Shortage of desert islands

Having blogged about my Desert island sideboard last week I can’t resist returning to the more traditional topic of favourite music. Two very interesting posts about Desert Island Discs by The Cross-Eyed Pianist and The Argumentative Old Git set me thinking. As well as sharing their own marvellous music choices, they drew my attention to the BBC’s highly addictive archive of castaways.

The archive lists every broadcast back to the show’s earliest days in 1942, which to date means there are 2881 editions – the guests being 805 female and 2086 male – including Roy Plomley himself on two occasions, requiring guest presenters Lesley Perowne and Eamonn Andrews to be wheeled in to interview him. The archive tells us that Plomley had a youthful passion for Borodin in 1942, which he had evidently lost by 1958.

Roy Plomley

I find the archive utterly compelling, and have spent hours browsing across the decades, enjoying flashes of involuntary memory, wondering what I have actually heard and what I am just inventing, trying and failing to track down the earliest show I can remember.

I’ve never been a regular listener. Desert Island Discs has always been one of those things I listen to quite randomly, idly, often indifferently. It’s not something I think about or talk about much. I’m sure I heard it quite a lot at university, when any time of day and day of week was convenient for idleness, and probably sometimes in the middle of the night while I was travelling in 1995/96.

But perhaps for those very reasons the archive touches on a delicious type of soft memory, prodding at forgotten moments of solitude, distant times when I was fleetingly touched by intimacies and revelations that were meaningful for me, but didn’t form part of the big narrative of life. Listening to the radio generally takes place in the gaps between things – including the big things that are pondered and shaped and shored up into an inner sense of history and self.

A few names that jumped out at me were Nigel Hawthorne (1986), Kenneth Williams (1987), Tony Benn (1989), Dirk Bogarde (1989), Kaffe Fassett (!) (1990), Jeffrey Bernard (1991), Stephen Hawking (1992), Ian Dury (1996) and Clive Stafford Smith (2004). I think I heard all those when they were broadcast.

Thomas Quasthoff

There was clearly something potent for me in hearing people describe how they coped with formative aspects of their identity – such as sexuality and disability. But if there was a programme called Desert Island Radio Broadcasts the one I would pick above all would be the exceptionally moving interview with Thomas Quasthoff (2009), sadly recently retired from singing.

There are also many tantalising broadcasts in the archive that I’m keen to download and hear for the first time (e.g. Grayson Perry, Ian Hislop, Brian Sewell, Madhur Jaffrey, David Munrow …) though they are currently only available back as far as 1988.

But moving on … the main impetus for this post was in fact a desire to find out if there are equivalent programmes elsewhere around the world. I assumed the concept of Desert Island Discs would be just about universally interesting to people and, being easy to implement, I would find large numbers of broadcasters offering very similar concepts, probably becoming well-loved national institutions in many countries.

But that’s not what I’ve found, after a few hours research.

The internet abounds with thousands of references to the original. Everywhere you look there are people saying “hey, there’s this great show from the BBC that’s been running since … ” etc.,  but almost never do they go on to comment “just like our … on KFC3”. There are all sorts of discussions, suggestions, blogposts and forums trying to adapt the idea for local groups and communities, types of music, and for other favourite things like movies, clothes – I even found a marketing group debating desert island brands. How wonderful to live out your days joyfully admiring a beautiful Volkswagen logo and catchy HSBC slogan.

There have been quite a few imitators in the UK – Celebrity Choice on Classic FM, Face to Face on Smooth FM, various local and community station shows – mostly now gone, with the exception of Radio 3’s more highbrow offering, the long running Private Passions. But I found very little by way of actually established broadcast programmes in other countries.

Here are the three I did find:

1. Sommar – Sweden.  This is quite distant from Desert Island Discs in format but is certainly comparable in spirit and the only other show I’ve found that seems to have become quite celebrated in its home nation. Every day from June to August a ‘summer speaker’ has 90 minutes to give a monologue about their life, including favourite music. It’s been running on Swedish Radio since 1959 and apparently the announcement of each summer’s line-up of ‘sommarpratare’ is quite an event, given out at a big press conference like a season’s football fixtures.

Lars Ulvenstam

The speakers appear to be limited to Swedish people, and for some reason tradition states that author and journalist Lars Ulvenstam is the last speaker every season. I believe there is now also a short Vinter series.

Browsing the lists of recent speakers Björn Ulvaeus (2008) caught my eye – what would he choose?! Well you can listen to the whole broadcast here.  I find his voice strangely compelling in a late-night sort of way. His music choices aren’t surprising – Bowie, The Everly Brothers, The Beach Boys, Sondheim.

