John Peel

FLA 22: Sioned Wiliam (23/07/2023)

/ whenisbins / Leave a comment

I’ve interviewed Sioned Wiliam a couple of times before. The first time was about twenty years ago, when she was the head of comedy at ITV commissioning the likes of Baddiel and Skinner, Harry Hill, Simon Nye and Rob Brydon, not to mention BAFTA winners like Cold Feet, and also The Sketch Show, the series which first brought Lee Mack and Tim Vine to national recognition. A few years later, when Ian Greaves and myself spent a year – a year! – writing a book on Week Ending, she told us about writers’ meetings and discovering a young Cardiff writer called Peter Baynham. She has become a good friend.

 

But as well as working as a producer of comedy and entertainment shows in London – Tonight with Jonathan Ross, Game On, Drop the Dead Donkey, Yonderland, Paris starring Alexei Sayle and Big Train (the latter two written by Linehan and Mathews) – and running the Radio 4 comedy department for seven years (2015–22), Sioned has had a considerable parallel career working in Welsh language entertainment broadcasting, as presenter, contributor and behind the scenes.

 

As someone who has spent over two-thirds of my life living in Wales, I am struck by the irony that my grasp of the Welsh language remains patchy at best, but the divide has always fascinated me. And so, via Zoom, one afternoon in May 2023, we discussed not only Sioned’s career in comedy and commissioning, but a subject that is comparatively rarely written about in English media: pop music in Wales.

 

But we began with the usual question: what music was Sioned Wiliam listening to at home when she was young?

——

 

SIONED WILIAM

My father [academic and prize-winning writer Urien Wiliam, 1929–2006] loved classical music, so he played a lot of Beethoven and Brahms, although he didn’t like Mozart, he thought he was populist rubbish! He loved Vaughan Williams, but it’s only relatively recently that I’ve grasped what a sublime composer he was. My husband Ian [Brown, top sitcom writer] has also introduced me to composers like Britten, and Handel operas – I remember going to see those brilliant Nick Hytner productions of Xerxes and Ariodante at the ENO. And we also once went to see a concert at Westminster Abbey to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of Queen Mary, with the music of Henry Purcell [televised live on BBC2, 6 March 1995]. It was wonderful to be in that building where the music was originally played, with the drummers entering from the cloisters and remarkable singers like Ian Bostridge and Emma Kirkby.

 

But back to music at home when I was young. We also had a lot of protest music in the house because my parents were like a lot of people in the 60s in Wales who were involved in the Welsh language movement, which was allied with the civil rights movements all over the world, really. There were a lot of really great protest songs in the Welsh language by young, very groovy bands, all fantastic singers. I’ve still got singles from that era, quite valuable now because they’re quite rare. I’ve even got a song book from that 60s/70s period, which my son has been learning to play.

 

As children, we used to perform in what they call noson lawen, which means ‘merry night’, which was a tradition, and we were forever doing something from school in a party, or something like singing a song and then finding as I was on the same stage as these Welsh stars like Heather Jones, one of the greatest voices ever, and Dewi Pws, and bands like Y Pelydrau.

 

At school, we sang oratorios, using this sol-fah technique, which was very popular in the Welsh industrial areas because it was a way for people to access music without having to read music. So our wonderful music teacher Lily Richards taught us Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Verdi’s Requiem using sol-fa, so my copy is all  ‘do-ray-me’. You could hear these sounds and she would do all the hand gestures and everything.  

 

As children, you grew up with this incredibly rich culture of music, both popular and beautiful. There was the Eisteddfod tradition, which was competitive, and you did that at a local level, or at the youth level, the Urdd, the many competitions you were part of as a child. And then there was the nationalist element as well. But also there was this upsurge in live music. People like Meic Stephens, Heather Jones, Dewi Pws, Geraint Jarman, Eleri Llwyd… There was a woman called Nest Howells, with the most incredible singing voice, who used to sing for a group called Brân.

 

Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals put together these wonderful compilation albums called Welsh Rare Beat (Finders Keepers Records, two volumes, 2005, 2007) featuring a lot of these singers, the best of 60s/70s Welsh rock. Gruff comes from that tradition of very melodic music. Welsh musicians tend to like hymns and folk songs, very melodic and pretty. They don’t have these repetitive, swirling things that you have in Gaelic music or in Scots music. They tend to have a beginning, a middle and end, quite often in the minor key, but they always have very beautiful melodies. It’s a real tradition.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Funny you mention the Welsh Rare Beat compilations. Volume 2 has a Swansea-based group on it called AD 73, for which my dad sang and played drums! But unfortunately, the title and recording don’t match: the title’s called ‘Higher and Higher’ but it’s actually the other side of the single that’s featured, ‘Jerusalem’, which is an instrumental, and so my dad isn’t singing on it!

 

SIONED WILIAM

You must let Gruff know!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I should really, shouldn’t I? Actually, my dad’s first language was Welsh. During World War II, and his mum had died before he was even two years old, he was evacuated to Carmarthenshire, to Pontyberem, with a lovely couple who lived there. And they looked after him, he was initially educated in Welsh and then moved back to Swansea, and to Mumbles, where I’m from.

 

But weirdly I don’t remember Welsh being spoken very much. You would sometimes sing Welsh songs at school, and obviously you’d hear it through television. In the days before S4C, obviously you’d get Welsh language programming integrated into the BBC and ITV schedules, and I’d just sort of pick things up just from cadences or associations or just repetitions. [SW agrees] So my Welsh language knowledge is patchy really. We had Welsh lessons, the same way you’d have French lessons or Geography. But with Welsh, we’d had a very good teacher for a year, and then she left and we had a very ineffectual teacher, and I lost enthusiasm then. Particularly unfortunate because that was 1982/83, when S4C was just starting on television.

 

SIONED WILIAM

But that was very common, Justin. People had it drummed into them that it wasn’t worth anything. I lived in Barry as a kid, an English-speaking town, although we had a lot of Welsh speakers, but the message was: ‘Why pick that funny language, it’s gonna hold you back.’

 

My grandad was of the generation that had the ‘Welsh Not’ put around their necks. At the turn of the 20th century in Welsh schools, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in school, they had a piece of wood put round their neck with WN on it. They have examples of this on display in St Fagans Museum, near Cardiff. And if they then heard another child speaking Welsh, they’d put it round their neck. And if you had that round your neck at the end of the day, you were beaten in front of the whole school.

 

That was part of a culture that were doing their best to get rid of the language. My mother lived in Carmarthen where almost nobody spoke in English at all, but she was educated entirely through the medium of English. She was told she was just an uncivilised peasant. Emlyn Williams’ play The Corn is Green (1938)… that’s the same story. That the boy is brilliant, but he is civilised by learning English. There was no sense offered of this ancient rich culture and literature. And someone like me had the opposite; we only spoke Welsh at home, and my father was a writer, my grandfather was a professor of Welsh in fact, so there was a real interest in the culture in my house.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think you can only really do it from speaking the language every day.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Things have changed so much. I think people realise that any bilingualism is really good for a child’s brain. When I was eleven, I had to go to Pontypridd [about 15 miles away] to a senior school that would teach me through the medium of Welsh. That school split eleven times, there are now eleven schools where there was one, but Barry has four junior Welsh-speaking schools. And in school there is greater ease with bilingualism than 20 or 30 years ago, and I think a lot of people feel a bit angry now as well. They were kind of fed this lie that it was going to hold them back.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It also, it occurs to me, never felt like we were taught much about Welsh history.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Well, this is true, and a scandal. They’re talking about this now in all sorts of areas of Welsh history.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you know that book by Richard King, Brittle with Relics (Faber, 2022)? It’s an oral history of Wales, from 1962 to 1997, it ends with the devolution referendum. And while I knew bits, there was so much I did not know – and I was living there for most of it!  

 

SIONED WILIAM

But I’ll tell you what’s changed a lot in relation to the Welsh language is football. Football said: We own this language, it’s our right to this language. Half our team speak it, so we’re going to do press conferences in Welsh, we’re going to sing songs in Welsh, like Dafydd Iwan’s ‘Yma o Hyd’, which became this phenomenon, because they played it again and again and again in Cardiff Stadium, and everyone knew the words. Earlier last year, they invited him to sing before a Wales game, and he said, ‘Oh, they won’t have heard of me’, but when he went in, this predominantly English-speaking stadium went mad. He started to sing the song, and they joined in as they knew the words.

