Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Publisher and former Oz magazine obscenity trial defendant who became a wealthy media magnate and poet.
On the island
Eight records
One Too Many MorningsFavourite
This will always remind me of uh Fourteen St Kilda's Road. My first bed sit, Harrow on the Hill. I'm fifteen years and ten months old.
All the hair on the back of my head stood up. You know it still does.
John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton
This is probably the greatest guitar solo by white bluesmen in the last fifty years.
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk & Buddy Rich
It blew me away. I just absolutely loved it and I still love it today.
John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band
One night when he stopped working. He did an acoustic version of this song. And it was just terrifying.
She's one of my favorite artists and I just think she has a beautiful heartbreak for it.
This is probably one of their greatest lyricists in rock and roll. Not perhaps the nicest man who ever walked the planet, but certainly one of the finest wordsmiths.
I'll be singing away on this on the desert island, that's for sure. Uh this is when uh Frank Snatcher was a young man. And he had a wonderful voice.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:31How do you see yourself given the contradictions in your character?
At best I'm tremendously loyal and very generous. I know that. At worst, I'm bad-tempered. But usually I'm bare tempered because somebody's forgot to iron my shirt. If uh we've just lost, you know, twenty million bucks. I'm not bad-tempered at all. It's um anything serious I don't get angry about at all. It's just the little things that drive me nuts.
Presenter asks
2:07What did you identify most strongly with when you stood in the dock of the Old Bailey back in 1971?
I'm not sure we were free marketeers. We were certainly up for free speech, that's for sure. There's a lot of um revisionist history goes on about uh the counterculture, which are now supposed to be, you know, the most evil thing that ever happened to Britain. But it's just not true. The first time that I ever really understood the dialectics of women's liberation was through working in the Underground Press.
Presenter asks
4:54What were the circumstances of your very early childhood?
I stayed with my grandmother and grandfather, who were wonderful, in a little two up, two down, one of those tin baths hanging in the coal shed outside Loo. But my mother's career blossomed. And um my mother was a wonderful woman. Obviously she had to be very tough. In those days, even though she earned more than her brothers and sisters because she was a chartered accountant, if she wanted to buy a three piece suite or anything, on the higher purchase. She would have to get a man. It would have to be her brother. It would have to be her father. To sign the higher purchase form.
The keepsakes
The book
Dictionary of National Biography
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee
Because it'll take me months and months, years to read them and then I'd be able to start reading them all over again, and I could also use them to sort of build a wall or to wipe my bottom with.
The luxury
a very long stainless steel shaft (about 15-20 feet)
It's in the hope of encouraging underwater mermaid pole dancing.
Presenter asks
15:58Was the price paid [by your generation] absolutely worth it given the subsequent freedom?
I I I know the price that was paid. I myself went through ten years of idiocy and madness. And I've been to enough funerals. Many of them died young. Not just Jimi Hendrix, not just Janice Joplin. You know, was the price worth it? Yeah.
Presenter asks
23:43What do you mean by saying there is a sliver of razored ice in the heart of every self-made man and woman?
It's just impossible to make ridiculous sums of money. by accident. And the only way you can do it is really, I'm afraid, by denying it to others. There's only so much pie to go around. And also the self-made men and women have completely screwed up. social lives and emotional lives. Because they're spending sixteen, eighteen, literally, hours a day. Making money.
Presenter asks
29:24What did you mean when you said 'I am not a very nice man'?
You can't have spent forty years becoming one of the richest guys in your country from a standing start and be a very nice person. You can be a very generous person and I can be, and have been and will continue to be. But if I send a business opportunity, then nothing, nothing on this earth will stand between me and that business opportunity, added to which I will risk everything that I have already made. On one throw. And if you think any one is standing in my way, then you'd better think again, Kirsty.
“I never even applied for a driving licence. I just used to bum lifts off of them. And they'd be joshing me, you know, Y you gotta learn to drive for this, come on, you know And I'd say, You you don't understand. I was born to be driven.”
“We we we honestly believe we were changing the world. And I know we get mocked for that now that, you know, we're aging baby boomers. I understand that. I understand mockery. I think it's fine. You know, mock away, son. Just remember. That if you're a hardworking businesswoman to day. You do not have to get your brother to sign the hire purchase form.”
“I just went completely off the deep end. You know, we're talking about Rolls-Royce's, we're talking about crack cocaine, we're talking about 14 mistresses, quote unquote, you know, who'd follow me around the world. W we're talking about madness. We're we're talking about a descent into complete madness, just madness.”
“I couldn't beat it. That's all I can tell you. And if I couldn't beat crack cocaine, if I could not master crack cocaine, there isn't there isn't a single person on this planet can master crack cocaine. Certain drugs will kill you. and drive you mad, and one of those is crack cocaine.”