Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Director, writer and actor; known for satirical sketches and political impersonations, later partnered with John Fortune.
On the island
Eight records
My father really loved Arthur Tracy. He had a big kind of booming kind of voice. And it's also he was known as the street singer. So it's about the streets of Paddington. And it always reminds me of Paddington.
Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier
My next record is is Revelle's Bolero, but played on a piano as opposed to orchestrated. I don't like Bolero. I think Bolero is an ugly uh when it's orchestrated because it's so syrupy and all that. But if you strip all that away and you play it on the piano, it is incredibly refreshing.
The Stones hadn't made it yet. This was their first record. And in a way, it was quite interesting because I hated it. And then he made us listen to it so often that I really got to love it. And it is probably one of my favourite pop songs.
Record number four is it's kind of got a kind of revolutionary angle to it, though it may not sound so. Bobby Darren singing Mac the Knife. I became very interested in Brecht, very interested in the music of Kurt Weil.
Variations and Fugue on Chopin's Prelude in C minor, Op. 22
I discovered Bussoni when I was at college at the age of thirty-seven. Not an awful lot was going right for me and I became a mature student ... and did the equivalent of O-levels for thirty-seven year olds which was to do a humanities degree at Ealing College ... This music is so much the kind of music that I I love listening to. Though it's posh, it has this kind of real meaning and is not simply you know just some kind of bra background music.
Chuck Berry in August in New Orleans' 1961 recorded Come On. We heard the earlier version by The Stones. The Stones has this kind of wild kind of, you know, going down the pub, enjoying yourself, kind of rough, not particularly musical in a way. This is Chuck Berry laid back, missing the beat on occasions and really being underplayed, so to speak.
About 91, 92. I came across them through friends, and I was just blown away by this kind of strange, almost combination of white noise and all just a kind of cacophony of sometimes unrelated sound. I mean, I don't want to make it sound too intellectual, but I just love this kind of exuberance. And it reminds me that once I was a youth.
CaravanFavourite
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
I would say that Duke Ellington is one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, and he will be remembered as that.
Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20
Smetana Quartet and Janáček Quartet
I would like to wake up in the morning and have a bit of um energy and a bit of Lightheartedly. This is the Mendelssohn Octet, an absolutely miraculous piece of music, uh which is so full. He wrote it when he was sixteen, and it's of Mozartian magic, I think this.
Havana-Song (from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny)
The second record is um Lottie Lenia singing uh Brecht and Viol. And this is one of the records which will have great resonance with me because I I in the sixties worked with Lottilenya and uh it was uh one of the great working experiences of my l my life this.
String Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5, "The Lark"
I've always loved Haydn. I've always loved his musical personality and his personality in general. I I knew when I was coming to do this programme I thought I I must have a Haydn quartet because nobody has ever done better than Haydn at writing quartets.
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink
I love Debussy because of his slipperiness, the kind of ever-changing light in his pieces. I'm not a fan of Debussy the Impressionist. I'm a fan of Debussy the the transformer of material. And Jeur, which is his last orchestral score, is a wonderful example.
Gerry Mulligan and his Concert Jazz Band
Jerry Mulligan became a good friend of mine in New York. And this is the the record from that time. This is 1962 in his concert jazz band, The Wonderful Band, playing a piece by Bob Bruckmeier.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83
Maurizio Pollini, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Claudio Abbado
The lady I lived with, Libby, uh and uh we'd been together now for twenty three years when I met her well one of the first occasions which uh I remember was when she performed this uh in Southern Cathedral and uh this is Pellini who has a stab at it, but um I still like Libby's performance best.
The Rite of Spring (version for piano four hands)
Bracha Eden and Alexander Tamir
This next piece is another memory of Libby. Libby was a concert pianist, and uh she performed in piano du duets with her partner's um piano partner Ben O'King. And one of the things her p sort of party pieces was the d piano duet version of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.
RéponsFavourite
Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez
Probably because for the virtues which are the opposite of mine, for the kind of uh ration the ex The energy and the vigorous. application of uh principle to to everything. But what I admire about the music is the the brilliance of the invention and uh The wonderful, glittering sound world that is produced, and this piece is his masterpiece.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:17Did you have any idea when [the editorship of The Big Issue] was offered to you that this was a job that was going to change your life?
Not really. Um Gordon Roddick, who who was the guy who came up with the idea, who started the body shop with his wife Anita, had been in New York and bought a copy of the Street News. ... He approached me largely because I'd been in the print. I'd done loads of magazines. I'd also sold papers on the streets. I'd also been ex-homeless. And I was also an ex-offender. So that probably covered a lot of the people who we were expecting to work with.
Presenter asks
3:52What does [The Big Issue] do for the people who sell it?
First of all, it gives people the opportunity of earning a legitimate income. It then becomes a way of them gaining in self esteem and moving on. It also, for some of them, unfortunately, is the only form of legal income that they're going to get, and it keeps them out of trouble.
Presenter asks
5:26How small were you when you got your first taste of [the street]?
