desert island discs

I haven’t been able to confirm this, but Desert Island Discs may be the longest-running radio program in the history of broadcasting. It started during the Second World War, and it has been broadcast continuously by the BBC since 1951, initially on the Home Service and since 1967 on Radio 4, the corporation’s talk-radio station. The concept is simple: a celebrity guest is asked to imagine themselves a castaway on a desert island. Originally, the idea was that they would somehow have a wind-up gramophone and eight records, and while being interviewed about their lives, they would introduce the records they had chosen, and brief extracts would be played.

The longevity of the program can probably be attributed to the notion that one obtains a more nuanced insight into someone’s personality by discovering what turns them on musically than by anything they might say. With that in mind—and I’m never going to appear on the program, obviously—I thought that I might list the eight pieces of music that I would choose to be marooned with. I’ve listed them in approximately chronological order, and where possible I’ve linked each one to YouTube so that you can listen to the track if you’re unfamiliar with it.

Eddie Cochran: Summertime Blues
I started listening to music in the late 1950s, and for me this is the record of the decade. I didn’t become a teenager myself until 1959, the year after this record was released. It articulates perfectly what we had to put up with from grown-ups—and politicians.

Solomon Burke: Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
I was a huge fan of what I later characterized as real soul music in the 1960s. My favourite singer in this genre was Otis Redding, but this is the stand-out individual performance. This is what I wrote about it in my essay Black Music of the 1960s:

This record, more than any other, betrays the gospel origins of what was beginning to be called ‘soul music’, because it is impossible to listen to this pulsating up-tempo song without gaining the impression that one is listening to an old-style revivalist preacher whipping up the emotions of his congregation.

The Beatles: I Am the Walrus
I was 16 years old when the Beatles burst onto the music scene in 1963, and I was so impressed by Love Me Do that I placed an advance order for Please Please Me. However, if I’m going to pick a Beatles song for this list, then it has to be from their later work, because they continued to improve throughout the decade. Despite this caveat, you may be surprised to learn that it is the surreal lyric rather than any musical qualities that makes it one of my favourites. Shakespeare buffs may spot some quotations from King Lear during the fade-out groove.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: All Along the Watchtower
Although I included Hey Joe in Sixties Music: The Top Ten, my assessment of the most significant records of the decade, this is a much more accomplished work. In fact, it is an extreme rarity: a cover version that improves on the original. I’d begun to lose interest in Dylan by the time he released his version, but Hendrix really brings this song to life—so much so that whenever Dylan performs the song in concert, he uses the Hendrix arrangement nowadays. And the guitar solo on this record takes my vote as the best guitar solo in the history of rock music!

The Grateful Dead: Uncle John’s Band
Although I was aware of the Grateful Dead, I didn’t hear anything by the band until I came back to Penrith after working in Australia in 1970 and became a friend of someone who was an avid Dead fan. Although my favourite Grateful Dead album is Aoxomoxoa, this song, from Workingman’s Dead, is the one I will always choose if I’m restricted to one track. Even though I detest country and western music, and the Dead have been labelled ‘the world’s loudest country band’, this will remain my choice.

Pink Floyd: Atom Heart Mother
Pink Floyd are one of my all-time favourite bands, and if restricted to just one track, then the choice is extremely difficult. However, there is an intensely personal reason for choosing this one:

In 1971, I joined the staff of Eskdale Outward Bound School. The mainstay of Outward Bound in those days was the 26-day ‘standard’ course. The daily routine on such courses included an assembly at 9 o’clock each morning. The format of the assembly was simple: the warden made any announcements that were required, then an instructor gave an ‘inspirational’ reading and led a short prayer.

On my second course, I was asked to perform the second and third parts of this ceremony. I decided to interpret ‘reading’ in the widest possible sense. I rigged up my two large speakers to a recently acquired stereo cassette deck containing a tape that had already been cued to the start of the final movement beforehand. Before pressing the ‘start’ button, I explained to the audience that the music symbolized the symbiosis between different levels of consciousness (I’d recently been reading Timothy Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy—and consuming LSD for the first time). I sat down and started the music. The warden didn’t look too impressed, but he said nothing.

After what seemed like a lot more than the six minutes that the final movement actually takes to play, the music stopped and I stopped the tape. The reaction was so far beyond my expectations as to be halfway to the outer reaches of the solar system. All 108 students (all male, all between the ages of 16 and 20) stood up, and I received a standing ovation. Even the warden admitted that he’d ‘appreciated’ it, and he appeared not to notice that I skipped the prayer. Several students sought me out during the day to tell me that I’d made them think. 

