Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A former journalist and lyricist who wrote the lyrics for 'Les Miserables' and the song 'She'.
On the island
Eight records
Ken Jennings and Angela Lansbury
It's sung by a young, scruffy, psychopathic adolescent who imagines himself to be [the protector] of the middle-aged misses Levitt. And it's a song full of menace and underlying threat. And yet, on one level, it's a sweet love song.
I would like to take with me on my desert island something that celebrates the new freedoms in South Africa. And so it's the anthem, In Corsi Sicole, Africa, written in 1897 by a man called Enoch Sotonga...
I simply love Paris. Hemingway said somewhere that if you have lived in Paris as a young man... Then wherever you go for the rest of your life, Paris will follow you, for it is a movable feast.
The moment he hit that long, first extended note, the word she jumped into my brain. And the song all hung from that first note, she.
It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington
I have lived and loved jazz all my life and if I have to go to my desert island I would want to take a representative jazz record that expresses it as what somebody once called the music of goodness, of good.
Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren
The brief was so impossibly dense and complex, the Indian doctor, the heartbeat, how do you get all this into a [comic song]... It all came in about ninety seconds, and it became, goodness gracious me.
Of all the famous songwriters, and my favourite without a doubt is Richard Rogers, there is a freshness and a melodic inventiveness about him which never ceases to [delight me].
Gymnopédie No. 1Favourite
I've always been intrigued by Eric Sarty's Gymnopedia. I would play it. At the end of the day, as the sun went down and I was feeling thoroughly miserable, I would play. this thing because it would reinforce my feeling of isolation and loneliness.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15How did it happen, Herbert, that Cameron [Mackintosh] should ask you [to write Les Misérables]?
I wrote to Cameron asking him whether he'd ever seen [Our Man Crichton] and whether he'd be interested in getting behind a revival of it. He wrote back and said he didn't think he wanted to do it, but would I come and talk to him... On the way from the sofa to the door, he asked me, why didn't you go on writing lyrics? I said, but I had continued. And he said, Well, name me something you've written. And when I mentioned... She Cameron gave a reasonable imitation of a man in a dead faint... six months later, when he was in deep trouble about Les Miserable... he suddenly sat bolt upright... and remembered that little snatch of conversation...
Presenter asks
10:05How aware were you then, Herbert, during that idyllic childhood in South Africa... of racial discrimination?
Oh, that you were hardly aware of it at all. You were simply... moved into a form of society which took all these things for granted. There was a benevolent feeling between master and servant, which was understood on both sides. There was very little evidence of anger.
Presenter asks
14:11How did you come across [Charles Aznavour]? How did you start working together?
The keepsakes
The book
The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell
One of the most remarkable books about the First World War I've ever read, and if anybody hasn't read it, I urge you to do so. It is a revelation.
The luxury
Because it would be tantamount to the man's discovery of fire. If I had a lighter I could light beacons in case any ships pass by.
I don't translate so much as reinvent. I don't think you can translate. a song, because a song is a distillation of nuances and inferences and words which reverberate and resonate in a certain culture. And when you're translating a song, you have to find Not only how the word, but the word that will have that same appeal in another language to another culture.
Presenter asks
20:32How many of the celebrities you were meeting and interviewing... made a lasting impression on you, or were they simply grist to your mill?
Well, I met a great number of people, writers and fighters particularly, Steinbeck and Henry Miller and Muhammad Ali, George Foreman. Judy Garland, I spent roughly an hour or two with them, so this is not exactly a deeply based friendship... Those who resonated mainly were, I would say, two American writers, three, Steinbeck... Truman Capote... and Henry Miller.
Presenter asks
26:03Was [the song 'I Want to Go Back to Mississippi'] informed at all by Kretzmer the White South African?
What I was aware of in South Africa, even though as I say it was a sweet and idyllic childhood, I was very much aware that a life we were living in South Africa was due to one thing which had nothing to do with us, which was the the privilege of a white skin. and earned, unased for, and sought. So that idea of the inequalities based on race. and colour. has always struck me all my life as one of the great injustices.
“There are certain activities on this earth which provide rewards which are out of all proportion to the effort involved. when I think of novelists slaving away for seven, eight years And then achieving perhaps a few thousand sales and so on and so on. One mustn't look for just desserts. There are only unjust desserts, I think.”
“I was born in South Africa when it still happened to be a member of the Commonwealth, so it was a historical and geographical fluke. that I happen to Speak English at all.”
“I don't translate so much as reinvent. I don't think you can translate. a song, because a song is a distillation of nuances and inferences and words which reverberate and resonate in a certain culture.”