Björn Ulvaeus

2. My Life, My Music – Slovenia.  “Now it’s time for a musical discussion with interesting characters”. This is very close to Desert Island Discs in format: weekly, with an interviewer (Chris Wherry, though possibly now changed) and allowing 8 music choices.

Chris Wherry

I found My Life, My Music thanks to the interesting Argentine blogger Carlos Yoder who was a guest on the show in 2011 – you can listen via a link on his blog.

This show is broadcast on Radio Slovenia International, Solvenia’s English / German language channel, and I suspect there is a limited range of people of international renown available to choose, though I’m sure they are genuinely interesting, and based on my sample of two probably make more thoughtful music choices than many UK celebrities. This week the guest is the second oboe player of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, Marjorie Carrington.

3. The Morning Interview with Margaret Throsby – Australia. This is broadcast on ABC Classic FM as well as the Radio Australia shortwave network. It also has the familiar life-story interview and music choices format, but with a looser interpretation of the rules. I do have a suspicion that there’s something particularly British about the preciely disciplined structure and no-you-mustn’t-be-naughty closing minutes of Desert Island Discs.

Margaret Throsby

The programme has been hosted by Margaret Throsby for more than 15 years. Heston Blumenthal was a guest recently, interviewed in Dinner rather than having to travel to Australia. The discussion was very interesting, but accompanied by some pretty dull music choices (O Fortuna, Concierto de Aranjuez, etc.) plus a heavy duty plug for Heston’s latest book that would have been out of the question on Radio 4!

And that’s really all I found. Does anyone have any stories from other countries? I would love to hear.

I expect there are quite a few more loose variants on the interview-plus-music format around the world that have been hidden from me by use of a wide variety of programme names. I did find slight evidence of something in Canada but couldn’t verify its existence – perhaps it was in the distant past before everything was documented on the web.

I’m left wondering if the absence of obvious Desert Island Discs copies is mostly about commercial restrictions or about culture. I suspect there must be some specific issue preventing the show being licensed around the world, but is that all there is to it, or is there also something about Britain that makes this concept particularly popular here? I would be delighted to hear any opinions!

Of course, having got this far, I can’t resist adding my own list.

When I went travelling for 18 months, before internet cafés and mobile phones, I knew my Sony Walkman was going to be crucial to staying sane, so I had to do this for real. I gave myself the luxury of filling ten 120 minute cassettes, and I’m sure I spent weeks choosing.

TDK AD-120

But I haven’t thought very hard about the list below – it applies for today only, and is slightly distorted by what I could find on Spotify, as I wanted everything to be freely available to try. But it does include some of the more radically life changing pieces I’ve encountered over the years – and that’s a topic deserving a separate post.

Machaut – Messe de Notre Dame

Bach – St. Matthew Passion

Mozart – Le Nozze di Figaro

Beethoven – Symphony No. 7

Wagner – Parsifal

Brahms – Double Concerto

Bartók – String Quartet No. 5

Shostakovich – Cello Concerto No. 1

Messiaen – Catalogue d’Oiseaux

Boulez – Dérive 1

Desert island sideboard

What’s the difference between contemporary art and craft? To me this feels a big question only because of the very different economic and critical worlds in which they have been produced, discussed and consumed over the past generation. But I’m not convinced that it’s a helpful distinction to make any more, and it certainly isn’t a clear cut one.

I’ve been set thinking about this by seeing remarkable work by both Grayson Perry and Dale Chihuly recently in London. Perry has an ambiguous rather teasing relationship with the art world and uses a range of traditional craft techniques, but with a very personal expressive intent and almost confessional communication. Chihuly is a master glassblower with an astonishing visual imagination who trained in Venice and works with a team to create work on an almost industrial scale. The Halcyon Gallery makes the rather uncomfortable claim that he “is credited with elevating the medium from the realm of craft to groundbreaking fine art”. They both make a mess of the distinction between art and craft.

What could it be? Uniqueness? Originality? Non-functionality? Conceptual content? Or simply an attitude, an intent? Expression and communication as opposed to technique and tradition? I can see that these were very important distinctions to make for much of the twentieth century, to allow art to be reborn and free itself. But now, in a world saturated with concept and individuality I suggest it’s no longer particularly helpful to raise these up as the dominant qualities conferring value.