 

I didn’t in all my life think that would happen, that there would be this feeling of ‘We own this, we may not speak much of it, but it’s ours. We know that song, and that’s mine as well as yours…’ It’s so much healthier.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was watching that Hywel Gwynfryn at 80 documentary that was on at Christmas.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yes. It’s great.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess I first knew him from the children’s programmes that were on in the 70s like Bilidowcar (BBC Cymru, 1975–88), which was a sort of Welsh language equivalent of Blue Peter or Magpie. How on earth do you sum up a man like Hywel Gwynfryn, he seems to have done everything, he’s like a cross between Terry Wogan and John Noakes…

 

SIONED WILIAM

And a journalist on top of that. [He began his career on the BBC Cymru Wales news magazine, Heddiw in 1964.]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

He is an integral part of Welsh language becoming a contemporary part of a changing world. As was your dad – I was re-reading his obituary in the Independent, written by Meic Stephens, who you mentioned earlier, and Stephens made the point of how entertainment as well as education was vital to the survival of a language. ‘We need quizzes, cartoons and pop songs in Welsh as much as we need philosophical treatises and historiography.’ [‘Obituary: Urien Wiliam’, The Independent, 26 October 2006]

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yes, that’s right.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And is it true – because it’s mentioned in the same piece – that your dad coined the Welsh word for ‘television’: ‘teledu’?

 

SIONED WILIAM

When a new word comes along, the Welsh Academy (like the Academy of France, in France) think of what the word might be in Welsh – obviously ‘television’ is both Greek and Latin in origin – and I think they did a competition for the best translation. My father won that competition, and I think he created the word ‘teledu’. We were always told that story as children. But to be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure every bit of that is true. Whether he had suggested a word, and then other people embellished it, I don’t know. But he was definitely part of that process.

 

——

FIRST: TRWYNAU COCH: ‘Mynd i’r Capel Mewn Levis’ (Recordiau Sgwar, single, 1978)

[Currently not on YouTube. Or on Spotify, unfortunately! It was when we had the conversation. When they return, they will be reinstated here.]

SIONED WILIAM

When I was in the sixth form, and then an undergraduate in Aberystwyth, we used to go and see lots of live bands, and one of them was Trwynau Coch [‘The Red Noses’], this great punk band from Swansea that John Peel used to play. It was Huw Eurig, Rhys Harris and his twin brother Alun. They used to do songs like ‘I Want to Go to Chapel in Levis’ (‘Mynd i’r Capel Mewn Levis’, 1978) and when you saw them live, they were able to replicate their studio sound on stage rather well.

 

Although I think I may have bought a Tebot Piws [The Purple Teapot] one before then, who were this great, very funny band, with Dewi Pws.

 

And then there was Geraint Jarman and the Cynganeddwyr. Cynganedd is a particular strict metre of Welsh poetry. Geraint was a Cardiff boy, and he had these amazingly diverse band playing reggae, with people from all kinds of backgrounds in the band, so it wasn’t cultural appropriation as we know it today – but Geraint would sing in Welsh. It actually came from the Casablanca Club in Cardiff, they were fantastic to see live as well.

 

It was a great live scene at Aberystwyth. I also saw English bands too – Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, and Squeeze, I even liked U2! And I loved Motown, always loved Stevie Wonder, stuff you could dance to.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What do you think was the effect of punk and new wave on Welsh music, did it create similar inspiration to that going on in English and American cities? How did it change perceptions in Welsh society?

 

SIONED WILIAM

Definitely. The fact that John Peel would play and give validation to these bands like Trwynau Coch, and Anrhefn, who were from mid-Wales – Rhys Mwyn, their co-founder is now a presenter with BBC Radio Cymru… Even though Peel didn’t understand what they were singing about, made us feel like somebody recognised our existence outside Wales. He made a huge impact. And Melody Maker and NME would review them. It made it feel more legitimate, part of a bigger picture.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a clip of John Peel on The Tube (Channel 4, 3 April 1987) introducing a band called Datblygu, who were very significant in the history of Welsh pop.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yeah, he used to play them quite a lot.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess they had the same kind of spirit as The Fall, these very sardonic lyrics. In fact, there’s a really interesting documentary about them online (Prosiect Datblygu 2012 – this also has English subtitles).

 

SIONED WILIAM

Unfortunately, Dave [R Edwards, lyricist and founder] died not so long ago [2021], and they were seminal, a lot of people were very influenced by them. And they were kind of quite rude about Welsh language stuff, which nobody had had the courage to do before from the same background. When you have the confidence that your culture exists, you have the freedom to start being a little bit naughty then. But before then, you’re just struggling to survive. So it was a sign of maturity that Dave, like Datblygu, you know, could laugh at middle-class Welsh people.

 

—

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Let me ask you about i dot, a music show you produced for S4C in Wales.

 

SIONED WILIAM

I did the first series (1996). I was working at Talkback at the time, but it must have been quiet. Huw Eurig who ran the production company Boomerang rang me up, and I thought it would be really good fun. It was a particularly magical period in Welsh music: we had Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, 60 Foot Dolls from Newport… Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

 

We recorded i dot in Newport and Bangor, in two different nightclubs, with a little moving set, and we had two really charismatic presenters: Daniel Glyn and Ffion Dafis, who’s a brilliant actress and novelist as well.  

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously there had been previous Welsh pop shows, I remember Sêr (HTV Cymru) from when I was a kid, and Fideo 9 a bit later, which I think Geraint Jarman was involved in, right?

 

SIONED WILIAM

Fideo 9 (Cwmni Criw Byw/S4C, 1988–93) was a seminal programme, yeah. With directors making films, people like Endaf Emlyn – this was the age of the MTV video – and again, there was this flowering of Welsh language music that’s still going strong. But back when I was a kid, they had Disc a Dawn (BBC Cymru, 1966–73) with the wonderful Mici Plwm, which was like Top of the Pops. Twndish (BBC Cymru, 1977–79) was another one. They kind of evolved over the years. i dot, I think there were two or three series. I could only do the first one, I think I was doing Big Train after that.

 

 ——

LAST: CARWYN ELLIS & RIO 18: Joia! (2019, Recordiau Agati/Banana & Louie Records)

Extract: ‘Tywydd Hufen Iâ’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Moving on to more recent Welsh language artists, I knew about Gruff Rhys’s Griffiths, but I hadn’t heard the Carwyn Ellis album with Rio 18, especially this record with the National Orchestra of Wales.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Carwyn Ellis is a clever guy. He plays in Chrissie Hynde’s band – in fact, there’s a song to her on this, called ‘Joia’, with this Latin American rhythm all the way through, in fact all through the whole album. Absolutely stunning. We’d play this driving down to Italy, my son Macsen would insist on having this wide variety of things.

 

It’s really interesting how many good Welsh session musicians there are. Carwyn, Peredur ap Gwynedd, his brother Rheinallt, an excellent guitarist, they’ve played with everyone. And Pino Palladino, who played with Geraint Jarman…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, that’s Pino on ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)’ by Paul Young, amongst many other things, which of course begins with this bass part straight out of the beginning of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! I knew he was from Cardiff, but not of his early work.

 

SIONED WILIAM

He played with a lot of Welsh bands, I remember.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you’ve also brought Parisa Fouladi, a newer name, to my attention. Again, reggae influences there.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Again, it’s that internationalist approach, she’s Welsh-Iranian, people from a lot of different backgrounds – but singing in Welsh. It’s fantastic.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was thinking about how this internationalist relationship between Welsh language music and the rest of the world often seems more profound than the English language connection. [SW agrees] When I was about six, 1976, I saw this weekly series on BBC 1, in Welsh – I’d forgotten the title but I have now established it was called Y Tir Newydd [‘The New Land’, BBC Cymru, Summer 1976]. It was a group of musicians playing American songs but with Welsh lyrics. Things like ‘Freight Train’. The singers were Mari Griffith who I’d seen on that schools programme Music Time…

 

SIONED WILIAM

Oh I loved her, she had a brilliant singing voice, great guitarist.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

…And Emyr Wyn. And the theme to the series was a translated version of ‘America’ from West Side Story, which I don’t think I’d ever heard in English. I didn’t question why this was on, just saw it every week, and doing research for this, I discovered they made it for the 1976 bicentenary. And I got this feeling, ‘Oh okay, and this is something I’m not getting from English language television at the moment.’ It’s funny how you absorb things sometimes.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yes. Emyr Wyn another great singer. I think what’s so key is with almost every presenter on Welsh television, they can do other things, playing an instrument, singing a song. It’s fascinating.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And of course, you fit into this category yourself. You were regularly on radio and television in Wales, presenting before you became associated with comedy.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yes. When I was a student, at Aberystwyth, I started doing that and after I graduated, this lovely producer at HTV called Dorothy Williams very kindly offered me a chat show – which was probably terrible! And I did lots for them, reviewed films, and then did a show with Elinor Talfan, a sort of afternoon cookery show, which was great fun. And because I was a post-graduate student at the time, it was good money!

