DESERT ISLAND DISCS: LAURIE ANDERSON (320kbs-m4a/133mb/58mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 12th January 2025
Laurie Anderson is an artist and performer who came to fame in the UK with her 1981 hit O Superman. Her work spans music, film and multimedia projects which interrogate our relationship with technology and tell stories about the world we live in.
She was born in Chicago in 1947, the second-oldest of eight children, and started learning the violin when she was five. She studied Art History at Barnard College in New York and took a Masters in Sculpture at Columbia University.
In the 1970s she was part of the downtown New York art scene and her friends and contemporaries included Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark and the choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown. One of Laurie's first performance art pieces featured a symphony played by car horns.
In 1992 she met Lou Reed, the singer and songwriter who fronted the Velvet Underground. They were together for 21 years until his death in 2013. Laurie is the head of Lou's archive which is at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and open to anyone who wants to learn more about his musical adventures.
In 2024 Laurie was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammys and a Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
BOOK CHOICE: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
LUXURY ITEM: A dog collar
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Gracias a la vida - Violetta Parra
Presenter Lauren Laverne
Producer Paula McGinley
Chubby Checker - Pony Time [AudioSonic]
Mercedes Sosa - Gracias A La Vida [Universal Music Latino]
Tusen Tankar - Triakel [MNW Music AB]
Philip Glass Ensemble - Part 1 [Nonesuch]
Ken Nordine With The Fred Katz Group - Flibberty Jib [Master Classics]
Lou Reed - Doin' The Things That We Want To [RCA]
The Magnetic Fields - Washington, D.C [Merge]
Soul Coughing - Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago [Roundhill]
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