Castaway

ANNOUNCER: And now on BBC Radio Four, we go over to Sue Lawley, who will be finding out about her latest castaway's Desert Island Discs.

MUSIC: The Sleepy Lagoon, by Charles Etherington

SUE LAWLEY: Hello. I have with me today a man who is perhaps not that well known to the public at large but has in recent months fostered a small reputation in an obsure corner of the popular badly-run internet site, MySpace. He was a member of two of Leicester's least successful bands and is currently working in a technical capacity for the city's slightly unreliable bus network. Douglas Burgess, hello.

ME: Hello, Sue.

SUE LAWLEY: Douglas, at 27 you are quite young for a guest on this programme.

ME: Yes, I suppose I am. I haven't had anything exhibited at the National Gallery or worked in the diplomatic service, either (laughs).

SUE LAWLEY: No. But let's pass on that and move back to the beginning of your life. You were born in quite a backwater, weren't you?

ME: Yes, Sue. I was born in May 1979 in Sheerness, in north Kent. It's a small town on the Isle of Sheppey, and it has always had quite a reputation for being a... rough sort of place. It still has a large docks and some heavy industry, but when I was a child these dominated the island. The steel mill made eveything smell of iron filings and the container ships woke everyone up every night. Of course, things are different now, sadly.

SUE LAWLEY: So you feel it has changed for the worse?

ME: Well, we all look back with rose tinted glasses. If I think about it, we were a working class family living in a working class town. Things were tight sometimes, but I was only a kid. I didn't think about it at the time. As long as the Island is still there, I suppose I don't mind. But it does feel sometimes like it's turning into a giant estate of Barratt Homes.

SUE LAWLEY: So what is your first selection?

ME: Well, at that age, and I'm talking no more than eight years of age, we all make a hero figure out of our Dads. Mine played cricket, football and took us on long bike rides. And so what Dad listened to, so did I. And at the time, it was Dire Straits.

MUSIC: Money For Nothing by Dire Straits

SUE LAWLEY: What is Sheppey like today?

ME: I have said that it seems like the local powers that be are trying to solve all of the South-East's housing problems by moving them all to Sheppey, but it's still very rural, really. I used to ride my bike all across the Island past the bird reserves, and the last time I looked, much of it was no different to then. It was very self-contained, and we didn't need to go anywhere else. Although it's been a long time since we lived there. I like to say that it's exactly the same size as Manhattan, but instead of a population of two million, it's got one of 35,000.

SUE LAWLEY: Tell me about your second choice.

ME: Well, this leaps forward a bit, but it is linked. Sheerness, as I said, has always been a port town, if a little obscure. A university friend refused to beleive that Sheppey even exisyted until I showed her on a map. Anyway, The Navy left in 1955 but it still has a huge cargo operation. The sea is inextricably bound up in anyone who lives there, and not just as something warm and blue to swim in. It can feed you, cool you, play with you, or it can kill you in a second. It is grey, forbidding and romantic. It is far more alive than we give it credit for these days. So, growing up with that, I have always had a great feeling towards the modern poetry of The Shipping Forecast. Now, I'm not going to take an edition of that with me, but I will take the following song. It was inspired by it, and to my ears, it sounds like the sea that I know. Powerful, scary and it will be here long, long after we are all gone.

MUSIC: This Is A Low by Blur

SUE LAWLEY: So tell us how you came to leave Kent?

ME: Well, it was 1991, and my Dad was in a bit of a rut at work and when the offer of a better position came up, he was going to be keen. And so we all moved down to Paignton, in Devon in the summer of 1991. Of course, in 1992 the economy collapsed.

SUE LAWLEY: So what happened?

ME: Well, the promises that had been made to us basically turned into nothing. We were in a house that needed masses of repairs, in a new town and living on dole money. It has given me the work ethic I have today - I am terrified of unemployment and I suppose this has made me a bit too cautious at times, but I do not want to be in that position again. Then again, Dad has said that it gave him the chance to watch all of the Olympics, which he hadn't done since 1968.

SUE LAWLEY: But you were on the move again soon after?

ME: Yes. Really we had no affection for Devon, and Torbay is no more than God's waiting room. So when a job came up that required a move to Market Harborough, we were straight there, even though none of us had ever heard of it. Dad had applied for anything he could, and we struck it very lucky. Dad was out of work for probably no more tha six months, which compared to a lot of people at that time was a very short time indeed.

