're there. I think with you that that the job's a hobby and the hobby's a job, isn't it?

Benny Green28:17

Yeah, I've devoted my entire life to avoid going to work, which is absolutely true. I d I could never ever have contemplated the thought of going to work, and I was willing to do anything at my hobbies.

Benny Green28:27

But not go to work. And, for instance, I never dreamed of writing a book about cricket, it seemed to be absurd.

Benny Green28:33

And it was a hobby of mine which spilled over into print, and it's a complete flu. I've now published, I think it's five or six anthologies of cricket, and I'm writing another one now.

Benny Green28:43

But that's absurd, it's a hobby. Jazz music was a great hobby of mine. Literature was a passionate love, which I never ever remotely considered to be a profession. People say, Why do you work so hard? and I don't know what they're talking about. I get up in the morning, I can't get to the typewriter. It's absolutely true, I cannot get to it quick enough. And every time I get up in the morning I have all these notes I scribbled by the bed the previous night to prepare what I'm going to do the next morning. I can't wait to get to it.

Presenter29:08

Yeah.

Benny Green29:09

I s'pose I'll get right this block one day. They all say everybody says it comes.

Benny Green29:13

But at the moment uh I'd not experienced it. There's always so many things to do.

Presenter29:17

Okay, let's have another choice of record, and our final choice.

Benny Green29:20

My final choice is dedicated to one of the most remarkable and I think lovable men that I ever met. In in the early nineteen seventies, one of the greatest of all lyric writers was Johnny Mercer, came to London. I didn't know this at the time. It was at the last throw of his career. He had couldn't get work in America.

Benny Green29:36

He came to London to write the musical called The Good Companions, and in the course of his journeys in London I met him, and we did a couple of broadcasts together and I got very friendly with him.

Benny Green29:45

Mercer was one of the great romantics of modern light verse, and I once said to him

Benny Green29:50

How does it feel to be one of the most popular poets since Shakespeare? And he said to me, Well, he said,

Benny Green29:57

It's been easier for me because Shakespeare didn't have Harold Arlen and all those others to write with me, which is a lovely, humble way of doing it.

Benny Green30:04

My last

Benny Green30:05

Choice of record is such a marvellous experience when you hear the whole album. I can't really describe it. It's Johnny Mercer in the early seventies standing up on the New York stage with a pianist, nobody else.

Benny Green30:15

Telling his life story through the songs.

Benny Green30:18

In this medley he closes his medley in 1972 with the last four that he wrote, and of the four.

Benny Green30:24

I commend the last sou.

Benny Green30:26

For the marvellous

Benny Green30:28

Tenderness and emotional awareness that he put into them. Anyway, this is an evening with Johnny Mercer.

Speaker 230:39

Wider than a mile.

Speaker 230:43

I'm crossing you and star

Speaker 230:46

They had a preview of this picture breakfast at Tiffany in San Francisco.

Speaker 230:51

And they had one of those conferences afterwards. It didn't go too well, because it was a big hit, but it didn't go too well at this preview.

Speaker 230:58

So the producer Marty Rackin said, well, I don't know what you guys are gonna do, but I'll tell you one thing, that damn song can go.

Presenter31:05

Memory though of the late and very wonderful Johnny Mercer.

Presenter31:08

Benny, we're now on the desert island. How are you going to enjoy the experience, do you think?

Benny Green31:12

No, if you ask me what I do all the time it would be sulk. I'm very bad when the circumstances are not entirely comfortable and favourable. I'm not very good in adversity. I say, well, where is the deep freeze? Where is the television? Where is the sofa? Where is the electric light? And if it's not there, I sulk. I don't try. It's a weakness of character.

Presenter31:32

You're going to have a very, very difficult time then. You've got the records, but you have to imagine that seven are washed away. You're left with one of the eight you've chosen. Which one that would that be and why?

Benny Green31:42

I think it would be the evening with Johnny Mercer, because, a, I knew him pretty well, and b, he's demonstrating a craft which I would dearly love to have mastered. It's uh a craft not all that widely appreciated, uh but I think a great craft despite that. It would be a reminder to me of how good a lyric can be.

Presenter32:00

Yeah.

Benny Green32:00

And what about the book? What's the book you take? Well, I'm going to cheat. There's a thick book called A Quartet of Comedies, and it's got four novels by HG Wells. It's got Kipps, Love of Mr Lewisham, The History of Mr Polly, and The Wheels of Chance. I would take that book as a reminder to me of what the first initial impact

Benny Green32:18

of good literature was, on my mind.

Presenter32:21

And what about the luxury object?

Benny Green32:24

Well, I suppose I could get by with a paper and pencil for the writing. In that case it would be a saxophone, with plenty of reeds.

Presenter32:30

Benny Green, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Speaker 132:39

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