The first episode of “Desert Island Discs” was recorded at the bomb-damaged Maida Vale Studios, in West London, on January 27, 1942, and aired on the BBC two days later. It’s an interview show with a simple premise: each celebrity guest discusses the eight recordings that he or she would bring if cast away alone on a desert island. The show is less concerned with logistics—in the early days, it clarified that guests would have “a gramophone and an inexhaustible supply of needles”—than the trigger of sound. Each guest wrestles with the question of what you would want a song to remind you of. Since that début episode, featuring the show’s creator, Roy Plomley, interviewing the Austrian-British comedian, actor, and musician Vic Oliver, there have been more than three thousand castaways. It’s now one of the BBC’s best-known and most cherished shows, hailed by some as one of the greatest radio programs of all time.
More than two thousand episodes are available online as downloads or podcasts, and I began listening to them a few years ago, as a way of glimpsing times other than my own. I love hearing about the path-altering memories of others—what it was like to experience Beatlemania or Motown or punk before they were settled narratives. At first, I was drawn to specific guests, hoping to learn more about the interiority of David Beckham (the Stone Roses, Elton John, Sidney Bechet), what kind of music Zadie Smith liked (Biggie, Prince, Madonna), where the cultural theorist Stuart Hall found inspiration (Bach, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley—“the sound that saved a lot of second-generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through a hole in the ground”). Besides the eight songs, guests are allowed one luxury item—the Danish chef René Redzepi (Run-D.M.C., WU LYF, Metallica) asked for a day of snow—and one book other than the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, which every castaway automatically receives. “I don’t want the Bible,” the activist and journalist Tariq Ali (Charlie Parker, Cornelius Cardew, Pathane Khan) scoffed a few years ago. “I’ll have Shakespeare,” he continued, before opting for some Balzac or Proust—a favorite among castaways.
At first, the conceit seemed to me a perfect and efficient exercise of taste. How could you whittle down your personality to eight or ten songs? Could your essence be distilled to one side of a cassette? Some guests, like Morrissey (Marianne Faithfull, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls), still playfully self-deprecating in 2009, or John McEnroe, who ratchets up his American bad-boy-isms, delight in sharing a personal canon that has become synonymous with their unruly public images. McEnroe arrived in London for his first Wimbledon in 1977, the summer that punk transformed the pop mainstream. At first, he thought the punks he saw walking down the street were “freaks,” but then he realized that “those are the people that rally behind me.” Keith Richards basically spends his entire episode speaking admiringly of all the black music (Chuck Berry, Aaron Neville, Etta James) that the Rolling Stones adapted to their own use.
For most of the episodes, the guests’ selections are full of inspirational highs, offering insight into why these people chose the paths that eventually brought them fame, or infamy. Some are obvious, like Thom Yorke swooning over the Talking Heads album that rewired his brain. The artist Jeremy Deller reaffirms the hopeful earnestness beneath his irreverent work, citing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” as his personal manifesto. Some are less obvious, as when Jared Diamond, the academic and author best known for “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a book about the ecological roots of European expansion, passionately shares his love of German lieder. The author Michael Lewis speculates that his wife, the former MTV host Tabitha Soren, would prefer that he get caught in a sex-tape scandal than share his fondness for Chicago or Dire Straits. The Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is less guilt-stricken about his tastes (Mötley Crüe, Rush, Lynyrd Skynyrd). But, eventually, I became entranced with the format itself, the way that such longtime hosts as Sue Lawley and Kirsty Young, better versed in current affairs than pop esoterica, toggled between fun reveries and the serious stuff. Since 2018, the show has been hosted by the journalist, former d.j., and musician Lauren Laverne. Guests usually accustomed to delivering the same old talking points drift off as a stray tune reminds them of the lean times of their youth. In the interest of time, and as a result of having to hit eight distinct markers over the course of about forty minutes, the conversations get intense very fast, triggered as much by memory as the host’s probing questions.
I’ve been obsessively listening to old episodes the past few days. It’s come to seem less like a show about music and creative inspiration than one about the possibility of loneliness. How do you find meaning in total isolation? The musical selections remind you of the bonds that have made life up until now worth living. In one famous episode, Young peels away at the actor Tom Hanks’s jolly persona, asking about the tempestuous childhood conjured by an upbeat jazz tune. He slowly unravels, talking about how much his well-documented niceness owes to the instability of how he grew up. “What have you done to me?” he asks, as he gently cries. He jokes that he has put far too much thought into this list. But who wouldn’t? Would you prefer to be reminded of where you began or where you ended up?