 

Prior to this, I had been doing a drama degree at Aberystwyth. I was very very lucky because at the time I was there, Mike Pearson (who sadly died last year) and the Brith Gof theatre company (founded in 1981) were part of a company that came from Cardiff Lab, this extraordinary movement, the Third Theatre they called it, were also teaching at Aberystwyth at the time. So I got the most incredible opportunities to work with people from all over the world. I did three shows with Brith Gof, and then we did lots of Stanislavsky and Chekhov. It was a brilliant, enlightened degree, very academic as well, but we did lots of performing and lots of touring and stuff. I did Japanese Noh theatre, did a show in Harlech Castle, we did a promenade performance round the villages of West Wales.

 

I had three years there, and then I got a grant to do further research, and went to Royal Holloway College for two terms but they didn’t mention to me that the person I was going to be working with wasn’t there anymore, she’d left! So I wrote to John Kelly at Jesus College, Oxford, because he was the only person I knew who was an expert in Sean O’Casey, who I was studying. So I had to get the university at Aberystwyth to send my degree dissertation and then have it translated into English. My English wasn’t brilliant at that point, not academically brilliant anyway, you know. And then I got a place at Jesus, because a student there hated it so much they decided to transfer to Aberystwyth.

 

I arrived at Oxford [summer 1983], and I auditioned straight away for as many plays as I could get into. I got into something called the Oxford Revue, but it wasn’t the real one, it was an alternative to it. I’ll tell you who was in it, was John Sparkes! Who wasn’t a student, but was great fun. Pooky Quesnel was in it as well.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And then you formed a double act with Rebecca Front. The Bobo Girls. How did that come about?

 

SIONED WILIAM

We went to Edinburgh, did a show, and Rebecca had written one of the songs for it. And then, in the autumn, I went back to Oxford, and finally got to meet Rebecca through the proper Oxford Revue, and Patrick Marber too.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We should probably explain the Bobo Girls a little, for those who don’t know. You performed sketches, often written by Rebecca’s brother Jeremy Front [who now writes the Charles Paris Mysteries on Radio 4, amongst many many other things]. But you also performed these songs that Rebecca wrote. So it became clear that you both loved singing, and this was going to work?

 

SIONED WILIAM

Absolutely. Also, there wasn’t much for women to do in the Oxford Revue items. I always used to say we got very good at filing because we were playing so many secretaries. So after that first year, we decided to try and write our own stuff, and in 85 we went to Edinburgh and again in 87, got on Radio 4’s Aspects of the Fringe both times, did residencies at places like the Canal Café in London. And eventually, 1989 and 1991, we did two series for Radio 4 [called Girls Will Be Girls]. And Armando Iannucci produced the second series. But there weren’t many opportunities outside that, there weren’t panel games or Taskmaster, those things didn’t exist, really.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And by then, from ’88, you were a staff producer in BBC Radio Light Entertainment – and you went on to produce one of the great Alan Partridge half-hours, Knowing Knowing Me Knowing You (Radio 4, 3 July 1993). The Knowing Me Knowing You series, produced by Armando, had won the Sony Award, so you made this special mock ‘celebratory behind-the-scenes’ documentary. For a long time it was a bit of a lost gem.

 

SIONED WILIAM

It was just the most enormous fun. We only had two days in the studio, and at first there wasn’t a shape to anything because they were just so used to improvising, brilliantly. The one contribution I think I made was to say, ‘Let’s find a story, have a beginning, a middle and an end’. But they knew each other so well by then, the character was so rounded. And Rebecca playing Carol, Alan’s wife, weeping, in the background. It was very funny. But I was producing because Armando, who was usually the producer, wanted to be in it as well.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, as ‘Mario Santini’! I love that little running joke where he keeps having to go back to the Fifteen-to-One production office, which I think is a coded reference to the fact that at the time he was working with Chris Morris on getting The Day Today off the ground for television. But I love all the stuff about the hierarchy of guests, the availability of guests. And then a few months after I heard that, I saw The Larry Sanders Show for the first time.

 

SIONED WILIAM

You know I’m in an episode of Larry Sanders, do you?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s crazy! Which one?

 

SIONED WILIAM

It’s in the very last series. I’m not really in it! I’m sitting in the [chat show] audience with my husband Ian. We were on a tour of Universal Studios, and someone asked if we wanted to be in the audience for Larry Sanders. It was fantastic. It was one where Jon Stewart was hosting it because Larry (Garry Shandling) was ill, and there’s the Nazi Jeopardy sketch with Hank, and the studio executive characters are horrified, and there’s one shot where me and Ian are sitting behind them. [‘Adolf Hankler’, S6 E6, aired in the US on 19 April 1998.] And later, we met Fred Barron, who had been instrumental in getting Sanders and Seinfeld off the ground. So that’s my connection with Sanders, a bit nerdy but it’s a good one.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And of course, you produced Jonathan Ross’s chat show for a while, in the early 90s, but I did not know that you’d been planning a radio pilot with Vic and Bob.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yes, I’d been to see them live in Deptford in 1989. I’m not sure we ever got to make that pilot. I’ve got some of their original documents for it somewhere, which I treasure. We offered it to Radio 1 and they didn’t get it at all.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You went back to BBC Radio in 2015 as Commissioner of Comedy. What are you most proud of commissioning from your time back there?

 

SIONED WILIAM

I’m very proud of bringing Alexei Sayle back to Radio 4 [Imaginary Sandwich Bar]. Michael Spicer’s The Room Next Door. Jon Holmes’ The Skewer, which won 28 awards. There’s a great series on medicine coming from Kiri Pritchard McLean. But also bringing people like Mae Martin, Rosie Jones, who we had before anyone else. Lost Voice Guy. Tez Ilyas. Lots of younger women, but lots of older women too. Conversations from a Long Marriage by Jan Etherington, for Roger Allam and Joanna Lumley.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was especially interested in something you said on the Kay Stonham podcast (Female Pilot Club) recently. You mentioned how you might greenlight something, and say, ‘I don’t entirely get this, but I trust the performers and producers’. You might not like everything the department makes but something still intrigues you about it.

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yeah. Or you know the audience loves it. There are shows the audience will get, they might not make me laugh, but they’re very popular, greatly loved, and the best they could be. Or things that were a bit weird that I was too old to appreciate, but you knew that the young people involved were brilliant. That’s how Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy got on the air in the 70s, they believed in Geoffrey Perkins as a producer. I think it’s your job to put the odd thing on that you don’t quite understand. One famous show, a real Marmite show, I never quite got myself, and it might not necessarily be my bag, but people adore it so much, it’s the bag of the core audience. It’s not my place to stop it, and with any comedy, nobody can agree on what’s funny.

 

Also, there are things I saw on stage that would never work on Radio 4 because it’s too much about being in the room with them. It’s very hard to take improv out of the live situation, it’s like gossamer. You couldn’t put the Radio 4 microscope on it – it would diminish it.

 

And there were other calls I made. Miles Jupp and Andy Zaltzman taking over The News Quiz. Sue Perkins taking over Just a Minute after Nicholas Parsons…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just a Minute’s a good example of something that you almost couldn’t imagine without Nicholas, and it’s a different thing now, but it still works. Same with I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. I remember when Humphrey Lyttelton died, and you couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it – and yet it continues. So you left the department last year?

 

SIONED WILIAM

I felt ready to go. It had been seven years. I wasn’t made redundant, it had been great, but I didn’t want to get jaded with it, and also with Covid, I realised that I wanted to do a range of things in my life and not sit in an office all day. It was the right point to go.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you going back to programme making, in comedy production? Or are you concentrating on more novel writing?

 

SIONED WILIAM

I’m back to the freelance life – exec producing some telly projects, broadcasting and writing. And I’ve really enjoyed doing the rounds of literary festivals with my latest book.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was writing an area you always wanted to get into? Because this is novel number four, is it?

 

SIONED WILIAM

It did take me a long time to find a voice. I mulled over the first book for about four years before I sent a few chapters to the publisher. It’s the kind of thing you take on holiday with you, and there’s a bit of satire in there – not entirely pulpy, but it is entertaining. And this next book is actually about people that going to Italy to a holiday home, but it’s got parallels perhaps with Wales.