This may have been the single most personally uplifting experience of my entire life.

This extract is from Atom Heart Mother, my attempt to analyse what is a hugely complex piece of music that features a brass ensemble and a choir to augment the band.

Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody
In 1975, I was working at the Hong Kong Outward Bound School, and we used to take groups of students on two-day rock-climbing expeditions to the sea cliffs at Fat Tong Point, in the extreme southeast of the New Territories. On one occasion, at the end of the first day, I was listening to one of those tiny pocket radios that were popular at the time when Killer Queen began.

“Wow!” I thought. “What is this?”

Shortly thereafter, I was wandering around a branch of ParknShop, a local supermarket chain, when I came across a rack in the middle of an aisle with vinyl records for HK$20, which was a third of the price I would have expected to pay at the time in the UK. I didn’t look too closely, but I spotted a copy of Sheer Heart Attack. At that price, I was bound to want to buy it, which I did. I became an instant Queen fan and bought their next album, A Night at the Opera, on which this is the obvious stand-out track, as soon as it was released.

This is the only track in this selection that I’ve actually seen performed live. I was living in London in 1979 while working for the BBC. One evening, I was watching an arts program on BBC2, from which I learned that Queen were doing ‘a crazy little tour of London’, playing in small venues. When the program finished, it was time to take my dog for a walk, and I bumped into the  guy who lived in the ground-floor flat. I already knew that he was a sales rep for EMI, so I had an obvious question:

“Hey Nigel,” I said. “Is there any chance you can get me tickets for Queen at the Rainbow tomorrow night?”

The Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park is just down the road from where I was living in Highbury.

When I saw Nigel the following evening, he handed me two tickets, not for the Rainbow but for the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand two days later! I could not have been more grateful.

One of these days, I plan to post a copy of an essay that I wrote about the band that was published by TV & Entertainment Times—for which I’d been the resident TV critic—in 1978.

Dire Straits: Sultans of Swing
By the 1980s, for someone who had begun the process of growing up accompanied by the music of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino, there was almost nothing to spark my interest, but this ‘song’ was something that immediately caught my attention. It wasn’t the almost spoken delivery of the words—a feat that is technically far harder than most people realize—but the sparkling guitar embellishments that originally caught my attention.

The irony is that it’s about a jazz band, and jazz is the other musical genre that I’ve always found abhorrent. While I associate country and western music with right-wing rednecks, I consider jazz to be the music of left-wing ‘intellectuals’, and I like to think that I don’t fit into either category.

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I will resist the temptation to include any ‘honourable mentions’, which seems to be the de facto way to present this kind of list, except for my reason for not including classical music, which I do listen to—and enjoy—from time to time. My introduction to this type of music will probably surprise you. When I worked on oil rigs in the Sahara Desert in 1968, there was always a recreation cabin, which invariably included a pool table and a ‘library’ of paperback novels that workers had purchased at airports before flying out to Libya, read and discarded. I can’t tell you how many Agatha Christie novels I read during this period.

However, on one rig there was also a gramophone, and among the small collection of records was a recording of Beethoven’s sixth symphony. You can imagine how boring it must have been in the middle of nowhere that I decided to give it a listen. To say that I was impressed would be a massive understatement. Although I’m now familiar with all Beethoven’s symphonies—and his sixth is not his best by a long way (that would be his seventh)—I’m still a rock ’n’ roller at heart, and if condemned to listen to just eight tracks, possibly for eternity, I’m always going to go with that.

I was tempted to include a rendition of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance, which is the ultimate rap song, but I know all the words, and if alone on a desert island, I can sing it myself!

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Desert Island Discs always concludes with the presenter asking their guest that if their collection of records is threatened by the breaking waves and they can rescue just one, which one would they choose. I think that my choice is too obvious for me to identify specifically here.

The presenter then informs their guest that despite being granted the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible (the Authorized Version, I would hope), they can also have one other book on their desert island. As someone who spent almost 20 years editing other people’s books, I think that I would forgo that concession. However, if forced to choose, I might go with Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge by Robert Audi. This was the most challenging assignment of my editing career, and the author was so impressed by my work that he asked that my name be added to the acknowledgements at the front of the book. I haven’t read it since, even though there is a copy on my bookshelves in Penrith.

The guest is also allowed one ‘luxury’, and that is an easy choice for me: a pack of playing cards. I know more than 20 types of patience (US: solitaire), and a pack of cards is the ultimate time waster, or time passer if marooned on a desert island.