This week, while waiting in line for groceries, I listened to Young grill the talk-show host Jerry Springer in 2009. Springer talks about the radical empathy that, he says, underlies his show, which gives a platform to neo-Nazis, suburban gangster wannabes, or victims of trysts and cuckoldings that nobody really needed to know about. He gruffly maintains that he just wants people to understand and never underestimate one another. Young seems unconvinced that Springer is really interested in connection. And then he offers his next song: the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” She bursts into laughter at the sweet deliciousness of it.
When “Desert Island Discs” first aired, it was part of the BBC’s broader effort to make life during wartime slightly more bearable. It was a way to insure that not every waking second of life was lost to worry. The conversation was scripted and polite, and one imagines that guests were encouraged to offer selections that would make listeners feel optimistic or proud. In those days, there was only so much recorded music in existence. It wasn’t yet everywhere, soundtracking every moment of life, love, and loss. So, meaning was quite literal, and choices tended toward an easy romanticism. In 1951, the actress Margaret Lockwood chose the “Eton Boating Song.” Her nostalgia was meant to remind listeners still digging out of wartime destruction that their past was an exceptional one. “It always conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene,” she explained. “The River Thames in midsummer in the days before petrol launches, lovely ladies in parasols and flowing white gowns, willow trees, and whiskery gentlemen in straw hats and blazers.”
It’s strange to listen to voices from throughout the twentieth century offer fond, genteel reminiscences, like this one, and to know that they do not see what awaits them, both personally and globally. One can’t fault guests of the fifties for assuming that things could only get better. But it’s also what makes these voices so captivating to me now. As guests try to stitch together a story of themselves in eight songs, they offer glimpses of invention and survival, finding a raison d’être where others just hear a pretty tune.
Nowadays, guest responses have grown more psychological, reflecting the unpredictability of every new age. Where Plomley treated it as a show about music, it is now a show about life. There’s more of a sense that even a prominent actor, politician, or academic struggles with their mental health. Some guests, nearly destroyed by their fame, talk seriously about how the isolation of this imaginary island would be welcome. Or maybe the isolation would be absolutely unbearable after a lifetime in the public’s eye. They joke about insights gained from therapy, youthful indiscretions that now bring shame or embarrassment. Some reveal sides of their personalities at odds with their public profiles: Naomi Klein laughed and joked through her entire interview, much to the surprise of Young, who at one point remarked, “There’s a lightness to you that I think maybe people wouldn’t necessarily expect.” Recently, there was a moving episode featuring Ian Wright, a British-Jamaican soccer star for England and the London clubs Crystal Palace and Arsenal. He gets emotional repeatedly, sometimes in shame, because of how he had let people down when he was younger. But, other times, he giggles and weeps in pure joy, as a funky bass line reminds him of finding his wife, Nancy, and, with her, a new serenity. “Even when I’m thinking about it now, before it’s come on,” he says, before naming Mary J. Blige’s “Just Fine,” “I could imagine her dancing to it, and it makes me smile.”
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about what role music plays in our lives. As many people prepare for weeks of “social distancing” and working from home, we return to comforts. In some cases, we have to remind ourselves what those comforts felt like. Over time, music became intertwined with the entirety of our lives. Today, we hear music everywhere, whenever we want. It’s just another form of content. It’s so easy to take its ubiquity for granted, as we are offered various playlists for relaxing or working out, reliving the eighties or recapping the year that was. But maybe our listening choices also communicate something about the world we hope for. Thom Yorke, whose music has become synonymous with alienation and isolation, talks about how, at first, he thought he would want to bring music that was ambient or contemplative with him. “And then I realized, like, O.K., hang on a minute, I’m going to be on my own on a desert island. I’m going to need human voices. And I’m going to need the voices that really have helped me.” So, along with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, he will take Neil Young.
What the guests from every decade are really talking about is a kind of enchantment that has become rarer over time, a sense that there is nothing better in the world than escaping for a few minutes into a song. It never occurred to me, until fairly recently, that this exercise was different from merely naming your favorite songs, or what you considered to be the best. Those metrics, like all hierarchies, derive their meaning socially. They don’t matter if you’re all by yourself. I didn’t realize that the desert-island choices were really a question about mortality. If you knew you were facing down the end of your days, how would you spend them? It’s not about the serious questions many people are playing out now, foolishly or not: Who will bring food to Grandma? What will happen to my dog? Rather, it’s about something possibly more morbid. What would it mean to survive and find yourself alone (Pharoah Sanders)? Would you bask in memories of friendship (the Beach Boys) and good times (Derrick May), of your greatest love (the Intruders)? Would those memories be too painful? Maybe you would want to listen to music that existed free of context—the last splendid and uplifting thing you heard before getting lost, a reminder that the world goes on without you? Maybe what the show does in this moment is remind me that we have choices. A song is an infinite spiral of memories and associations. Would you trace it all the way back to the beginning, or would repetition become a kind of trance, casting you somewhere new and impossible?
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