——

ANYTHING: MADNESS: The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009, Stirling Holdings Limited/Union Square/BMG)

Extract: ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’

SIONED WILIAM

I always loved their videos and songs in the 80s, but I’d kind of forgotten about them until my son, who was then in his teens, saw them – this is so strange – on Strictly Come Dancing, in the guest music slot, around 2016. And he said, God, these are good. He became obsessed with them, and of course, I had no idea that they had this massive body of recent work, like Norton Folgate (2009), which is just absolutely magnificent.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I can’t work out how they did it all, especially early on. Because they were all so young, even though I know there were seven of them, and they all wrote songs in various combinations; they all co-wrote at least one major hit single.

 

[They really did. Here’s the evidence.

 

Mike Barson (keyboards):

‘My Girl’, ‘Night Boat to Cairo’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘Grey Day’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Driving in My Car’, ‘Tomorrow’s Just Another Day’, ‘The Sun and the Rain’, ‘Lovestruck’, ‘NW5’.

 

Graham McPherson (aka Suggs) (vocals):

‘Night Boat to Cairo’, ‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Shut Up’, ‘Wings of a Dove’, ‘One Better Day’, ‘Yesterday’s Men’, ‘

Waiting for the Ghost Train’.

 

Chris Foreman (guitar):

‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Shut Up’, ‘Cardiac Arrest’, ‘Our House’, ‘Yesterday’s Men’, ‘Uncle Sam’.

 

Lee Thompson (saxophone, percussion):

‘The Prince’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Uncle Sam’, ‘Lovestruck’, ‘NW5’.  

 

Dan Woodgate (drums, percussion):

‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘Michael Caine’.

 

Mark Bedford (bass guitar):

‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘One Better Day’.

 

Carl Smyth (aka Chas Smash) (vocals):

‘Cardiac Arrest’, ‘Our House’, ‘Tomorrow’s Just Another Day’, ‘Wings of a Dove’, ‘Michael Caine’.

 

—-

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yeah. These little vignettes of London life, incredibly beautiful, and well written. So I suppose I rediscovered them through my son. I then saw some stuff that Suggs had done and thought, ‘Gosh, he’s very funny and he’d bring a slightly different listenership to Radio 4.’ So he did these shows [in 2019], Love Letters to London, walking around London just as he’d been this kid who had wandered around London on his own, on the buses, you know, while his mother was working at the Colony Club. But in general, as a family, we’re big Madness fans. We’ve seen them live now a few times.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How does the live set work now? Is it a mixture of new-ish and the hits?

 

SIONED WILIAM

I went to the 40th anniversary show [2019], and the first half was sort of ‘unplugged’, lots of stuff I’d never heard before. Then, more familiar stuff, but also things like ‘Bullingdon Boys’ (2019), stuff from the last two albums, which I know quite well. And then obviously, they build up to things like ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ at the end.

 

But then there’s also the Suggs solo stuff, things like ‘Green Eyes’, and my favourite song is ‘Powder Blue’, which is about him and his wife [Bette Bright, formerly a member of the band Deaf School]. They’ve had this obviously wild night, saying their pop star friends have all gone home, they’re both listening to Aretha Franklin. It’s very funny, but it’s very beautiful, nobody would really connect it with Madness.

 

They were a very political band, always – singing about racism, homelessness, Thatcherism – and still are. ‘Norton Folgate’ is about immigration, and there’s this huge range of fantastic Turkish instruments on it. It’s about looking out into the world and welcoming culture into London and how London’s the melting pot. It’s an ode to joy to cultural richness. Quite often, their stuff is about the little person trying to make their way in the world, encountering all sorts of difficult things, but with a musicality I can’t get over.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was interested to find out what you, as a comedy commissioner, made of the sitcom pilot they made in 1984. It’s quite a curio, this little test-tape, shot on location.

‘MADNESS: THE PILOT’ (Talkback Productions, 1984)

SIONED WILIAM

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? I didn’t realise it was written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just after The Young Ones finished. It was the first thing they wrote together, I believe – shortly afterwards they started work on Blackadder II. And produced by Geoff Posner, who at the time was working with Lenny Henry and about to start working with Victoria Wood (As Seen on TV).

 

SIONED WILIAM

It looked like Geoff, one of the great comedy directors and producers, probably had to do it in about a day for about 20p. But the Madness boys all had so much personality and charisma. Geoff gave it as much style as he could in what was obviously a very short amount of time, but I don’t know why they didn’t take them because they could have been brilliant.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This was one of the first two pilots made for television by Talkback [set up by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones initially to make radio commercials]. The other was a vehicle for Frankie Howerd, but neither of them made it to the screen. The Madness one eventually turned up as part of a DVD boxset they released, called Gogglebox (2011).

 

But I remember reading about that pilot about a year before they made it, in Smash Hits, and because I’d seen The Young Ones and obviously they’d guested in it, I could picture this three-camera studio sitcom, with an audience. Although I also remember thinking, even then, ‘But Madness have already found their ideal comic medium, and it’s the promotional video.’

 

SIONED WILIAM

Yeah, they made fantastic videos. Clever, funny, literate, as were their songs.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Can pop groups do sitcom, I wonder? Could there be another Monkees?

 

SIONED WILIAM

Can there even be another sitcom?! The age of the sitcom has passed, to be honest with you. We seem to have these hybrids, some better than others, some hyper-real, some more surreal. Now, say if you were to do a sitcom with Madness now, you could either go hyper-real and make it gritty, or you go with these flights of fancy.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What are you enjoying at the moment, comedy-wise?

 

SIONED WILIAM

The Windsors makes me laugh out loud. Derry Girls, unashamedly funny but poignant and moving at times. And there’s this thing on Sky called Extraordinary, this kind of magical realism comedy, it’s about every single person having a superpower. It’s full of flights of fancy and it’s surreal but terribly touching as well. Colin from Accounts, more of a soap than a comedy, but really delightful. So I would say that sitcom’s just evolved into a different shape. There’s some fantastic new stuff out there. I don’t want to be the dinosaur who bemoans the end of sitcom, though I am sad that nobody wants to write Frasier anymore, which seems to me to be the difficult thing to do. It is much easier to do something that’s mildly amusing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Not Going Out seems to be the last one standing now in Britain. And they’ll still try things like do a live episode, or one in real time.

 

SIONED WILIAM

And there’s Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is more panto than sitcom. But there isn’t the appetite to do a Seinfeld or Frasier now – it costs too much, they won’t pay a room full of writers. This is what the writers’ strike in America is all about. That infrastructure that allows you to make shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Big Bang Theory. It’s very difficult now to get that kind of level of funding to create these brilliant lines. There was some wonderful story about how the Frasier writing room would be silent for about two hours while they just tried to think what Daphne might say to Dr Crane, which had to be something Daphne would say, but which would also move the plot on.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s funny how the world of television has never been so diverse in terms of who’s on there – rightly so, obviously! – and yet the range of programmes has never been so narrow. Because all these people could be appearing on, could be making, so many different things – but so many genres seem to have a house style.

 

SIONED WILIAM

That’s a real worry, yeah, and with comedians, they seem to be used in every way apart from being funny, so they’re going fishing or cooking. The amount of factual entertainment you get now with comedians because it’s cheaper, and they don’t have to write anything.

 

But just in general, the notion of spending all that time working on a weekly script with a room full of people… it never really existed in this country. And there’s not a hope in hell of it happening now, because people’s choices have changed. And something else we’ve lost: you used to be able to put your hand over the side of a page of script and know who was speaking from the line of dialogue. There’s so many shows now where everybody has the same voice.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We have got this far, and we somehow haven’t mentioned Bob Dylan. I have been aware for a while you are a massive fan.

 

SIONED WILIAM

I first heard Dylan while I was a postgraduate student at Oxford. My boyfriend at the time, John, was a huge fan, had all the bootlegs and went to see him at every possible opportunity. I had always bought into the cliché that Dylan couldn’t sing but when I saw Dont Look Back at the cinema, belting out his songs with such power and charisma, I completely changed my mind. He’s so funny and smart in that film. And then I heard the live version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in Manchester – extraordinary – and the Pennebaker film when he’s with The Band. I love all his different phases, even the religious stuff and Nashville Skyline and that wonderful trilogy of American Classics albums he did a few years ago [2015–17]. And my son and I always play the Christmas Album [Christmas in the Heart] every year – we love the arrangements!

——

You can follow Sioned on Twitter at @sionedwiliam.

