Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, best known for her debut novel White Teeth.
On the island
Eight records
My first one is Notorious BIG: My Money, My Problems. What I loved about it when it came out, it had this extraordinary video. Everybody was dressed in these like white or bright yellow tracks, it's dancing for joy, and with Puffy playing a kind of black golfer because Tiger Woods had just happened. It's the middle of like Clintoni in America. There's this enormous feeling of optimism, like we're here and there's no getting rid of us. It was great.
This is Billie Holiday, Easy Living. I love singers, female vocalists. I wanted to be one when I was younger. And you have a terrific blues voice, I've been told. I have an alright voice, but Billy is on a different scale from most other human singers. And the thing which I really love about her is that technically it shouldn't be good. Everything's wrong, right? The phrasing is bizarre. She takes songs and kind of dismantles them, and yet there's such beauty in it. And this song, particularly Easy Living, because when I met my husband, he was also a fan of these black female singers, Nina, Billy. And it's easy to live with people you agree with on things with.
This is to Ramona Dylan. Dylan was my dad's favourite and my mum loved him too, so that's one place where they were united. And it's just a song about displacement. I always hear it as Dylan saying to a girl, Well, you've moved to the big city and it's tough and everyone's mean to you, but you've just got to try and get on with it. And I felt both my parents were ill in that situation, really. They were just trying to get on with it.
This is Madonna. ... 'Cause you go on Desert Island like this, you don't expect to be choosing Madonna, but I had to try and be honest. There's something about how I noticed when I was a kid that, you know, there'd be boys running around the playground talking about pop stars or actresses they would do. And I never ever heard anyone say that about Madonna. There's never a question that some nine-year-old was gonna tell you what he would do to Madonna if he got his hands on it, because that was just never gonna happen. And subconsciously that's the effect that she gave to the generation of girls who came up around her, that you were not to be done unto. If anyone was going to be doing the doing, it would be you.
He had the same kind of skin colour as me. He had this strange kind of gender thing, being almost kind of male and female. And I guess I thought about myself sometimes having both instincts. And this song, particularly Pop Life, I just thought if I was on a desert island, I'd want people, I'd miss humanity. And this is a song about the mess of human life, and it has so many human voices in it. And I've always loved it. It's a joyful thing.
This is Mozart's Requiem. I guess it plays a large part in on beauty. I grew up almost perfectly ignorant of classical music. The first time I met people who listened to it was at college, and I was constantly amazed that anyone would have this music. So, when I first heard the Requiem, I was completely bowled over by its entry-level into that form of music. But to me, it was a kind of overwhelming experience.
This is a recent track by a guy called Wretch32 who I believe is from Tottenham. I heard it on the radio and I just fell in love with it, partly because his voice is so perfectly North London. The rhymes are so clever and funny and yet so completely simple. And it samples the stone roses so it's like two ends of my life squished together. And if I was on a desert island I'd want to remember the 90s as well as the present. So this song kind of does both.
Tristan und Isolde: PreludeFavourite
This is Wagner, it's Tristan and Nizold and it's the prelude. It's a sublime piece of music in the kind of extreme sense that it will make you shake and cry. What's interesting about it is that it's a series of unresolved musical phrases. And that goes with the story of Tristan and Isolde as well. You know, that he has this love potion, and when they fall in love, it's like the insertion of something really irrational, something you can't control, something that destroys them both, really. It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly painful. And just as a work of art, I find it perfect.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:39What purpose do you think [exploring what memory feels like] serves?
For me it's the idea of recognizing where you are in time. I just find a lot of the way we live now is is meant to disguise from you the reality of time. And when I'm writing I'm trying to remind myself before anybody else that it's real, that this thing that you're in.
Presenter asks
4:59You say when you read the first twenty pages of White Teeth it induces nausea. Why is that?
I don't think that's a very unusual thing to say. Like, when I ask people, imagine picking up a letter you wrote when you were twenty-one, or a diary or a journal, what's your reaction? It's like as if somebody else wrote it. There's a kind of shock that you could have expressed yourself that way or thought that way. So that's how it is for me. It's just that the thing is published and everybody's read it. But as I get older, I feel fonder towards it. I think of it as a book that young people really like, and that's great.
Presenter asks
8:37You were born slap bang in the middle of the seventies. What are your first memories?
It's weird when you have kids, you you think you don't have early memories and then as you're doing up the buttons on their shirt or or smelling bongella you realize that you you do have these memories, incredibly early ones. … of being held and cared for it. I think my earliest memories are kind of knocking about Wilsdon and Kilburn with my slightly odd looking parents.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I would choose Proust because I've never finished it. Because you can have a lot of time on the island. And I would choose it, if it's possible, in a dual translation, French and English, because you might as well learn French while you're there.
The luxury
I think you'd want to feel your body and move, but I think probably goggles so I could swim.
Presenter asks
9:17What was the actual age gap [between your parents]?
Thirty years. … It was a kind of extremity, and that was interesting because I ended up with a lot of the tastes of my father, who was more like a grandfather's age, a lot of my musical tastes. … You know, I liked a lot of films in the twenties and thirties.
Presenter asks
10:11What do you remember about life at home then?
My brother would probably say my brother just underneath me probably say differently, but I was the oldest, and my memory is of my parents at war, basically. They were just always at war. … They just didn't like each other. It was just general. But they really liked us and I always felt that. So I always felt kind of sympathy for them. Like we're in a car going to Cornwall, they're screaming at each other. But I was aware of the fact that at least they're trying to get us to Cornwall, like united in the idea of giving us a happy childhood. And with my brothers, we had our own thing going, you know, and we had a lot of fun.
Presenter asks
18:36Did you get a lot of male attention [at Cambridge]?
I was the opposite. I was kind of a minor stalker of other people. … I was primarily trying to date my husband, who was not at all interested. … He s he says I used to go round to his room and just sit there all day and half the night just hoping that something would happen. Then finally about four AM he'd be like, Well, I really need to go to bed now And then I shuffle off again. That went on for ages.
“For me it's the idea of recognizing where you are in time. I just find a lot of the way we live now is is meant to disguise from you the reality of time. And when I'm writing I'm trying to remind myself before anybody else that it's real, that this thing that you're in.”
“And the thing which I really love about her is that technically it shouldn't be good. Everything's wrong, right? The phrasing is bizarre. She takes songs and kind of dismantles them, and yet there's such beauty in it.”
“I think my earliest memories are kind of knocking about Wilsdon and Kilburn with my slightly odd looking parents.”
“I feel such a kind of happiness in my skin, and it's not really to do with what size you are, it's just the recognition that you're healthy, for example. That you get out of bed and everything works, that it moves. This is an incredible blessing that I was too busy moping around to recognize.”
“The person who wrote White Teeth was a know-it-all, you know. At twenty-two, that's that's how you are. The older you get, the less sure you are.”