Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Frontman of the band Elbow, whose voice and lyrics won major music prizes, headlined Glastonbury, and played at the London Olympics closing ceremony.
On the island
Eight records
New GrassFavourite
It never fails to get me, it never fails to evoke sapling freshness and springtime. It works any time of year, it's not just a spring record, but it's just th the way it picks up and delicately moves around, there's there's like a very subtle bliss to it.
Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa
It's important to me because when the band got together and started playing together, none of us could play. And we learnt our instruments, and we l and we learnt our craft, if you like…listening to funk music.
And from being very little, all my sisters played me music, and they all told me why I should like it. But my memories really are of Becky playing me stuff and saying, listen to what happens with this piano here, listen to what happens with this harp here.
This is Public Enemy. It's not my favourite Public Enemy song, but it reminds me of my friends. When everyone went to university, I think that was possibly my first heartbreak.
Arleen Augér (soprano) with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier
I went wandering off through the trees and got lost and ended up half way up the side of a mountain…and I thought why not finish walking up it and have a look. And as I got to the top this was on the compilation that my sister Becky had made for me. The Lonely Shepherdess, it's um from the uh Chant d'Auvergne. It's the Bailero.
Jolie Holland, this is very much a homegrown bedroom record called Catalpa and she's taken a WB Yeats poem and she set it to music. For personal reasons, I really connect with this poem as well.
Tom Waits is another of those artists that exists in his own space…But this is a return to very simple classic songwriting for him. It's really simple and it's really beautiful.
This is Jonah's Policewoman. The song's called Real Life. It's exquisite. It's one for Emma Jane who thus far is the love of my life and it reminds me of the best part of that relationship.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:02You've said that when you're inside a song you're at your happiest. That's when you're inside the process of creating it, is it?
It's like finding your footing in a busy river. It's like knowing your way through something and being amazed that you know your way around. I love music so much and I've I still have this sense of wonder when I'm listening to something that somebody else has written. So to be on the inside of that feeling, to sort of still have that feeling of wonder, but it's something that you're creating, it's just addictive.
Presenter asks
5:08To stand then in a stadium in front of how many people at Glastonbury did you play to the biggest? Is there any way you can convey to us what that experience is like?
It's such a strange thing because the song belongs to the Five Boys, you know, it it belongs to the band as all our music does. I think that's part of being able to cope with People singing your words back to you. My words are part of what I do with Elbow. I don't feel sole ownership of that song. So it's easy to share with people outside the band, as it is with all our music.
Presenter asks
10:32What happened when your parents split up? How did they explain it to you as a twelve year old?
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Works of J.D. Salinger (or, if not available, 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters')
J.D. Salinger
It'd have to be Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters. That's my favorite companion of his short stories.
It was a case of. Mum left for a few days, and we knew that she was safe. We knew it she was at her friend's house, but they'd had their last argument, sort of thing. Mum came back and dad moved out. And … I was told I was the man of the house, uh which was perhaps a bit more responsibility than I needed at that age, but I think probably the best of the thinking at the time to do with it with a young man. And I was told that my dad would only be a mile down the road and that he'd always be there, and that has proved to be the case, you know. My dad was always working on a friend's car on the path, and he got me my own set of overalls when I was really little, and I used to slide underneath the car with him, and he'd he'd find a random screw on the floor, and he'd say, Find me a washer for that, would you, son? and I'd end up rooting through these drawers for hours and hours and feeling important, but in retrospect he was just keeping me busy.
Presenter asks
13:58I read that you just scraped a C in your GCSE English, and I'm wondering how somebody who just scraped a C could manage to write The Bones of You or all the other extraordinary lyrics that you've written. When did you come to language and come to love it?
I absorb anything I read, I absorb anything I hear. I remember film dialogue like really, really in quite a lot of detail. If something interests me, it goes in and stays in. But I fell out with school, aged twelve. … It was around the time my mum and dad divorced and I remember at the time feeling terribly guilty for using the divorce as an excuse not to do homework. … But now as an adult looking back, I think Now there's obviously something going on.
Presenter asks
15:52So when you feel it on your shoulder or knocking at the door of your head, what do you do these days? How do you marshal it?
I'm currently trying to train myself not to throw whiskey at it. If I've got to do a performance, then I I tend to have to have a drink.
Presenter asks
31:09What was it like playing in the closing ceremony of the London Olympics 2012? That must have been quite an atmosphere.
It was, it was amazing. We were told it was a dry backstage until tangible. No booze. No booze, yeah. And I was like … I got really stroppy, which is not like me. So I ended up smuggling in a case of Guinness, a case of lager, a load of spirits. … In Madness's flight cases. … Word got round that Elbow had the booze and we had the great and the good from British. … Brian May knocked on for a beer. And Timothy Spall was my favourite. … Me and Tim Spall now are really good buddies. … And the following day on the train, on the way home, I I thought, I really like him. I I really hope I get to speak to him again and and then I thought everybody in the country loves Timothy Spall, you know. And then I got home and I got a phone call from him anyway.
“It's like finding your footing in a busy river. It's like knowing your way through something and being amazed that you know your way around.”
“There is a beauty in in sadness, there is a calmness in melancholy.”
“Somebody looks at me wrong in the street, part of me agrees with them, like, Oh, yeah, what have I done wrong?”
“I think I'm really, really going to enjoy the next forty years.”
“I don't regret any of my decisions.”