SUE LAWLEY: And your third choice?

ME: Number three is a piece of music that I wish I had been able to hear at that time. It was a time of negative equity, redundancies, the whole Thatcherite Dream coming home to roost, so to speak. Very stressful, becasue we were a part of the casualties, and we really didn't know what could happen, because people were losing houses, moving to Australia, all of it. It was such a stressful time that it has taken my family many years to get fully over it. But I first heard this piece in an art gallery in Hamburg, so perhaps it isn't even music. But I find it very soothing, and it can bring me back to Earth from the most anxious states. I am a natural worrier, so that can be quite a lot.

MUSIC: Music For Airports 1:1 by Brian Eno

SUE LAWLEY: So you moved to the East Midlands, and another small town.

ME: Yes, another small town. Market Harborough. By this time it was 1993, and I was ready to discover girls. But of course, I was also far too shy and lacking in self-confidence to do anything about it. Still, I found a group of like-minded friends, and am still in touch with some today. We got heavily into cider and grunge music, perhaps, now I come to think about it, that was why we couldn't meet any women.

SUE LAWLEY: And your fourth slection?

ME: Well, this is one from the grunge phase. We really did it right - lumberjack shirts, black nail varnish and electric guitars, the whole thing. But at the same time I was aware of how some was better than the rest. With that in mind, I chose this.

MUSIC: Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle by Nirvana

SUE LAWLEY: And then it was school. How did you find education?

ME: I was never happier than those days at school. My Mum tells me that I never left primary school in my head, and she may be right. I was very lucky, though, as I was never seriously bullied, never knew anyone who went off the rails, at least, noticably, never got into trouble myself. I kept my head down, worked as much as I had to and ended up going to university in fairly relaxed fashion. I was terribly, terribly lazy. I didn't feel that I had much of a turbulent adolesence. I knew the feeling of not quite being sure what my body was doing, not feeling like it fitted properly, but we all did at the time. I was awkward and clumsy long before puberty kicked in.

SUE LAWLEY: Do you have any especially treasured memories from that time?

ME: Well, I will always remember the summers. We would sneak into pubs, watch TV, listen to music, play Mega Drive games. It was an idyllic time. The summer of 1995 was, I suppose, the last time we were all so innocent, though we didn't know it at the time. We all got our exam results and suddenly half of my friends vanished. It's a cliche, but your life really does change then. It became a little bit more important to listen, to think, and try some new things.

SUE LAWLEY: Number five?

ME: Well, I struggled with this one. At the time I was learning to play the guitar, and was teaching myslef about music. We had shed the grunge regalia by then, and I was dilligently trying to teach myself the guitar solos from Oasis's debut album. I suppose to relive that time I couldn't be without those songs, although I went off Oasis themselves long ago.

MUSIC: Rock and Roll Star by Oasis.


SUE LAWLEY: Now, after school you went to university in Leicester. How did you find this change affected you?

ME: Well, I was quite happy, really. I quickly made some very good friends and then spent the next, well, two years in a happily drunken stupor. It's what Uni was for. I am aware, though, that we were the very last intake to think that way. It was 1997, and after three years courting the student vote, literally the first thing that Labour did on coming to power was introduce tuition fees. A lot of us were very angry about that.

SUE LAWLEY: How did that make you feel personally?

ME: Well, the first time I voted was in the 1997 election. We all absolutely hated the Tories. They were just so awful. I had special bile reserved for them due to our experience in the earlier 90's. But by then I had turned into a real lefty polemicist anyway. So when we all marched down to the polling station on that gloriously sunny morning, and we did all go in a group, we all felt we were going to make a difference. We did, too. We all stayed up until about six that morning, watching the governemnt that had ruled us all our lives, fall into the abyss. We were like zombies the next day of course, but it was worth it to see Michael Portillo's face when he lost. It remains the best night of television I have ever, ever seen.

SUE LAWLEY: So tell us about your sixth selection.

ME: Immediately after my A-Levels me and Paul and Aaron went to the Glastonbury Festival. 1997 was the muddiest year they'd had in a decade, and we were there. It was absolutely fantastic. We saw about thirty bands, slept for about three hours in total over four days and got so dirty we had to throw the tent and all our clothes away afterwards. It was impossible to sleep. 80,000 tents-worth of young idiots are not ever going to be quiet. It's like a city, and no city is quiet. Plus, about every twenty minutes, twenty-four hours a day, and you could hear it coming, the word "BOLLOCKS" would roll past, on a kind of shouted Mexican Wave. Fantastic. So anyway, we saw Radiohead on the Saturday, the legendary 1997 Glasto set. I was four rows from the front, delirious with joy. It was an emotional set - we were all still high from the election, we were high from our A-Levels, we were 18 and they were playing OK Computer, which had been released in the May and was the soundtrack to the summer. It was our summer and when the fireworks started, more than one of us were bawling our eyes out.

