Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet Laureate known for finding poetry in ordinary lives, covering subjects from the Pennine Way to Brexit.
On the island
Eight records
Moon Age DaydreamFavourite
I do actually own this record. This was the first album I ever bought, Ziggy Stardust. I always thought of Bowie as a kind of Jesus figure. You know, when you grow up between the mills and the moors, you need some kind of otherness to believe in. And Bowie provided that through his music and his behaviour. This song wasn't actually a favourite to begin with, in fact it was probably the least favourite track of mine on the album, but it's definitely my favourite now. I mean, it starts with the line, I'm an alligator. So you can't really go wrong with that.
Choir of St John's College, Cambridge
I'm not really a Blakeian poet, you know, in terms of his visionary attitude, but this piece bridges poetry and music, and not many settings of poems are successful, but this one absolutely is.
You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two
I picked this just because I wanted something to remind me of those Amdram days and the village butcher and the village undertaker and the bank manager and the women who worked in the co-op suddenly coming out onto stage dressed as cockneys or as people from Oklahoma. I suppose I was thinking that if I'm on a desert island, if I really do start going mad, I'll listen to this song and choreograph my own little song and dance routine. You know, I'll put my thumbs in my belt hooks and walk around on my heels like the artful Dodger.
There's something about this track I think that absolutely transcends rock and and pop. It's got an element of the requiem in it. It feels to me to be near sacred music. So it's sacrilegious I always think to use this track out of context. When I heard it being used on Peaky Blinders I stood up and walked out of the room.
I remember going into a nightclub in Huddersfield called Flicks and asking for a record. The DJ leaned over to me and he said, We don't play records with guitars in. And I thought, I don't know what he means. I don't really know any records that don't have guitars in. And then he played this. I felt like I was hallucinating. It's so sexy, sleazy, cheap, luxurious, lush, intimate. I'd never heard anything like it.
It's very local and my wife will tell you that if I hear somebody singing this song, let's say that I'm very emotionally susceptible to it. And what I particularly like about this recording is that I can hear an audience in the background murmuring and joining in. And that's the way that I know this song. I hear it sung in clubs and pubs and people just don't seem to be able to help themselves from joining in.
I recognise that, you know, I am drawn to the melancholic and the sombre sometimes, and that I deliberately choose to be sad sometimes and need things to provoke that condition. So, you know, what better than a bit of East European neoclassical gloominess.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:00How can poetry help us at a time like this?
I don't know whether it's to do with the immediacy of poetry. You know, it's a very democratic art form. You only really need to have a knowledge of the alphabet and be able to pick up a pen and paper. ... And I suppose I felt some kind of duty as well to write to the moment to say something about now.
Presenter asks
10:38Tell me a bit more about your dad Peter.
Yeah, I will always be Peter's son in the village... He was very much the enthusiastic party that got us all involved in the local Am Dram scene... I saw my dad morph through all these different characters. He was quite often a baddie. He played Bill Sykes in Oliver. Even his dog deserts him. He's so bad.
Presenter asks
14:36Do you remember the first time you wrote a poem?
I was 10 years old. We were asked to write a poem about Christmas. And I went off home, wrote this thing, which I was very pleased with. And the teacher had said that he was going to put the best six poems up on the wall. And he didn't choose my poem. And I think I was a little bit heartbroken about it. ... And then poetry didn't really resurface then until I was sort of 15, 16, and we started reading Ted Hughes. And I just woke up. ... And it suddenly struck me in a very electrifying moment that the world was a really interesting place. It could be packaged up in these little bundles of language... And the shock of that realization and the magic of it, the primitive magic of it, has never really left me.
The keepsakes
The book
I'm going to take the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm going to take the twenty volume set in large print. So that should keep me occupied.
The luxury
I'm going to take a tennis ball with me. I mean, I don't know what sort of desert island it is, but I think if I had a tennis ball I could improvise a game of golf and a game of squash and I could practise my leg breaks against a tree stump... I want a proper professional grade one that that's going to last me a couple of years.
Presenter asks
23:16Why would it have been a disaster if you'd got the job [as Poet Laureate] ten years earlier?
I think I would have felt a little bit hemmed in and obligated towards a certain kind of writing. And if I think back over the last decade and the work that I've done and the work that I needed to do to, you know, sort of expand as a writer in different directions, I just wouldn't have been able to get on with that. ... But yeah, it wouldn't have been at the right time.
Presenter asks
24:49And how did you celebrate when you found out you'd got the job? Is it true that you bounced on the trampoline at home?
We did bounce on the trampoline, yeah, when we got back home. Not easy with a bottle of champagne in your hand, I have to say.
“I'm not an optimist in my nature, but I wonder if there's something about this current situation that has tried my pessimism a bit beyond its limits.”
“I always thought of Bowie as a kind of Jesus figure. When you grow up between the mills and the moors, you need some kind of otherness to believe in.”
“It suddenly struck me in a very electrifying moment that the world was a really interesting place. It could be packaged up in these little bundles of language... if you put them in the right order, you can make extraordinary things happen in somebody else's head across thousands of miles, across thousands of years, and in complete silence.”
“You go into poetry, I think perhaps into any art form, because you want to be anti-establishment or independent of any sense of authority. And three decades down the line... you appear as if you're connected to the government and to the monarchy.”