Her four novels, Dal i Fynd (2013), Chwynnu (2017), Cicio’r Bar (2018) and Y Gwyliau (2023) are published by Y Lolfa.

—-

FLA 22 PLAYLIST

Sioned Wiliam

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’

Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P04yfGRNebM

Track 2: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: The Magic Flute: ‘Ach, ich Fühl’

Renée Fleming, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Sir Charles Mackerras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjbY2-U2_MI

Track 3: GEORG FRIDERIC HANDEL: Ariodante: ‘Scherza Infida’

Ann Murray, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Sir Charles Mackerras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj2NKIPta0w

Track 4: TRWYNAU COCH: ‘Mynd I’r Capel Mewn Levis’ [Currently not on YouTube or on Spotify but will be reinstated here when it is]

Track 5: HEATHER JONES: ‘Cwm Hiraeth’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzmqws-K5kc

Track 6: GERAINT JARMAN A’R CYNGANEDDWYR: ‘Gwesty Cymru’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TWFZ7Wc_c

Track 7: JOE JACKSON: ‘It’s Different for Girls’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDFG5vm5kA

Track 8: STEVIE WONDER: ‘I Don’t Know Why’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QtgkxwG1Ew

Track 9: SQUEEZE: ‘Pulling Mussels (from a Shell)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn0Rzi1s5iU

Track 10: SUPER FURRY ANIMALS: ‘Ysbeidiau Heulog’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttikLIQnMg

Track 11: CARWYN ELLIS: ‘Tywydd Hufen Ia’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZPhTQ2QfOc

Track 12: MADNESS: ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X8BDcn-rSA

Track 13: MADNESS: ‘The Sun and the Rain’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_9FeMMlLZw

Track 14: MADNESS: ‘Powder Blue’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePLFqfzcqO8

Track 15: BOB DYLAN: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcNyMBw818

Track 16: BOB DYLAN: ‘If Not for You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyouhbgAiCA

Track 17: BOB DYLAN: ‘Blind Willie McTell’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AIRdU6CPf0

Track 18: BOB DYLAN: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwOfCgkyEj0

Track 19: BOB DYLAN: ‘Mozambique’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K_YPW-_Vnk

Track 20: SIDAN: ‘Cymylau’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zjVwMVbYkQ

Track 21: ENDAF EMLYN: ‘Macrall wedi Ffrio’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVJOxRCWVF0

Track 22: MEIC STEVENS: ‘Tryweryn’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fok0IlnYEXI

Track 23: MEIC STEVENS: ‘Y Brawd Hwdini’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA5fqsMneEc

FLA 16: Jonathan Coe (25/09/2022)

/ whenisbins / Leave a comment

(c) Josefina Melo

Jonathan Coe, born in Bromsgrove near Birmingham in the early 1960s, is one of the great contemporary comic chroniclers of British life and society. His highly enjoyable, incisive and thoughtful novels frequently include material about films, television, politics, the media – and from time to time, music, of which he is an enthusiastic listener and sometime participant.

 

He read English at Cambridge University’s Trinity College at the turn of the 1980s, before completing an MA and PhD at the University of Warwick. His first novel, The Accidental Woman, was published in 1987, and his subsequent acclaimed titles have included What a Carve Up! (1994), The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001) and its sequel The Closed Circle (2004), The Rain Before It Falls (2007), The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), Expo 58 (2013), Number 11 (2015), Middle England (2018) and Mr Wilder and Me (2020).

 

I should also mention here that Jonathan wrote one of the most remarkable literary biographies I have ever read: Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson (2004), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction the following year.

 

Jonathan is one of my favourite authors, and I have met him in person a few times, so you can imagine what a thrill it was for me when – with the impending publication of his fourteenth novel, Bournville, this autumn – he accepted my invitation to come on First Last Anything. We discuss his love for progressive rock and French classical music, as well as how he began creating music of his own in his teenage years, and why music can be more powerful than words.

 

It felt like the ideal way to end this first run of FLA, although may I assure you it will return, in 2023. I hope you’ve enjoyed all these conversations. Thank you for reading them. And thank you to all my guests.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When you were growing up, before you started buying music yourself, what music did your parents have in your house?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

My main memory is easy listening. Radio 2 would be on – this is in the 60s.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was this pre-Radio 1, when it was still the Light Programme?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I suppose so. Radio 1 started 1967. But the first piece of music I can remember my parents having on single and me liking, was ‘Tokyo Melody’, the theme music – probably the unofficial theme music – for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, by a German guy called Helmut Zacharias. That was on heavy rotation in our house at that time. So I would have been three.

 

I also have a memory, probably my earliest memory, of being in a pushchair, and my mother singing a Beatles song as she pushed me down the street, but maddeningly, I can’t remember whether it was ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ or ‘She Loves You’. It was one of those two – probably ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

 

The first piece of music that I can really remember getting excited about, which was as much a visual as a musical thing, was seeing Arthur Brown singing ‘Fire’ on Top of the Pops in the summer of ‘68, when I was seven. That just blew my mind. I’d never seen or heard anything like that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s quite an arresting sight, that ‘Fire’ clip, one of the very few Top of the Pops extracts from the 60s that still exists in the archive. I’m trying to imagine seeing that at the age of seven.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yes, it was the sight of Arthur Brown in his flaming helmet, but also the music as well – the heavy organ sound, that sinister Gothic sound, which I suppose set me on the road to prog, in a way.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a fork in the road in popular music around 1968, isn’t there: pop or rock. There was another fork in about 1986: house and hip-hop or everything else. But there definitely seemed to be that crossroads in ’68.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Although I then did go into pop, because I became a huge Marc Bolan and T Rex fan in the early 70s, my first real musical love. My first gig, in fact, was T Rex at the Birmingham Odeon in ’74. Just on the decline, after his glory days.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess by ‘74, the mass of teen pop had moved on to… The Osmonds, David Cassidy, and then the Bay City Rollers a little bit later.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

‘71–‘73 was the peak for T Rex but I worshipped them during those years. When I saw them [28/01/1974], Marc’s trousers were so tight that they split on stage, causing great excitement in the audience.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Given you saw T Rex in Birmingham, it made me think about the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games recently, and how they had a really wide range of Midlands bands from down the years: Black Sabbath, Dexys, Goldie, Musical Youth…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

UB40?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Of course. But it made me think how Birmingham isn’t necessarily viewed as this big musical hub, the way Liverpool or Manchester or Sheffield are.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Well, all the names you’ve mentioned there, from Birmingham, have nothing in common really, musically. Richard Vinen has just published this big book about Birmingham, Second City and he devotes quite a few pages to the musical scene in the 70s and 80s, and it’s just very heterogenous, you know? I was never a Sabbath fan, but I would have liked The Moody Blues. And later on, Duran Duran, Dexys… there’s no real ‘movement’ there. More a coincidence that they all came from the same city.

 

One local musical celebrity who doesn’t get talked about much anymore was Clifford T. Ward (1944–2001), the singing schoolteacher who taught at the same school as my mum for a while. He had a hit with ‘Gaye’, and he was a really good singer-songwriter. There’d be stories about him in the Bromsgrove Messenger.

 

I grew up in Worcestershire, in the Lickey Hills, and didn’t know then that Roy Wood, from The Move and briefly one of the ELO’s founder members, before forming Wizzard, literally lived a mile away from us, down the road in Rednal. I would not even have known that the ELO came from Birmingham.

 

 

FIRST: THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: ELO 2 (Harvest, 1973)

Extract: ‘From the Sun to the World (Boogie No. 1)’

JONATHAN COE

At the age of 10, or so, I was a retro rock’n’roll fan. My grandparents had an original 78 of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and this was a kind of sacred object in our family mythology, which we assumed was worth thousands and thousands of pounds. So I bought a Bill Haley compilation on Hallmark Records [Rock Around the Clock, 1968] and I also got into Chuck Berry, just buying greatest hits albums, so I knew his song ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. And then [in early 1973] I heard this weird version of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ which started with that clip from Beethoven’s Fifth, which turned out to be by the ELO.

 

So I thought, Great, I love this, I’ll buy the whole album on cassette – my preferred format back then. I had no idea that what I was buying with ELO 2 was a full-blown prog album, just five tracks, all about ten minutes long, and with lots of time signature changes. And all this did something strange to my ears. I thought, ‘I want to hear more music like this’, and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ quickly became my least favourite track on the album. So I got into all the other stuff, and I suppose I was a bit disappointed when Jeff Lynne took the band in a much poppier direction.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of the earliest memories of TV I have – and I’ve never been able to confirm it – is that one afternoon, for some reason, there was an ELO concert on BBC1. Maybe they’d cancelled something at the last minute, sports coverage or something, because I’ve never found what it was or why it was on. This was 1975, maybe ’76. I was five or six.  

