Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A novelist and playwright, best known for the film My Beautiful Laundrette and the novel The Buddha of Suburbia.
On the island
Eight records
I've chosen I Am the Walrus because when I heard the words Semmelina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower, I was so um shocked and amazed that anybody would say anything like this in a record that I could see that pop music was moving into all kinds of new areas, which would be terrifically exciting.
In a Silent WayFavourite
I fell in love with Miles Davis, and have listened to one of his records every day of my life ever since.
if you're on a desert island and you were feeling lonely and depressed and you heard this record by the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK, which is such a terrible sort of screeching noise and a sort of howl and comes from s these sort of dirty little Dickensian street kids, it would remind you about what was so horrible about living in England and what was so wonderful about it too, which is a kind of defiance that this record represents.
this record is very harsh and very cruel, and I had a girlfriend who would always play it when I walked into the room, and I wondered why, and then I listened to the lyrics very carefully, and then I understood something.
one of the reasons it seems to me for living in England is the fact that the young people who live here continue to make music which is always interesting and alive and this this record is a combination I suppose of all kinds of strange Indian, Afro-Caribbean and English elements mixed up together which make for a fantastic combination of new music.
when the BBC made the series of The Bull of Suburbia, Bowie did the music, and Roger Michel, the director, and I went to Switzerland and worked with him, and it was a great sort of honor and privilege to be working with this man who I'd worshipped for so long.
the music he's making seems to me to be very original and strange and dark and just right for our time.
Oasis seem to me to have all the right combinations for English pop, which is w that they write very good pop songs. They're suitably defiant. And this is a terrifically lively record called It's Good to be Free.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:57How did your father react when you succeeded as a writer?
Um he was extremely pleased, and I would imagine desperately envious at the same time, because it was something that he he wanted for himself.
Presenter asks
5:08What kind of books were you brought up on?
I was brought up really on two kinds of literature. American literature, which was sort of Kerouac, Salinger, Philip Roth, Bellow, and all those writers at that time who were writing about sex and pop music and running away from home and all that stuff … and also to Russian literature, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, because they were so funny and they were so gloomy and they were so violent and they were comic at the same time.
Presenter asks
5:52Was it your father who showed you that there was a way through escapism through reading?
At that time it was very difficult for me because South London was. Really violent, and many of my friends had become skinned. and Enoch Powell was making his speeches. Um and it was heavy on those streets, and my father was frightened, and and I was frightened. And I suppose the idea of being a writer. was a way of Getting out. South London to Another World. and also a way for me to try and understand why I was living in so much abuse and violence … I was insulted racially every day of my life between the age of four and sixteen, and I suppose writing was a way in which I tried to Make sense of it or find a way through it.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
I thought I would take something by um Sigmund Freud, because he seems to me to be the sort of presiding genius of our violent and dangerous century, and his work in the area of the unconscious is such a brilliant uh discovery that illuminates our time like nothing else. And also because his work is full of stories. Those case studies are are like short stories or little novels.
The luxury
Well, I like relaxing when I get home and I thought I would take some marijuana seeds which I would grow on my island um and and water uh regularly, though not I'm not a keen gardener and I think in this particular environment they would probably grow very well. And then after a time I would cultivate them and smoke them. And presumably as I would be in charge of the law on the island um I wouldn't be I wouldn't uh have to arrest myself for doing this, as I might have to in London.
Presenter asks
7:09How did your mother deal with the racism?
Yes, I would say so, though she never talked about it very much. I think originally Indians in Britain were rather rare and exotic creatures. And then through the sixties and seventies, during the period of immigration, we became the focus of all kinds of other people's violence or preconceptions and so on. And I think she found it very difficult then, because she'd married into something that she had didn't expect and didn't understand. … Suddenly, she had to deal with it, and I think she dealt with it very well, and we seemed to get through it all right.
Presenter asks
22:47How did your first visit to Pakistan strike you?
Well, I wanted to find my roots, as it were. And so I went off to stay with my family in Karachi for the first time. … And I remember feeling very much at home because of my family and everything I was learning about them. And also feeling completely alien. there as well. And one of my uncles rather kindly turned around and said to me, the thing about you is, he says, you'll always be a Paki and we are Pakistanis. They belong there and I didn't. And I think being in Pakistan made me think about what I liked about being in England and how English I felt.
“I write really in order to keep myself alive, to interest myself, to find out what I think. And so when I start I don't know, and when I get to the end, um I'm always disappointed and then I start again.”
“I was insulted racially every day of my life between the age of four and sixteen, and I suppose writing was a way in which I tried to Make sense of it or find a way through it.”
“I learnt that I was British in a sense and not Pakistani in another sense, and I learnt that in a sense you couldn't be at home anywhere. And then I thought, well, why do you have to be at home anywhere? And then I realized that all that was a myth and that you could be free.”