Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Rock musician and former Roxy Music keyboardist who pioneered ambient music, created video art, and produced for David Bowie and U2.
On the island
Eight records
They sounded to me like music from outer space when I first picked them up on my little transistor radio late at night.
Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Africa 70
It's the best dance music I've ever heard. And I think one of the problems sitting on this island would be trying to stay in tone in some way or another. And with this record, I can't sit still.
I remember first hearing this record and going completely crazy about it. Walking around with the album for about a year saying to everyone, you must listen to this band, this is the future.
I became more and more certain that I wanted to make music that was kind of a description of a place or an evocation of a place, so that when you put the music on, it was like going somewhere.
It's a long, very static piece, which is all to do with texture, I think.
Record number six has a rather a good theme for a desert island.
Lord Don't Forget About MeFavourite
Very appropriate for this context.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:08Do you take delight in being hard to pigeonhole?
It's something I find difficult as well. If people ask me what I do, I always say, Well, I'm a chartered accountant. Unless there's a lot of time to explain things, I tell them a lie. … And and having explained, I mean, it it can make you sound like a a bit of a dabbler, can't it? A bit of a dilettante. Well, I am a dilettante and It's only in England, I think, that dilettantism is considered a rather bad thing to do. But I mean, in other countries, dilettantism is called interdisciplinary research. That's what I think of it as.
Presenter asks
2:11How are you looking forward to the desert island?
I would love to be able to say that I could cope with this and be a wonderfully content human being, but actually the world I enjoy being in is so much the world of culture that I think I would find the idea of sitting on a desert island having only nature for my friend absolutely terrifying. I'm always trying to make a blend between nature and culture. You know, New York is too much culture and not enough nature, and Woodbridge, where I currently live, is a bit too much nature and not enough culture. So I can never find really the place I want to live, but I don't think it would be a desert island.
Presenter asks
13:31How did you react to the success of Roxy Music?
I didn't enjoy it as much as you might think. The first thing is I remember very often standing on stage looking at the audience and thinking but you could be doing this. And That wasn't to diminish what we were doing. I liked what Roxy did, and I thought that it was interesting and valuable and. It was really something new in popular music.
The keepsakes
The book
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Richard Rorty
It doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but it's a really good book.
The luxury
I settled on a radio telescope, because I thought on all those long nights I could watch the stars at night and probably pick up the World Service during the day.
Presenter asks
14:35Did you fall out with Bryan Ferry?
Oh yeah, we had a a very big rift. It was a typical clash of young male egos, I think, really. What had happened was that because I was visually so bizarre looking, I got a lot of press attention. The press is always are always interested in people who make good photographs, and I made good photographs. That did rather distort the impression of where the creative leadership of the band was. It was definitely Brian's band, you know. It's just that you wore the feather bar. Yeah, and I I probably got more attention than I deserved, um or perhaps I should say he got less attention than he deserved. So this this created a real problem in the band. It was something that I must say was almost not of my doing either.
Presenter asks
17:39Did you come up with the idea for ambient music by accident?
Yes, quite literally. I had an accident. I was hit by a taxi on the way home from a recording studio one evening. … So I started thinking then of creating a music that you used in the way that you might use light in a room. or use colour as an aspect of the atmosphere of the room. … This led me to start thinking about music in quite a different way. I thought it was rather interesting to make music that existed Like a painting exists on the wall. When you have a painting on the wall, you don't sit and stare at it all the time. You look at it sometimes and then you Get on with what you're doing. Then you might look at it again.
Presenter asks
29:04How has your one-year-old daughter changed your life?
She's changed my life a lot in the sense of She's made my life feel a lot longer. Because I I notice now when I think about things, like I'm a gardener, I I I'm planting things very often, and I'm thinking of her also when I'm planting them. I'm thinking of sixty years or eighty years is As the foreseeable future for this plant, rather than the, what have I got, 30 years or something left?
“I would love to be able to say that I could cope with this and be a wonderfully content human being, but actually the world I enjoy being in is so much the world of culture that I think I would find the idea of sitting on a desert island having only nature for my friend absolutely terrifying.”
“I didn't enjoy it as much as you might think. The first thing is I remember very often standing on stage looking at the audience and thinking but you could be doing this.”
“I had an accident. I was hit by a taxi on the way home from a recording studio one evening. … I started to listen to it and to think this is really a new way of listening to music, not as um. A focal event, but as part of the ambience of your life, as a surrounding, you know.”
“She's changed my life a lot in the sense of She's made my life feel a lot longer. Because I I notice now when I think about things, like I'm a gardener, I I I'm planting things very often, and I'm thinking of her also when I'm planting them. I'm thinking of sixty years or eighty years is As the foreseeable future for this plant, rather than the, what have I got, 30 years or something left?”