 

I don’t think I’d ever seen a rock concert on television before, actually. I know now that ELO had done a live LP in America, and there’s something on YouTube they did for German television, but how on earth would that have been on BBC1 in the afternoon? It’s one of those half-memories you can’t nail down. I feel like that character in your novel Number 11.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The one who’s looking for the lost film, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how did you fall for prog? I think you particularly gravitated towards the Canterbury Scene, right?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The big prog bands I never particularly liked. I never had any Emerson Lake and Palmer album or Yes album – although my brother was into Rick Wakeman, so we had his solo albums. I immediately went for the fringes of prog, and in a way that chimes with my taste anyway. I always seem to be drawn to the fringe figures, who seem to then become the major figures for me.

 

I suppose my entry point there was The Snow Goose by Camel (1975). I can’t remember how that became such a desired object for me. I think there was a buzz around it at school. I can remember seeing it in the local WHSmiths in Bromsgrove, and I circled it for weeks and weeks thinking, Am I going to buy this album or not? Eventually I did. I really liked that record and still do.

 

On Radio 1, I was listening to John Peel, but also the Alan Freeman Saturday afternoon rock show which played a lot of Gentle Giant, Soft Machine, Caravan. Like a lot of people, my gateway drug to the Canterbury Scene was Caravan because they were popular and more melodic and more accessible. I heard ‘Golf Girl’ one night on the John Peel show and a Caravan compilation album had just come out, Canterbury Tales (1976), which included ‘Memory Lain, Hugh’, a particular favourite. Around that time, Pete Frame did a ‘Rock Family Tree’ of the Canterbury Scene, which suggested so many connections that it gave me my record-buying programme for the rest of the 70s.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Those incredibly detailed, beautifully realised Pete Frame Rock Family Tree illustrations were like a forerunner of the Internet, a way to make musical connections.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yes, you could piece it together, I suppose, by reading the music press, but those Family Trees were the only places where all the information was gathered in one place. Another thing that gave you a lot of information in one place was a book called The NME Book of Rock (1975, edited by Nick Logan and Rob Finnis), which was sort of the first British pop reference book, as far as I remember. I had a couple of paperback editions of that.

 

But yeah, as you say, otherwise, your findings and your quests for this kind of music were very random and haphazard, which in itself was part of the pleasure, of course. There’s this perpetual debate about whether it’s better to be able to find things within five seconds with one click, or whether it’s more exciting and romantic to have to traipse around half a dozen record shops looking for something.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s been interesting for us to have both those experiences. They both have good points and bad points.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Generally speaking, I think, as consumers, as punters, we’re better off now. It’s probably not as good for the musicians, of course.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to avoid analysing anything in your novels as autobiographical, but I was thinking about that section in The Rotters’ Club, itself named after a 1975 Hatfield and the North album lest we forget, where Benjamin visits the NME building. Did you ever do anything like that in your teens, try and get into the music press in that way?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

No. Absolutely not. I’ve seen it reported that I was one of the people who applied for the NME ‘hip young gunslinger’ job that resulted in them hiring Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, but it’s not true. I was so untrendy back in the 70s – still am, really. I wasn’t even an NME reader or a Melody Maker reader. I was a Sounds reader. Before it turned into a kind of full-blown heavy metal paper in the late 70s, Sounds was good for Canterbury Scene stuff. It wasn’t as snobby about that as the NME was, or as serious and muso-ish as the Melody Maker was. And John Peel had a column in Sounds back then, which I have to say was a big influence on my writing style. It was one of the highlights of my reading week.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And he used to review the singles in Sounds quite often, didn’t he? He backed quite a lot of singles you might not expect him to have done. You may remember he had a nickname for Tony Blackburn, ‘Timmy Bannockburn’…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

That’s right.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Once he reviewed ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’ by Ann Peebles, and mentioned it had been ‘Timmy Bannockburn’’s Record of the Week on the Radio 1 breakfast show, and with some sincerity said something like, ‘Quite right too’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

One single I was obsessed with in the 70s was ‘I’m Still Waiting’ by Diana Ross, which I also heard on the Tony Blackburn show. He used to play that a lot.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That came out as a single because of him. He’d been playing it as an album track and persuaded the Motown label in Britain to put it out as a single. Funnily enough, that single wasn’t a success in America at all, and nor was her other British number one, ‘Chain Reaction’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I had a real fascination for those rare, occasional, slightly melancholy minor key songs that made it into the British charts. ‘Long Train Running’ by the Doobie Brothers is another song I’ve always loved – again, there’s a minor key.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

On the subject of ‘I’m Still Waiting’, those records in the early 70s where they use orchestras, especially woodwind. You hear lots of oboes on American soul records. That Stylistics record, their best one really, ‘Betcha By Golly Wow’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I bought very few singles in the 70s. I was an album buying person, but you’ve just reminded me, I did like ‘The Poacher’ by Ronnie Lane, precisely because it has a beautiful oboe figure, running, running through the song that grabbed my attention immediately.

 

Though clarinet and bassoon, there’s not so much of those on pop records. ‘Tears of a Clown’, that’s got a bassoon.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to think. [During the editing of this piece, I discovered that the bassoon on ‘Tears of a Clown’ was played by Charles R. Sirard (1911–90), from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I also suddenly remembered a second number one hit featuring a bassoon: ‘Puppet on a String’. It feels a shame that there aren’t more bassoons in pop music.]

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You mentioned in one piece of writing, a while back, that your ideal early profession was ‘composer’. Obviously, that’s interesting given that you write novels, have done for decades. I’m struck by the similarities and differences between composing and writing. They can both liberate you in different ways. They can both do something that the other cannot. Is that how you feel about the two things, and were you composing in the early days, as well as trying to write novels?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The key thing is that I was intensely shy as a teenager. Part of the reason I went for fringe music, I think, was to sidestep all the musical arguments that were going on at school, and not be a part of that. I could like bands that no-one could criticise me for liking because they’d never heard of them and they didn’t know what they sounded like. The other kids at school were forming bands, but I couldn’t really handle that social dimension of rehearsing together in a room and asking people to join.

 

I was having classical guitar lessons, and my teacher wanted us to play a duet, so I started wondering how to practise for it, between the lessons. I had an ITT portable cassette player, recorded my teacher’s part on the tape, and then played along with it. As soon as I did that, I realised: Wow – even if I can’t play in a band, I can play with a tape recorder. And then if I get another tape recorder, and recorded those two parts, then I could bounce them down and then start multitracking. So I started working on these ever more elaborate duets – at first – and then trios, and then quartets. And then my mother traded in her piano for an electric home organ, so we had one of these terrible home organs in the corner of the sitting room.

 

I never composed, really, because although I can read and write music on paper, I find it a very difficult, time-consuming process. But when I started multitracking, in the mid-70s, and I was modelling myself on Mike Oldfield – who wasn’t one of my favourite artists, but I did like his records. And that’s what I realised I was doing: solo composed and solo performed music. I carried on doing that for years, until the late 80s when my first novels started getting published. And I still have all these recordings from that period, which I’ve digitised, so there’s about 40 or 50 hours of music there – in terrible sound quality. [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And there are three albums of your compositions that are out there now.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

On my bandcamp page, there are two albums, if you like: Unnecessary Music and Invisible Music. And there’s a little EP of other pieces an Italian producer heard and remixed. But what I must talk about for a few minutes is something incredible that’s happened in the last couple of years:

 

Those bandcamp albums are mainly digital re-recordings of some of those old pieces, and an Italian musician, a drummer and bandleader called Ferdinando Farao, heard them and liked them. He runs a twenty-piece orchestra in Milan called the Artchipel Orchestra, and they specialise in doing big band arrangements of Canterbury music, Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine tunes and so on. And to my amazement, they took half a dozen of these pieces and did new arrangements of them – and they’ve performed them four times in concert now. The last time was in Turin in June this year. They even persuaded me to come on stage and play keyboards with them. So finally, in my sixties, I’ve become a live performer. There’s a little clip of the Turin show on YouTube. It was a fabulous night, one of the best nights of my life:

JONATHAN COE & ARTCHIPEL ORCHESTRA at Torino Jazz Festival, 12 June 2022

JUSTIN LEWIS

The first novel of yours I ever read was The House of Sleep in May 1998. I was given the beautiful hardback edition of that as a birthday present, and tore through that, and then I quickly worked backwards, bought and read What a Carve Up!, and then your much earlier, first three novels – which were quite hard to find at that point.

