Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael. Michael Parkinson. ...are castaways, a columnist, broadcaster, musician, lyricist and novelist. That would only be half of the story. He's also written biographies... Musicals, and has had his own show on television. In between times, he took it upon himself to read every word of the 123 editions of wisdom. He is, of course, Benny Green.

Benny, I've known you many, many years but didn't realise that in fact you're a Yorkshireman. Yes, my father was what they call a strolling player in the 20s and he strolled to Leeds because there was a job there, played as saxophone. He met my mother, got married. Therefore, I have a birth qualification to play for Yorkshire and I... I'm still waiting for the call. - He could come, the state there. Your father was a musician, so that's obviously where you're interested. - Yes, he taught me to play. He was a saxophone player, and he taught me to play the saxophone and clarinet. Presented me with the instruments. I was 13 at the time. And what about ambition then? Was it always likely that you're going to be a musician? No, not really. Before that, when I was in single figures, I always wanted to be what I used to call a reporter. I'd always been seen in little photographs to this day when I was a kid with notebook and pencil. I was always... And I was going to be a writer. And it wasn't until I was 13 years old that it suddenly hit me that I might like to be a musician instead. But I was...

I was surprised by that myself when I became an avid of music because I'm not very musical, strangely enough. I found it very difficult. I wasn't an actual musician. I didn't have an ear. I didn't have much of a voice. Aptitude and it took me a long long time to reach any state of proficiency at all. Let's have a first choice of record. The first choice is connected with these pre-war years when I was a little boy. My father was a great lover of London and he took me around with him all over London. Not just... To the tourist places, but just wondering about the streets. And I have this picture in my mind of London fixed in the pre-war period, a very smoky, quite dark, and foggy, and-- ...hurry in city, looming up with things like the Euston Station arch and all those big buildings... And it seemed very romantic to me and Londoners seemed to me to be tremendously romantic and this record Stanley Holloway seems to me to symbolize the sort of typical romantic Londoner of my family.

Was charmed. But Jones looked very serious as he shouted to the crowd. Wonderful performance Tony Holloway. Let's go back to your early days. Did it have much of an influence one way or another on your life? Well, yeah, I would like to write a book about it. The schools I've been to one of these days because they were all so different. Up to 11 I went to a wonderful school about 200 yards away. The BBC which was bombed and is no more. I then went to grammar school when the war started, evacuated Cornwall with a...

Having groundless school. That was a nightmare. Why? The school and I had different ideas about what education was and the school had the bigger weapons so I left after 18 months. And came back to London. This was in the middle of the Blitz and I was 13 and there weren't really any schools until The government acknowledged the fact that London was full of kids who didn't want to be evacuated. And I went to a place called the North London Emergency Secondary School, which is really the William Ellis School in Parliament Hill Fields in London. And there I had a magnificent education. But by then, by the time I was at this school, I'd got the jazz bug and my... My father persuaded me to learn the saxophone. And without realizing what I was doing, I was able to improvise before I could read music. Today I understand that it's difficult to improvise and a lot of great musicians can't do it.

When I was 13 it seemed easy to me and it was really music that was difficult. I learned to improvise by listening to improvisers on record. Well, it was very hard to get jazz records because A, they weren't LPs, and B, you only bought three minutes at a time. The W&W and Parlophone series for instance were five shillings and four pence halfpenny per record. And once a month they issued four. That meant that you'd have to wait the equivalent of about four months to get one LP. I didn't really buy it. My father bought it for me because he was influencing my opinions. I didn't have any opinions. And I wanted to hear some good jazz. So he said to me, You ought to listen to a saxophone player called Frank Trumba. And I said, Oh, fine. And he said, I'll tell you what, I'll try and buy this record. And he bought this record and perversely, I didn't like the Frank Tramper saxophone playing that.