MUSIC: No Surprises by Radiohead (Live at the Glastonbury Festival, 28th July 1997)

SUE LAWLEY: And so we move on to your time in Germany. How come you went to Germany when your degree was in English Literature?

ME: It was all down to the wonder that is the EU. Each year, about a thousand students from Britain, and a similar number from all the other EU countries, get to spend a year abroad studying their subject. I applied on a whim one quiet afternnon and got in. I went to Saarbruecken, a fairly small and obscure place on the Franco-German border. It was hardly Berlin, but I have literally never been happier.

SUE LAWLEY: Why there in particular?

ME: It's the traditional No Good Reason. My GCSE German textbnook was set there.

SUE LAWLEY: And what made you so happy then? You describe this whole time with great affection and emotion.

ME: Well, I was twenty. I was living in a new country, surviving day by day in a language I could barely speak, I was in love for the first time, all the pressures of university in Leicester were, well, in Leicester. I needed four marks from the year to pass. I did all my work in the first two months and then did absolutely nothing for the next six. I really did live the undergraduate dream.

SUE LAWLEY: Six months? What did you do?

ME: We travelled extensively. Paris, Koblenz, Luxembourg. Anywhere you could go on a cheap Deutsche Bahn weekend pass. I went to Dresden as well. Otherwise, we just lounged about. The beer was cheap and delicious. The living was slow in the summer heat, and just as slow in the snow in the winter. We spent a lot of time at the outdoor swimming baths at Schwartzenberg. Really, it was the best year of my life.

SUE LAWLEY: So now we come onto your seventh choice.

ME: Yes, Sue. I have chosen a song which reminds me most of that time. It wasn't just Germany, I had been interrailing the summer before, so I was already immersed in Europe. I have so many stories of chasing trains and girls and traveller's cheques from that trip, I could fill the programme with those alone. But the song I have chosen is one that was everywhere in the summer of 1999. It will always take me back.

MUSIC: Narcotic by Liquido

SUE LAWLEY: And so we come up to the present day. You graduated in 2001 and began working at your present employer in the October. Your life continued through the usual financial and personal crises that university graduates have until you find yourself living in Leicester and as content as you have been.

ME: Well, that's about it. The Summer of 2001 was one I remember fondly. My good friend, my best friend, Louise and I spent what we called the Summer of UB40. We sat in her house reading job ads, watching the TV and eating biscuits. And just before it stopped being fun to do nothing, we got jobs and our lives moved on again. She lives in London now, with my other best friend James, and they are blissfully happy together. I miss them, but we still travel between London and Leicester frequently. And email is a godsend.

SUE LAWLEY: So tell us about your final choice.

ME: Well, this is an odd one. James and I spent three years living together in various places in Leicester as we waited for our lives to begin. And to kill the time after work but before we could reeasonably go to the pub we explored the world of classical music - we were in a band together, and were looking for cool bits to steal. And one of our favourite pieces from that time was this. Classical headbanging.

MUSIC: Adagio from Schubert's "Death And The Maiden", played by the Amadeus Quartet, 1981 recording.

SUE LAWLEY: And so to the final choice of song. You can nly take one, so which is is to be?

ME: Well, I suppose if I am to take something that will remind me of the times I have had and the people I knew as I fester on my island, I suppose it could only be the Radiohead. That is the song which has the most emotional connection to me, that which is the most real in that sense.

SUE LAWLEY: And your book? We have allowed you the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. What else would you take?

ME: I have thought quite hard about this, and was stuck between Catch-22, which I love. It was the first book I read that made me realise that a lot of what we are taught about war and heroism is in fact a lie. My first copy was stolen by a Norwegian in a youth hostel in Paris, which is quite interesting in its way. But in the end I decided on "How To Navigate A Boat For Dummies".

SUE LAWLEY: And your luxury item?

ME: A boat.

SUE LAWLEY: Douglas Burgess, thank you for sharing your Desert Island Discs