 

I wanted to ask you about two of those very early novels because they both touch on the subject of music. In your first novel, The Accidental Woman (1987), there’s a footnote near the end of the book which says, ‘Instead of reading this section, you should just play the end of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata in F Minor.’ Now, at the time, I didn’t see this as a joke at all – but I was not in a position to take it completely seriously, on the grounds that I had no immediate access to this piece of music! [JC chuckles] More recently, I’ve been able to read it again and play that sonata – thanks to the Internet. Does it feel strange to look back at your pre-Internet work with the sense that things were out of reach at the end of the last century?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Well, there’s a couple of things there. It’s very interesting that you read that passage in The Accidental Woman in 1998. Soon after that, Penguin bought the rights to those books and reissued them, in 1999 or 2000.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, I think my copy was published by Sceptre.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

And for those Penguin editions, which are the editions now still in print 22 years later, I changed that passage; I looked at it again and thought that was a bit pretentious and wanky. But now I’d like to change it back because I kind of stand by it! In the Penguin edition, it just says something like ‘At this moment, what was running through Maria’s head was the last movement of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata.’ Whereas, in the (original) Duckworth version and Sceptre version, it actually says to the reader, in a footnote, ‘Don’t read this, just listen to this piece of music instead.’ Which is more what I really meant, because of the tone of the book – it sounds like a kind of arch joke. But actually, I was perfectly serious about it.

 

What I was trying to express there, was that you can say something much purer and more powerful in music than you can in words. It’s as simple as that, really. Words get in the way because they carry meaning, they’re semantic, whereas music brings you much closer to the emotion that the composer is trying to express. So the music that I play or improvise – because I’m kind of embarrassed to use ‘compose’ – and the books that I write are actually completely separate from each other. As you may know, I’ve made attempts over the years to combine words with music, working with the High Llamas and with Louis Philippe, always fascinating, enjoyable and fruitful collaborations. But in the end I decided that didn’t really work for me, because the two things, I think, are so different that it’s best to keep them apart.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I must admit, I always sigh with relief slightly when other people who work with words say that they prioritise music over lyrics. [Agreement] Am I right in saying that it’s the music you go for first?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

If I’m listening to a song which engages me musically, I just don’t hear the lyrics – the singer might as well be singing ‘lalala’. I don’t notice the words at all. It’s not that I don’t like Bob Dylan, but it’s why I didn’t listen to Bob Dylan because everybody said, ‘He’s a genius lyricist’…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t get him for years – I do now – on the grounds that he was ‘lyrics first’. But the lyric is the thing I get to last. I probably get the arrangement sooner.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I listen to quite a bit of French pop music – Orwell, for instance – and one thing I like about that is I don’t really know what they’re saying. [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s incredibly liberating, that. Well, hopefully, they’re not saying something terrible! But you get a sense that really you’re reacting to the sound.

 

Another of your early novels that I revisited recently, having not read it for a long time, was The Dwarves of Death (1990). And that one was written when you’d actually been in a band in London.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

We were called The Peer Group, a band I formed with some student friends in the mid-80s. The idea was to play a jazzy Canterbury, Caravan-y kind of music, but for various reasons, that didn’t work out. We weren’t really skilful enough musicians, I think that was the problem. Because I was writing quite tricksy music in odd time signatures, which I thought was a clever thing to do – so we mutated into sounding a bit like Aztec Camera or Prefab Sprout or The Smiths at their most melodic. Melodic, jangly guitar music, I guess. We did very few gigs, really, I don’t even know whether they got into double figures, actually. We just seemed to rehearse endlessly in cold, draughty South London rehearsal studios, which was the atmosphere I was trying to capture in The Dwarves of Death.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In that novel, you write about the detail of music in a humorous way, without trying to get too bogged down in technicalities. What were some of the challenges there, and do you think you’ll ever write a directly musical novel again?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

It’s a long time since I read The Dwarves of Death. I always think of it as my weakest novel, so I don’t like to look at it. But what you’re saying rings a distant bell with me now. There is quite a lot of technical stuff about the writing of music in there, and I think there’s a tune called ‘Tower Hill’, which is threaded throughout the novel, [and which appears in the form of musical notation]. I was very young, you know, and I thought I was being very adventurous and doing something terribly interesting by putting a lot of technical stuff about writing a jazz tune into a novel. It just feels a bit gauche to me now.

 

If I was to do something like that again, I would do it differently. For instance, Calista in Mr Wilder and Me is a composer, but you hear very little about the kind of music she writes, or how she writes. I think it’s better really to leave it to the reader’s imagination – but I remember being quite insistent at the time with Fourth Estate, the publishers of The Dwarves of Death, that they should include the musical notation in the text, and they were very accommodating about that. Because really I was an unknown writer, it was a low print run, and there was nothing much to lose by doing it. When I met and interviewed Anthony Burgess around that time, I had a copy of The Dwarves of Death with me, and when I showed him the musical notation, he was very jealous: ‘My publishers won’t allow me to put music in my books! How did you persuade them to do that?’ I think it was because, you know, I was just Jonathan Coe; he was Anthony Burgess and there was probably more at stake in his publications!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Not long after I read that book, I discovered BS Johnson, because a friend gave me his novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry as a birthday present, and of course that led me not only to his other books but your terrific biography of Johnson’s life and work, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004). Which I urge everyone to read! In its introduction, you talk about how novelists can put anything into a novel, the form determines it. I used to be obsessed by form, even more than I am now, perhaps. I suspect had Johnson written about music in depth, he might have tried to do something like you did in The Dwarves of Death. I know you were very influenced by him in your early novels – was formal experimentation at the forefront of your mind with that one?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yeah, subconsciously, that was very much going on, I think. Also, I was young, still in my twenties, and kind of hilariously, I thought of myself as a slightly rebellious literary figure who was going to shake things up. And throwing a whole lot of stuff about music into a novel was part and parcel of that aesthetic for me.

 

For me, though, what is more significant about The Dwarves of Death: it was the first time I wrote a book where some of the passages read a little bit like stand-up routines. I know this isn’t an interview about comedy, which is my other great love aside from music, but although I was never really going to shake up the form of the novel the way BS Johnson had done – I was never as adventurous as that – I knew I was trying to bring some of the energies of British pop culture, and especially comedy, into the literary novel. Which I think I continued with the next novel, What a Carve Up!, basing it on an old early 60s Kenneth Connor movie  of the same name. That was my little stab at doing something new and radical.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of my favourite things you did in terms of form was the footnotes section in The House of Sleep.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I remember the spur for that. It was about 1996, I was doing some research for The House of Sleep in the British Library, reading a book about sleep. And I just jumped from the number in the text to the footnote at the bottom of the page, and landed on the wrong footnote – and what I read was comically inappropriate. So I thought it would be funny if that happened again and again and again.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s brilliant. It feels in a similar spirit to that Two Ronnies ‘Mastermind’ sketch written by David Renwick [BBC1, 01/11/1980] where the contestant keeps answering the question before last.  

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I never thought about that sketch when I was writing it. I can see the similarity now. But the thing I’ve done that is closer to a Two Ronnies sketch, or was more consciously influenced by them, is the crossword scene in The Rotters’ Club. The character named Sam is trying to do the crossword and his wife is reading the love letter from the horny art teacher, and they’re working at cross purposes. And there is a great Two Ronnies sketch [Christmas special, BBC1, 26/12/1980] – they’re in a railway compartment with the bowler hats on and everything, and Barker is doing The Times crossword, and Corbett is doing The Sun crossword, and the two things keep getting mixed up. Do you not know that sketch?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I should know it. It’s been a while since I’ve properly watched them back.

 

LAST: LOUIS PHILIPPE & THE NIGHT MAIL: Thunderclouds (2020, Tapete Records)

Extract: ‘When London Burns’

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’ve worked with Louis on and off for many years, and indeed you cited a section of his lyrics in What a Carve Up!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I did, yes.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

A song called ‘Yuri Gagarin’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

In the late 80s, when I was in The Peer Group, the student group I mentioned earlier, we were sending demo cassettes around to record labels. And we sent one to Cherry Red, because we thought we sounded like a Cherry Red band. But for some reason, it fell into the hands not of the main label, but to Mike Alway at él records, which was a division of Cherry Red. And he gave a curious kind of response to this; he said, ‘I think you’re trying to sound like a few artists on my label, so here’s a bunch of their records.’ I think he was trying to say, ‘Try and sound a bit more like this.’ The artists were Marden Hill, Anthony Adverse… and Louis Philippe.

