Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Nicknamed the Bard of Salford, he is a poet and punk performance artist, known as Punk's poet laureate since the 1970s.
On the island
Eight records
what I've got on this desert island, terrifying though the prospect of this abject loneliness is for me, what I've got here is everything that Garnet Mims wants in this here poem. So it's a kind of reminder that it's not all beer and skittles living in the inner city.
Yes I did. Yeah, what a mover. Jerel Lee Lewis, the greatest piano player that ever lived. Whole lot of shaking going on.
I love doo-wop music. I went to see Dion about nineteen sixty one and he was the best dressed, the most handsome man I'd ever seen.
Well, I should imagine this would be a nice piece of escapism on that desert island. And one thing that I think you would miss more than anything else would be the voice of a woman. And what a voice in this case.
Well, this is a very mysterious tune. Enigmatic wouldn't be too big a word for it. And that is a poetic connection.
Again, a nice switch into another landscape altogether. Vermont, New England, ski resort. Deciduous trees. What's life without Sinatra? Nothing.
Doris Day, and this is the first woman I fell in love with at a very early age. Again with the geographical travelogue. Picture her in that buggy driving through a blizzard. Finally dressed as a woman, Calamity Jane with this one, the Black Hills of Dakota. She was the first golden vision of womanhood that registered as 100% adorable.
How Great Thou ArtFavourite
Well, this is uh the greatest singer that ever lived. If any guy changed the nature of our world, it's this fellow, the zenith of male beauty. And you're on your own a desert island. Sooner or later you're gonna have to wanna contemplate the nature of eternity. There is only one guy with the vocal equipment to do this. And that's Elvis Presley with his wonderful reading of How Great Thou Art.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:47You've said that you write in response to public anxiety, but your poems aren't political. Why not?
Well, I think the poetry and the politics suffer for it, you know, anybody that can be converted to a particular world view because of a poem. I think they're looking in the wrong places for whatever it is they want. But to hitch your poetry to any particular political waggon is always a mistake. 'Cause poetry is forever. You know, you write a poem and it's out there and it's you can't unwrite it. And politically, you know, well, one can change one's mind many times a day.
Presenter asks
5:40Growing up in your neighborhood in Salford back in the fifties, I think you once said that the best piece of advice you ever received was from your dad George. Can you remember what it was?
Uh well, there were two pieces of advice that I've never forgotten. One was never work for nothing, even if it's a flaky job like I've got. And uh never leave a bookies with a smile on your face.
Presenter asks
8:08You got TB when you were seven or eight, and you were sent away to convalesce with relatives in Ryl. How did that go?
The keepsakes
The book
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The way he talks you through a painting it's uh it's better than going to an art gallery. It's so rich that you can actually only read it three pages at a time.
Well, I thought it was great because obviously I couldn't stay in the part of Salford where I was living, so it wasn't very far away from Trafford Park. Trafford Park then was probably the biggest industrial complex outside of the Soviet Union. So I had to get moved out, and the nearest place to move me out to, well, the most convenient because we weren't made of money. We had a relative in Ryal, North Wales, which then was a flourishing holiday resort, the equal of Blackpool. And I was more or less, you know, feral. I was kind of turfed out of the house at ten AM and wasn't expected back till tea time. So I used to sort of knock around the fair ground and, you know, I made myself useful.
Presenter asks
17:44So your first paid gig came in the early 1970s, courtesy of Bernard Manning at his Embassy Club in Manchester. How did you persuade him to book you?
Well, a judicious choice of poem, right. Obviously, when I said to Bernard, you know, he said, Well, what is it you do? So I said, Poetry, mister Manning, you know, he said he said oh, they don't like poetry half of em can't bleep in read. So what did you say? So I said, no, it's nothing too high-flown, Mr. Manning. I'll give you a demo. So I'd just written this number, Salome, set in the writs in Manchester, which I knew Bernard would have known very well. So I give him the line, I'm going to have to bleep myself here. It's about a punch-up that kicks off, and she gets dragged into it, this woman, Salome, Salome Maloney. And the line is, When the punch-up was over, she was lying on the deck. She fell off her stelet oils and broke her bleeping neck. So as soon as he read that, he said, Oh, yeah, that'll fly. All right, I'll give you a chance.
Presenter asks
24:11How bad did it get during that period? [the heroin addiction]
Well, everything g was great after that. No, but seriously, obviously, I'm being sarcastic with myself. That is the centre of your universe, and there was always something better to do than write a poem. You're gonna get the sa I mean, you know, every drug addict is virtually the same person, you know, th th there's not really much point in dwelling on it, but I needed money more than ever, so I had to work. The the glamour was flaking off with every every new job I really felt like I was sort of selling my sorry ass at times. It was a tedious saying among hippies uh if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And that's why I'm no expert in these questions that you're asking me, because I was very much part of the problem.
Presenter asks
33:30The Sopranos also introduced you to Plan B, who asked you to collaborate on the album Ill Manners, and then, in twenty thirteen, an adaptation of another of your poems, I Wanna Be Yours, was on Arctic Monkeys album AM. How did that come about with the Arctic Monkeys?
I was doing a show at the boardwalk in Sheffield and the proprietor said, would you just have a word with these lads? Big fans of your work. They've done my stuff at school, you know. At GCSEs. Yeah, that was great, having my stuff rammed down the reluctant throats of school children and there was nothing they could do about it. That's GC... Anyway, I'm on my way out of the boardwalk. I have a word with these lads. They're in a band. We think they're going to be really big. So I says, oh, yeah, what are they called? The Arctic Monkeys. I thought, oh, that's a terrific name. There's no monkeys in the Arctic. You know, immediately you've got a dichotomy. It's going to stick it in your head forever. So, yeah, sure, and there they were. Shy schoolboys, very polite, nice kids. But I knew they had something, you know. But it did me yeah, fantastic. I couldn't be happier with their cover of I Wanna Be Yours.
“Desert Island Discs has all the finality of a suicide note without the actual uh obligation of topping yourself. As you can see, I'm a coconut half-empty kinda guy.”
“The way poetry works is it sneaks up on you thirty years later. You're not going to understand it. It was written by a forty-year-old guy, you're twelve. Just learn the words and then, you know, thirty years later, you know, wow, it's amazing how it makes its mark.”
“If I'd have known how much fun it is having a kid, I would have had seventeen of them.”
“My advice to any poet you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a note book, and idleness those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry.”
“No hesitation, Elvith.”