Desert island dislocation: Emotion, nostalgia, and the utility of music

This chapter explores how the contrivance of asking people to imagine being cast away on a desert island has provided the basis for radio discussions of disc recordings that go beyond questions of taste and aesthetic value, opening up considerations of potential utility. Guests are simply asked which discs they would want to have with them if alone on a desert island, and why. Explanations for given choices often include the way in which music and other sound recordings might prove useful—for managing the castaway’s moods, their social isolation, their sense of loss and displacement, their ostensibly endless ‘free time’, and their likely desire to wish to keep memory of people and places alive. Castaways mostly choose music, but sometimes opt for recordings of other sorts, including of their children. These prove to be nostalgia ready and especially well-suited to managing the programme’s fictional scenario.

Public and narrative selves in Desert Island Discs

The Desert Island Discs interview—ostensibly a private chat—is an entertainment format in which public figures are on public display and able to display themselves as types of public selves through discussion of ‘private’ musical tastes, experiences, values, and connections to others. This chapter examines castaways’ narratives in aggregate form, as patterned practices of display. Castaway narratives reveal six thematic ways of accounting for their musical choices: (1) situation of listening, (2) container for extra-musical matters, (3) link to a person or people, (4) resource for care of self, (5) castaway just loves the work, and (6) described in terms of music pedagogy. Comparing individual castaway narratives with this more general set of narrative patterns, and controlling for occupational group, and within that, gender, offers new, and otherwise undisclosed, information about individual castaways and their public presentation of self.

Personal Spin G

Bruce Springsteen: Kitty’s Back Rod Stewart: You Wear It Well Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Complainte pour Ste Catherine The Jackson 5: The Love You Save Touré Kunda: Fatou Yo Joni Mitchell: Night Ride Home Marah: My Heart Is the Bums on the Street LL Cool J: ...

Punk, class, and taste in Desert Island Discs

This chapter attempts to use popular music as a way of connecting a number of castaways who shared a similar love of punk and post-punk and who described certain experiences that their appreciation of that music had resonance with. The music is used as a starting point to trace the experiences of the castaways to wider sets of social, cultural, and political histories of the UK. Among the castaways chosen are Kathy Burke, Ian Rankin, Ricky Gervais, and Hanif Kureshi. Each of these had a working-class upbringing and Kureshi grew up in a working-class area with parents who had been well off in India before moving to the UK. The choice of music intertwines with their descriptions of economic hardship, domestic violence, and racism but also a developed sense of community, sensitivity, and humanism that illustrates a sector of British life in the 1950s through to the 1980s.

Personal Spin B

Desert Island Discs was, and probably still is, the one radio programme that everyone wants to appear on. So when I was asked to produce it in 1976, I saw it as a golden opportunity to meet all my heroes, from Lauren Bacall, Luciano Pavarotti, and Sir Adrian Boult to Count Basie and Felicity Kendal....

Desert island discomorphoses: Listening formations and the material cultures of music

Musical identities are forged in relation to the material properties of media formats. The cultures of listening and modes of identification fostered by the 78-rpm disc, for example, are not the same as those that took shape around the LP or the MP3. Each technology affords different modes of musical identification, fandom, enjoyment, and taste. To read Desert Island Discs as a continuous archive of self-presentation or a straightforward reflection of musical taste is thus to overlook a key point: the programme equally reflects seven decades of change in the material cultures of music. This chapter combs the online Desert Island Discs archive for evidence of the relationship between the discographic self and the ‘discomorphosis’ of music, focusing on such conjunctures as the hypothetical wind-up gramophone that furnished the island in 1942, the introduction of the LP and transistor radios around 1950, and the introduction of the iPod in 2001.

The cultural baggage of the desert island

The notion of the desert island disc has its roots in ideas of travel and self-improvement extending at least as far back as the 17th century. Lists of records to be taken to a desert island follow on from collections of books to be taken on long sea voyages. Descriptions of these collections recur throughout 19th century journalism, then become fashionable in the 1910s and 1920s, when the concept of ‘literature as luggage’ enjoys a brief vogue. By the 1930s, musical recordings begin to take their place alongside lists of literary works, laying the groundwork for Desert Island Discs and other manifestations of a music-oriented turn towards personal musical canons. Noting the ways in which such lists move between expressions of personal affinity and acknowledgements of public canons, the chapter traces the evolution of the travel-list and the shipwreck-list through literature and music from the 19th century onward.

Desert Island Discs and British emotional life

This chapter explores how Desert Island Discs has responded over time to an increasing public appetite for openness and honesty. One of the programme’s presenters once said it was ‘properly impressed by power, wealth and ambition, but … knows that the world is made up of more than that’. This spoke to a longer-term revolution in modern life, as outlined by historians of the emotions: an increasing informality of manners, especially in broadcast talk. How did the BBC navigate these trends in a series that had long been a byword for decorum? And what did Radio 4 listeners think of its new willingness in the 1980s and 1990s to probe guests more deeply? Drawing on unpublished BBC records and Mass Observation archives, this chapter focuses on how desire for openness over private lives and feelings—and the anxieties this prompted—was negotiated behind the scenes at crucial moments in its history.

Personal Spin I

Franz Schubert: Fantasia in F minor, D940 Robert Schumann: Symphony No. 1 in B flat major ‘Spring’ The Beatles: I’m Only Sleeping Terry Jones: I’m So Worried Johann Sebastian Bach: St Matthew Passion Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130...

Peripheral identities on Desert Island Discs and Beti a’i Phobol

Beti a’i Phobol has been a fixture on the Radio Cymru schedule since 1987. It is the closest equivalent to Desert Island Discs on the Celtic fringe, and indeed the only such programme in a minority language within Britain. Though not a direct copy of Desert Island Discs, Beti a’i Phobol nonetheless offers a useful comparator to the expressions of Welshness evident over the last 70-plus years of Desert Island Discs. This chapter explores expressions of cultural belonging by Welsh castaways and contextualises their appearances in the history of Welsh political and linguistic struggles, in order to gauge the changing sense of Welshness over the programme’s history and the concomitant sense of Wales within British culture.