Wednesday 17 November 2021

Desert Island Discs Revisited: Poets - Ian McMillan


DESERT ISLAND DISCS REVISITED: POETS - IAN MCMILLAN (320kbs-m4a/98mb/43mins)

BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast: 29th August 2021

From Captain Beefheart to Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan shares his castaway choices with Kirsty Young.

Forty years ago, Ian was working in a factory gluing together tennis ball halves. Then he got a grant, chucked in his job and devoted himself to writing and performing.

These days he's known as the Bard of Barnsley and his appeal stretches from the terraces of his local football club to the balcony of the London Coliseum... he is poet in residence at both Barnsley FC and the English National Opera...

He still lives in the village where he was born and he considers and analyses British culture from his very particular vantage point in south Yorkshire.

He says: "You can do the universal in the local, I always think. You can see all the changes that have happened all over the world in the 20th and 21st centuries in microcosm."

RECORD: 4' 33" - John Cage
BOOK: The Long and The Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 by Roy Fisher
LUXURY: A tandem bike with wooden models of his family on the front.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2010.

Ralph Vaughan Williams - Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis [EMI]
Andy Stewart - Donald Where's Your Troosers? [Music For Pleasure]
Doris Day - The Black Hills Of Dakota [Stylus]
Love - Alone Again Or [Elektra]
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Moonlight On Vermont [Reprise]
Bing Crosby - White Christmas [MCA]
Leonard Bernstein - Rhapsody In Blue [CBS]
John Cage - 4'33" [Hungaroton]

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