COMMENT Play it by ear when picking tunes for Desert Island Discs
Anice radio station invited me to be the guest on a show modelled - and not very loosely — on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
The premise of Desert Island Discs is that you have been washed up on a desert island with a functioning gramophone. Your task is to choose some discs to take with you to console you in your isolation, there being, as is usual on desert islands, a serviceable electricity supply with which to play the gramophone.
(I used to puzzle over the word desert. Surely on a desert island there would be only sand and heat, and records would be no consolation as the sun melted the vinyl and shrivelled you to biltong. But I have since learned that desert is an archaic form of deserted, so a desert island is just one on which no people live. It could readily be endowed with vegetation, endlessly fruiting trees and little pigs so innocent of human cunning that they can be tricked into flinging themselves onto the barbecue. And as they drip fat onto the coals, what better way to pass the time till dinner than playing a few records?)
So I said yes, thank you, I’d be honoured and they said we’ll Zoom you on Tuesday afternoon, and I said ah.
Name another day, they said. Tuesday’s fine, I said, but I have never Zoomed. Is there any chance we could do this thing by telephone, and they said how terribly quaint, but yes of course, which goes to show how nice they were. Meanwhile I had to think of five chunks of music.
Oh dear. The more I thought the harder it got. My mistake of course was to imagine that it mattered. I wanted to impress. I wanted to come up with a catalogue of discs that said here was a rare and sophisticate soul. But I am not a rare and sophisticate soul and neither do I know much about music.
I listen to a classical radio station when driving or cooking, and I like a lot of what I hear, but I rarely know what it is and if I do know I forget. I resolved in the end to just choose music that either stirred me or evoked a memory. I began with Stranger on the Shore by bearded Acker Bilk.
In 1973, with long hair and adolescent gloom, I was fielding suicidally close at short leg in a junior county cricket game aged 16, and from an open window in a terraced building bordering the ground Acker Bilk was playing. And as I crouched perhaps a yard from the bat I was swaying with the music and the batsman struck the ball firmly off his legs and I did not react — I was too close to react — but my swaying hands went somehow to the path of the ball and everyone looked to the boundary but the ball wasn’t there. I had it. I had caught it.
Maybe six years later I was sitting in a bar in Calle de Gascon de Gotor in Zaragoza, Spain, having a lunch of beer and omelette when a snatch of music played on the radio. Did you hear that? I asked the barman, but he hadn’t. Did you hear that? I asked the other bargoers, but they hadn’t. Nevertheless the tune stuck with me, the thumping opening salvo of triumphant, potent, groin-enriching sound, and in the following months I hummed it to anyone I thought might know it and eventually I found Polly. “Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto,” said Polly. It still thrills me. It is unapologetic emotion.
Who could not be stirred by tiny treble voices rising to the roof of a huge cathedral, by the pathos of the frail pipe in the vast and echoing space. But singing what? I went online and found Schubert’s Ave Maria sung by a Welsh 11-year-old. He’ll do nothing finer, however long he lives.
Edith Piaf was 4ft 9 in her stockinged feet. Battered by betrayal and exploitation and addiction, she was frail and damaged. But not when she sang. When she sang she believed, and she makes me believe. I chose Milord, about a whore and a gentleman.
And for a fifth piece? Nothing came to mind until I heard about the funeral of Anthony Burgess the novelist. As the doors of the great church opened at the end of the service and the mourners filed out, someone in a pub over the road broke into a popular tune on the piano and the whole pub started singing and the mourners all looked at one another and laughed. My fifth piece was Roll out the Barrel.