Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Broadcaster and journalist known for evangelising world music and reporting from conflict zones like Rwanda, Burundi, and Haiti.
On the island
Eight records
AmapendoFavourite
The Bundu boys and their arrival in the UK in 1986 was for me a road to Damascus experience. I remember John Peel and I, because we shared an office for many years, tiny little office. We used to sit across a table from each other with a record player in between. And this EP, as it was at the time, came in and we put it on. This tune started and we both just pros and we just stared at each other for the duration of it and thought, what is this? What is this? And that's what I'm always looking for in life. That sense of what is this?
Bob, in a way I'm where I am today because of Dylan, you know, and when I was twelve, we're going back to about nineteen seventy two, I was buying slayed records and sneaking them into the house under my coat. Uh but what really blew me off the middle of the road and into the margins uh was Bob Dylan, and I just never heard anything like it.
(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais
God the clash. I love the clash. Well, I was I suppose of the punk generation, but of the punk bands, I think the clash just stood head and shoulders above all the others. They turned up at Leeds University, one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen, in January 1980. And I have to say, they were that night the greatest rock and roll band I've ever seen.
The Hunter S. Thompson of Rock and Roll, Warren's Eagle. Well, this one. For me, it's it's a song that's never far from in mind in some of the places I I I find myself. And I went down to the Angolan Civil War in nineteen ninety six. I was with a demining team in a town called Quito.
Oh god, Loudoun. I've been a big Loudoun fan ever since I first heard him when I was about 13. And at whichever stage I've been in my life, Loudoun has always had the appropriate song. But he's got one which has always stuck with me, and it's almost like my mission statement. People will know when they see this show what kind of a guy I am. They'll understand just what I stand for and what I just can't stand.
If we're going to use the term world music, Joni was in there years before I was. But we come back to her album Blue, 1970, 71, something like that. And there's a song on there which, for me, just embodies the carefree promise of travel. And it's one of those songs that's going through my head when I'm bouncing down that rubber walkway at Heathrow Airport, you know, off to some madhouse or hellhole or whatever.
It's another travelling song. It's such a romantic song, this, and it's a song I always carry with me when I'm away. And I play it a lot, and it reminds me of Juliet, who's the great love of my life. And, you know, the lines in it's 20,000 Roads, I went down, down, down, and they all led me straight back home to you.
About three years ago, I went to an extraordinary event called the Festival in the Desert, which takes place in the Sahara Desert, about 100 miles north of Timbuktu. It started out as a gathering of the Tuaregs, the nomadic people of the Sahara Desert who come from Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and they travel hundreds and thousands of miles on the camels that come to this thing. And this is a band of Malian Tuaregs called Tina Owen.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:53Does this professional split personality [between world music and frontline reporting] come from the same place?
A fascination with the world, I think. I mean, I I did set out to be a journalist when I went off to university in Leeds in nineteen seventy eight, and it all got horribly derailed while I was there by rock and roll.
Presenter asks
1:28What do you remember about the invitation to go to Burundi and Rwanda in 1994?
I was asked by the Today programme. To go to Burundi, this was soon after the Rwanda thing had kicked off… to find out whether the ethnic conflict would spill over from Rwanda into neighbouring Burundi… And a guy came up to us, a local guy, and he said, Would you like to go into Rwanda? I had promised everyone back at home I would not set foot in Rwanda because it was beginning to emerge, you know, just exactly what was going on.
Presenter asks
3:07How did a Radio 1 DJ end up covering the Rwandan genocide for the Today programme?
Well, there was the strange thing was, Kirsty, nobody really wanted to go because it was so horrific, and there was no kind of immunity for press people… And also, don't forget, simultaneously, what was happening is Nelson Mandela was being inaugurated in South Africa. So every Africa specialist was down in Pretoria. And so I think that's how a Radio 1 DJ ended up covering the Rwandan genocide for the Today programme.
The keepsakes
The book
Ryszard Kapuściński
Kaposynski got together in the body of his work history, politics, philosophy and travel.
The luxury
Unlimited supply of toilet paper
I can't think of anything more undignified than not being able to wipe your bottom.
Presenter asks
19:30What was it back then that made you angry?
Your injustice makes me angry still still can do. We'll try and do something about it, I suppose, is what you're trying to do, in your own little way. It makes me angry now, actually.
Presenter asks
20:11Why didn't you [become an MP for the Liberal Democrats]?
Um because um to be honest with you, I couldn't put up with the tedium of daily constituency work, you know.
“I think that's how a Radio 1 DJ ended up covering the Rwandan genocide for the Today programme.”
“We're not here to give people what they want. We're here to give people what they didn't know they wanted. And I think that's what drives me.”
“I'm the luckiest person I know. I mean, it was just incredible the way things happened.”
“I've tended to find that those who've got least give the most.”