Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
International pop star with over 100 million records sold, known for writing, producing and performing perfect pop songs.
On the island
Eight records
Love Is a Losing GameFavourite
This is the best female vocalist I've heard in my entire career, and one of the best writers.
At both ends of the spectrum Brian Ferry's made some of the sexiest music of the last uh thirty years. It's so original and it's so sexy and it's so insistent, I suppose.
Brian Burton, Thomas Callaway, Gian Piero Reverberi, Gian Franco Reverberi
An amazing song is an amazing song. Occasionally something left afield comes through and people see it for what it is, which is one of those old classics, you know, the kind of records we used to hear quite often.
Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl
This record is the best produced rock record in the history of rock, I think. It's not necessarily the greatest song, it's a phenomenal record.
Neil Tennant, at a certain point in the eighties, was writing the most beautiful songs. No one wants to hear frightening, terrifying songs about AIDS, but they do, if they're gay and they've lost friends, they do want to hear those people referred to and remembered and honoured.
Alison Goldfrapp, Will Gregory
That first gold frap album, Felt Mountain, is uh a great, great album, you know. It's amazingly um elegant production. I'm a real admirer of her voice.
Kanye West, Ray Charles, Renald Richard
There are certain records that literally I just can't not move to, and this is one of them. The lyric makes me laugh. It's completely brutal, completely sexist. Surprise, surprise, coming from an American hip hop record. But it's funny.
Actually, this is the heaviest lyrical record on on this list, and it's from a gay artist called Rufus Wainwright. And he's written this song called Going to a Town, really laying into the Bush administration...
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:28Have these twelve months seemed almost unbelievably extreme?
Well, yeah, I mean it it's been um actually been a bizarre year. It's been a very bizarre year because you can't imagine what it is like playing to people who've been loyal to you for 25 years and haven't seen you for 15. That's just been the most life-affirming thing I could have done. I'm so glad I did it. And yet on the other side, I feel like, you know, it's been shown to me time and time again and very, very strongly recently that the truth is nothing like as important as a good story.
Presenter asks
2:15Do the stories matter to you? Do you still get buffeted by the headlines?
I don't like people thinking that I've been done for for grass and and other drugs when I've been done for sleeping pills. But I can't do anything about the fact that the story lasts longer than the fact that you've told people it didn't happen, you know? When I realized it was that one-sided and that really me telling people the truth didn't wasn't going to make any difference, I just really I've I've managed in the last eighteen months to master the art of not reading them, which I should have done twenty years ago, really.
Presenter asks
4:41Explain more about [never being sure about anything in your life apart from your ability to create music].
The keepsakes
The book
Doris Lessing
Um I'd take any book of if I'm getting the Bible right, I'm getting Shakespeare, which I won't read, by the way, I'm not going to take a jolly book. But I think I would take um a book of short stories by Doris Lessing.
The luxury
Well, I've thought about this. And obviously you're not allowed to have uh a partner so I couldn't take Kenny. So that's out. Um but on a desert island, who is going to know I've not got a driving license? So I can drive around in a DB nine. I'll just drive around and around my little desert island on my DB nine because I'm obsessed with cars and, you know, next two years I'm not going to get to drive one.
I have a huge propensity for guilt because I was the boy in a in a Greek family who could do what he liked from a very early age and did... I think I've finally realized one of the reasons my life has been so extreme and has felt so, in some ways, self-destructive, is that it sounds arrogant, but I never had any feeling that my talent was going to let me down... And I think in a strange way, I've spent much of the last 15 or 20 years trying to derail my own career because it never seems to suffer. I suffer like crazy. I suffer all around it... But my career just seems to always write itself like a duck in a bath...
Presenter asks
16:28Did you begin to be a little disorientated by that magnitude of fame?
There's a level of of deification in America that you just don't get over here... For an English boy that was kind of uh I was twenty four and and still quite afraid of still not knowing, to be honest with you, how to spend money. I was terrified of my lifestyle maybe removing my ability to connect to what I did. And I freaked out. I said, I don't want to make any more videos. I don't think I'll ever tour again. I have to step back.
Presenter asks
18:53Did you wrestle with [your sexuality] around about the age of nineteen?
Yeah, when I was 19, I came out to various friends and one of my sisters, and I said I was going to talk to my mum and dad. Was persuaded in no uncertain terms that it really wasn't the best idea... AIDS was was just not something I was prepared to bring into my parents' life. I was too young and too uh immature to know that I was sacrificing as much as I was.
Presenter asks
30:50Do you think you have a problem with drugs?
It depends what you call the problem, really. I'm a happy man and I can afford my marijuana, so that's not a problem. Uh I mean, I'm constantly trying to smoke less, really. I would like to take absolutely I would like to take less, no question. To that to that degree, it's a problem. Yeah. Is it a problem in my life? Does it is it getting in the way of my life in any way? I don't think so. I really don't think so.
“I think in a strange way, I've spent much of the last 15 or 20 years trying to derail my own career because it never seems to suffer. I suffer like crazy. I suffer all around it. I've suffered terrible things, obviously, bereavements and public humiliations and blah, blah, blah. But my career just seems to always write itself like a duck in a bath, you know, like a like a plastic duck in a bath. And I think in some ways I resent that.”
“I went from being Andrew's kind of shadow as a sexually confident being to being really in the center of attention. And at that level, somehow I lost all my confidence. I suppose also the realization that bisexuality was no longer a reality for me and I suddenly felt like a fake. So the whole thing just turned me into someone who really felt the camera was my enemy.”
“I wish to God it had happened then, I have to be honest. I don't think I would have had the same career. My ego might not have been satisfied in some areas quite as much, but I think I would have been a happier man.”
“I think the album is a beautiful reminder of him. I wouldn't go through it again to make a great album. Don't get me wrong, you know, this man's life was was much more important to me than entertaining people. I never want to feel that loss, I'd never want to feel that depth of emotion again.”