Last year I attended the spectacular Collect exhibition organised by the Crafts Council, and I found it the most exciting range of work I’ve seen at the Saatchi Gallery at least since it moved from Boundary Road.

I was struck by the fact that, almost all the work being unaffordable to me (so I was not too distracted by acquisitive hunger), I was looking at in exactly the same way I would be looking at an art display. I couldn’t find a difference in what the work was doing to me: exciting me, moving me, horrifying me, astounding me – even though it mostly had some notional practical function.

The very fact of it being shown at that venue probably signals the breakdown of the art / craft distinction, or at least that a meeting point has been found. Actually I suspect it’s a relationship that comes and goes in long cycles over time.

But all this reflection is by way of preamble to a rather indulgent post I want to make about some of my favourite creators.

Living in London it’s become apparent to me how rich and thriving the crafts, in the sense of people individually making things out of a range of materials that at least nod at some kind of practical function, now are. I’m thinking of ceramics, glass, objects in wood and metal, jewellery, and also a variety of other work in less obvious materials such as paper, plastics, and textiles. Even in the realm of objects that are more affordable I see around me an extraordinary range of imaginative creativity. For so many of the things that we buy in the course of life, from knives and forks to engagement rings, there is a deeply considered, locally handmade alternative to the standard mass produced options.

I’ve been thinking about a kind of personal Desert Island Discs of contemporary craft … or perhaps a Desert Island Sideboard.

There are hundreds of people I could name, but here’s a selection of eight that include some of the most personally significant to me plus some that are simply favourites:

1. Peter Beard – ceramics

Peter’s work has long been a favourite of mine, and Vanessa and I acquired a piece as a wedding present to ourselves. He creates robust timeless forms decorated with complex rhythmic patterns reminiscent of rock, fire and water.

2. Jo Hayes Ward – jewellery

Jo brings a radically modernist aesthetic to the creation of jewellery intricately surfaced with repetitions of tiny building blocks such as shimmering cubes and interlocking hexagons.

3. Janice Tchalenko – ceramics

I still love Janice’s work but she’s mainly included here because my very first purchase of an object that I consciously considered craft rather than simply shopping was a humble coffee cup in her Dartington Poppy range. I bought it at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery sometime in the earlyish 90s and it was probably the only piece I could afford. Lots of her work can be seen at the V&A.

4. Roger Tye – glass

Roger’s hallucinatory organic forms and startlingly vivid colours are sometimes reminiscent of Chihuly.

As an aside I’d like to briefly turn to Japan, a culture with a wonderfully charged relationship between deference to tradition and radical modernity. Travelling there in 2007 I was delighted to learn about the concept of Living National Treasures (Ningen Kokuhō). This is a status conferred by the Japanese government to help preserve important cultural traditions, and comes with a grant of 2 million yen a year!.

It covers performing arts like Gagaku and Noh as well as crafts. There’s a big list of potters here. The focus on preservation is interesting, although to be fair the recipients are by no means all traditionalists. A couple of my favourites are Matsui Kosei, master of Neriage, and Ito Sekisui.

Similar awards have been introduced in other countries, and I’ve started to notice the term being used informally here – in recent years I’ve heard David Attenborough, Paul McCartney and Sean Connery all described as Living National Treasures. I would pay at least one of them 2 million yen a year to retire.

Back to the second group of celebrities on my sideboard:

5. Sasha Wardell – ceramics

Sasha creates extremely delicate translucent porcelain vessels. One of my bigger disappointments of recent years was breaking one of them at the Royal Opera House cloakroom!

6. Malcolm Morris – jewellery

http://www.malcolm-morris.com/

I was originally drawn to a piece from Malcolm’s Apple Blossom series, and in time that led to commissioning an engagement ring and two wedding rings. Visits to his home-studio-workshop complex in Walthamstow to discuss designs and select stones made for a charming and very personalised experience.

7. Merete Rasmussen – ceramics

Gorgeously sensual intensely coloured sculptural forms, further from any practical function than anything else on my list. I love staring intensely at them in Contemporary Ceramics where they can often be seen. Mood-changing objects that  evoke anything from dried leaves to ships’ propellers. Definitely high on my long-term wishlist (but, I fear, risky to own). And as a bonus, Merete at work looks rather like a Vermeer.

8. Amanda Simmons – glass

Amanda is my favourite glass artist and despite working far way in Scotland I’ve amassed a slightly excessive collection of 10 pieces. It’s lovely to meet her once or twice a year at events such as Collect. According to her website she is motivated by themes such as love, baking and hills. I can empathise.