 

I listened to this Louis Philippe record, Appointment with Venus, and just thought it was beautiful. I could hear in it not just the pop sensibility that I loved, but lots of echoes of Ravel and Fauré and Poulenc – my favourite classical composers. So I started following his career and then I wrote to him and asked, ‘Can I use these lines from your song, as an epigraph to What a Carve Up!’ He was very happy about that, said yes, and then a few years later we met at one of his gigs, and became good friends. I wrote some lyrics for a couple of songs on his albums, and then we did a record together for Bertrand Burgalat’s Tricatel label called 9th and 13th (2001). He also made an album called My Favourite Part of You (2002), for which I wrote the lyrics for a song called ‘Seven Years’. He’s now joined up with a band called The Night Mail, and a couple of years ago they made this beautiful album, Thunderclouds.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m so glad you’ve recommended this, because I’ve been playing little else, these past few days.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

He’s a great songwriter. The strange thing is, he now has this parallel career as a football journalist and this huge following on Twitter.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Football is not something I follow, so I knew nothing about that side of his career!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I’m just so glad that he’s back making records and doing gigs again – as is he, I think.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How do you discover new music now?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I was thinking about this. You know, for everything that the Internet offers us, for me it doesn’t seem to work as a way of discovering new music, unless it’s personal recommendations that people have passed my way on Twitter. But I’m a bit sad and ashamed that I’ve discovered so little new pop music in the last 10 or 15 years really, and a lot of what I have discovered is old stuff that I’ve just never heard before. For instance, I just started listening to Brian Auger – how have I never heard him before? There’s this vast discography to explore, but a lot of it is, you know, 50 years old now. So I rely a lot on the kindness of strangers, really, and people just sometimes sending me CDs that they think I might like. A journalist in Spain a few years ago pressed into my hands a CD by the Montgolfier Brothers. Do you know them?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It rings a bell, but…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Roger Quigley (who died in 2020) and Mark Tranmer, You’d really like them, I think.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Must check them out.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

That led me to discover all their records. The person who wrote the music for them is called Mark Tranmer, who also had a band called gnac, who do ambient instrumentals… But it was just a chance encounter with a journalist in Spain who was kind enough to read some of the things I had written about music and think, Oh, maybe Jonathan would like this.

 

I use the Spotify algorithm and if I like an album on there I will scroll down and click on the other things that it recommends. Sometimes it works – sometimes it doesn’t.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the past, you’ve described music you listen to when you’re writing, and that’s ranged from Steve Reich to drum’n’bass instrumental music like LTJ Bukem. What seems to work for you during that writing process now, or do you now in fact prefer silence sometimes?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

It’s kind of stopped working for me, the idea of listening to music while I write. I nearly always write with silence. Sometimes a piece of music, usually a piece of classical music, will get me into a mood which is appropriate for the scene or the chapter that I’m writing next – but I will then turn it off and write the scene in silence. The way music and writing combine for me now is, I sit here at this desk to write and I have a piano [to my right] so I can swivel around to play the piano if I get bored with writing. So those two activities complement each other, but I rarely listen now to music while I’m writing.

 

You know, I’ve even become increasingly grumpy about the whole idea of having music on in the background anywhere. Even muzak, library music, lounge music. A lot of thought and creativity and talent and inventiveness goes into that music. And you should sit and listen to it, rather than just using it as background.  

ANYTHING: HELGA STORCK: The Harp and the French Impressionists (1969, Turnabout Records)

Extract: Claude Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp in F Major, L. 137: II. Interlude. Tempo di Minuetto (Wilhelm Schwegler (flute), Fritz Ruf (viola), Helga Storck (harp))

JONATHAN COE

I went to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, quite a posh school, and we had a dedicated music building which was full of practice rooms and a concert hall. And upstairs, there was a place called the Harold Smith Studio. I don’t know who Harold Smith was! But that had a library in it, a record library, and that was where I lived really, for two years in the sixth form, even though I wasn’t studying music at A level or anything like that. Which is where I discovered this record called The Harp and the French Impressionists, which included Ravel’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’ and Debussy’s ‘Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp’.

 

I put this on, and just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. And also, all these records I had been listening to, like The Snow Goose by Camel or certain Genesis albums… I thought, they’d basically been ripping off all their best bits from these guys, these French classical composers from the turn of the 20th century. And at the same time, I discovered Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, via an album by the group Sky, remember Sky?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I do, my dad had one of their albums.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

My mum had one of their albums. I didn’t think much of it really, but in the middle of one side, there was this one tune, which was just fantastic and I thought, wow, one of the guys in this band is a really good composer. So I looked at the credits, and it was someone called Erik Satie, who apparently had written this piece 100 years before, but which still sounded incredibly modern.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I knew the ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’ because I was studying it for flute. Thinking about it, that might have been my introduction to French classical music. I think the Debussy sonata is meant to be the first prominent work for that specific combination of three instruments, flute, viola and harp – it’s not absolutely the first, but the first major work. A real breakthrough.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yeah, it’s just an absolute masterpiece. I mean, I have lots of big blind spots in music, I hardly listen to 19th century classical music at all, but from 1888, as soon as Satie uses those major seventh chords in those Gymnopedies… everything starts to make sense for me again, and then that led me into Poulenc and into Honegger and all those other French composers of that period. And it always makes perfect sense to me that Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel in France, because although there’s a kind of a deep-rooted Englishness in his music, through the folk tunes and so on. I also hear a kind of Ravel-like delicacy in a lot of his orchestrations. So I fell in love with Vaughan Williams’ music at that time as well, and have been listening to him constantly ever since.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your next novel, Bournville, is out shortly, right?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

There’s almost nothing about music in that book! A bit of Herbert Howells and that’s it. No, actually – I tell a lie – there’s a huge section about Messiaen and his Quartet for the End of Time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you’re into music, you can’t help it!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I can’t. It’s everywhere, isn’t it?

 

 

—-

Bournville was published by Penguin Books in November 2022.

Jonathan’s fifteenth novel, The Proof of My Innocence, was published by Viking in November 2024.

Jonathan’s website, with further details of all of his books, can be found at jonathancoewriter.com. 

To hear some of his music, you can visit his bandcamp page: sparoad.bandcamp.com

You can follow Jonathan on Bluesky at @jonathancoe.bsky.social.

 

FLA PLAYLIST 16

Jonathan Coe

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: HELMUT ZACHARIAS: ‘Tokyo Melody’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZteHNQZcQQM

Track 2: CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN: ‘Fire’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLG1ys2CGcI

Track 3: T REX: ‘Get It On’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyzWDl0nz00

Track 4: CLIFFORD T. WARD: ‘Wherewithal’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMGg6dNT90

Track 5: THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: ‘From the Sun to the World (Boogie No. 1)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVGv-avRA64

Track 6: CAMEL: ‘The Snow Goose’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0cJVEtxJo

Track 7: CARAVAN: ‘Memory Lain, Hugh/Headloss’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ReI3YpEzs

Track 8: DIANA ROSS: ‘I’m Still Waiting’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAZh4Sccsk

Track 9: RONNIE LANE: ‘The Poacher’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFvN1i8m4bU

Track 10: SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES: ‘The Tears of a Clown’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4heHLbchPKk

Track 11: SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Minor, Op. 80: I. Andante

Viktoria Mullova, Piotr Anderszewski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe76VJ1NsIk

Track 12: THE HIGH LLAMAS: ‘Green Coaster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XhZYSYv4c

Track 13: LOUIS PHILIPPE: ‘Seven Years’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tha_vQz_ZBA

Track 14: ORWELL: ‘Courbes’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0YxqCew8_Q

Track 15: JONATHAN COE: ‘Tower Hill’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e8AFPk2wp8

Track 16: LOUIS PHILIPPE & THE NIGHT MAIL: ‘When London Burns’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQi4hpr8f2s

Track 17: THE MONTGOLFIER BROTHERS: ‘Be Selfish’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zag2USOkcOA

Track 18: MAURICE RAVEL: ‘Introduction and Allegro’, M.46

Gerd Starke, Helga Storck, Konrad Hampe, Endreas Quartet

Track 19: CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp in F Major, L. 137:

II. Interlude. Tempo di Minuetto

Wilhelm Schwegler, Fritz Ruf, Helga Storck:

Track 20: ERIK SATIE: Gymnopedie No. 1, Lent et douloureux

Anne Queffélec:

Track 21: JONATHAN COE: ‘Empty Mornings’