Um well I wu I was born in Paddington um just off the Portobello Road on on uh just after the Second World War. ... The Jerries had a go at uh Paddington because of the rail link, so there was it was a a big debris. Uh lots of slums, lots of uh broken buildings, bomb sites and all that.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
I would take the poems of Wallace Stevens because I'd have plenty of time to try and work out what they meant.
The luxury
Two thousand soft toilet rolls
My first thought was a feed from the Hubble Space Telescope and just have on the have a look at the universe, but I thought that would actually reinforce my sense of being alone. Um so it's gonna be down to two thousand soft toilet [rolls].
Presenter asks
9:41Why was [the orphanage] apparently a terrible experience?
I just sunk my brothers became a part of the system. You know, they got on well with the nuns and all that, and I just didn't, and I just became, I started running away. ... They were pretty violent. Um they you know, they they did give you a good clump. They were all largely women who had been picked out of the bogs of Ireland, and they were um my first experience of what you might call intense injected charity, which kind of put me off it for life.
Presenter asks
17:35What were your motives when you took on the editorship of The Big Issue? Was it more business than social concern, or vice versa?
It was really important in those days, back back in the early nineties ... There were so many people having a go at homeless people. ... So what we wanted to do was stress the importance of work. That they, by their own efforts, would get off the streets. So, therefore, I was very, very insistent that homeless people bought the paper ... what we're going to do is we're going to give all the profits away. All what is left over will go into social change for homeless people. But we are going to say to people, you have to be responsible for your own social transformation. It is not enough to simply give you another bowl of soup or another blanket.
Presenter asks
23:09If you became mayor [of London], what do you want to save it from?
I'd like to save it from... What you might call a dysfunctional democracy, which is about a cabal of well-intentioned burners of the midnight oil. Who will conspire to make sure that their opinions have got over ... I don't believe in that any more. ... I want to represent myself, and I want hundreds and thousands of millions of Londoners. Recognizing that we cannot rely on other people to. Save our streets and to save our communities. Our communities are rotting, and the only time that they ever gain any meaning is when people take control of the community.
Presenter asks
2:33How does it compare now, attacking New Labour [compared to the Tories]?
Well, I think at first we did actually find it very difficult, partly because, of course, The nature of the end of the Tory regime was The same as it always is when empires collapse, that it becomes decadent and sort of shameless in a way. … Whereas everybody was so relieved when they went. and Tony Blair got in, but particularly when the other lot went, that certainly we found the first series within with a new labour quite difficult to do, because it's quite it It takes time for the character of a government to establish itself.
Presenter asks
3:59What is most irritating about [New Labour] for you?
What is most irritating about it is its self satisfaction, its s self righteousness, um and what I suppose they would call its pragmatism, but what is what is in fact uh a desperate kind of l running round looking for uh what is the most um the most vote profitable uh line to take.
Presenter asks
7:10Do you think [a lack of energy] has hindered your career?
Well, I'm I sort of make a living and I kind of carry on and I'm sixty three years old and I think, well, it's rather remarkable that anybody who's so so indolent as I am can actually s survive.
Presenter asks
19:50Why did you suddenly decide to perform [at the Establishment]?
Well, I didn't I didn't decide to to perform. Uh I was just going to write for it. That was the idea. And John Fortune was going to direct. Peter was also going to write. And we had auditions. But nobody who Either people weren't sort of flexible enough today, or actually, what it really was, is nobody who was any good would do it for the amount of money that we were offering. … So Peter said … why don't you do it just for the first three months and we can get somebody who can do it properly. … Um I was performing.
Presenter asks
29:57How low did you get [when addicted to amphetamines]?
I Got I got pretty Paranoid. Yeah. … Suicidal? Yes, I would s say almost. Um Suicidal.
Presenter asks
30:09What was [the addiction] fundamentally about?
I think it was fundamentally about I was terrified of just being, as it were, myself. I was terrified of that I just that I was a sort of empty person really, and that uh I needed all this this stimulant in order to do anything.
“I was on the run from the old bill in 1967, the end of 67, just before Christmas. And this large, big-nosed Scotsman came into a pub in Edinburgh with a load of his rugby mates. And he made some comments about me and some people I was with. So I went over to kind of challenge him. And then we then started talking strangely about poetry. And we found out that we were both large-nosed poets.”
“I did become a a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party later in when I was twenty one, and I became a member of an organization that preached or suggested that there was this kind of heroic working class. And I didn't know any of these heroic workers. All I knew was all the people who were on the fiddle with me in the kind of slums and poor housing of West London and the West End.”
“All this rubbish about people being independent, we're all there's a scheme of dependency, we're all dependent on each other, and that is why I wouldn't be able to survive a desert island.”
“I always think that By now I should have a late period, you know, like uh Brahms had a late period, or, you know, where everything is very spare and abstract. Uh but I don't have a late period. I have my first my early period”
“what I was always trying to do with Wilson was to say those things which everybody knew Wilson was thinking, but which Wilson never said.”
“I'm intensely unpractical.”