But it was the trumpet playing that took me. I must have had fairly good taste for 13 because the trumpet player was Leon Bix Beiderbecke. He was the first great white jazz player. He's a tragic figure and I shall never forget him for this reason. His family thought that being a jazz musician didn't count. Lots of families like that. Thought that he was a disgrace to the family. He went away to New York and became worshipped by all his contemporaries and he got into Paul Atman's Orchestra, which was a lousy Orchestra, but it was a symbol of success and every time he made one of these records like the one We're about to hear he sent a copy home To his parents, as if to say to them, Look, I'm not a wastrel. This is what I can do. And what's the point? When he was very ill and dying, he went home to Davenport, Iowa to die really, and he was rousting around the house and he found all the records he sent unopened. Not even interested and so that's a tragic thing and if there's a musician who's symbolic of the Jazz Age with that kind of...

Joy in the moment and sadness underneath its Leon Bismarck big spider bit and what's the record the record?

is I'm Coming Virginia. Benny, what was your first job as a professional musician?

In 1949 I went to Sherry's Bawram Brighton to play with a band called Al Field and his orchestra which I imagine to be a huge orchestra and turned out to be a quartet plus me. And I was very excited about going to play at Sherry's because I'd done an enormous amount of reading by this time and I'd read Brighton Rock by Graham Green. And in Brighton Rock Graham Green describes Sherry's Bawram as a pit of iniquity and I thought wonderful, can't wait to get there. And I've never been so bored in my life. Nobody came in, the band was kind of-- Just nondescript dance band. There was no sin I could see and I looked very hard for it, believe me. And it was... The first lesson I got that you mustn't believe every lurid novelist that you read. But what for? Long from that then, how do you get into the jazz situation? Well, in the winters one gigged around and got what work one could. Dance halls, municipal Saturday nights, firms dances, weddings, that kind of thing.

And then in the summer you've got a resident job somewhere and gradually you got to play if you were any good with better players and then you gradually drifted into specialist work which would be in a jazz club where you would be booked to be a guest and you'd be booked to be a guest in some Provincial or suburban club which was kind of small beer and instead of getting Two pounds which you probably got for a night's work if you were the special star guest, they gave you three pounds. So it was worth being better, you see. And I very, very slowly graduated into this line. And I don't quite understand it to this day. I don't want to think about it too much. I think luck plays a great deal in it. It was during... In this period when I worked in my first professional bands for people like Ralph Sharon and Kenny Baker and Roy Fox. Those sort of people and Luisto, that I first came to grips with the greatest orchestra of its kind that's ever been. Now up to this point, I think I've got to

Now I'd always thought that you either played in a dance band, all this awful stuff you played for dancers, or else you played jazz. When I first was prevailed upon by some other musicians to study Duke Ellington a little more closely... It came home to me that dance music could be beautiful jazz as well. And this is a great revelation. And indeed did play tunes like Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf and it sounded like marvellous jazz. The reason was that Ellington had this magical system, which nobody's ever worked out I don't think, of... ...scoring for the orchestra in such a way to make the sounds exquisite and beautiful and yet... Very simple to listen to. The next record I've chosen, I think, illustrates this. It's a song he wrote in 20 minutes during a tea break in a recording session one day, 1938.

It's just dance music, but it's also beautiful.

Here you are in this time going around playing your way through the music world but at the same time you have that writer's gift of observing and storing up stuff for the first How good an area was it for you the writer to mingle with these because musicians are a particular peculiar breed of people on me they are And it's probably the best university you could ever hope to find. I haven't written much at length about them for a long time now. I have a diffidence about it. After all these years, I think it's in a way almost a... Intrusion of privacy, which is ridiculous because some of them have even died since then. But I haven't really written fully about that life, and it was an extraordinary life, a riotous life, and full of characters that one would never have kind of believed. Existed. - Are there any that spring readily to mind as being larger than life? Yeah, one of the most lovable men I met in the music business, a wonderful musician and a lovable man, was a trumpet player called Jimmy Watson.

I can tell you about his eccentricities which extended across the world is that if you went up to him and you said to him, Jimmy, I would have done it. So the Kerry pipers, he would start crying immediately and insist that he was happy. There was another one who I better remain nameless called Art Baxter a singer Who was in Ronnie Scott's band and you used to wake up one morning and you'd say, Wait a minute, my airbrush is gone, my white shirt's disappeared. Forget about it. Three months later you go into a hotel room and find that on Baxter's sideboard you say... What are you doing with my hairbrush? And he would say, Look, it was here all the time for you if you wanted it. Of barefaced impudence and they were always, always penniless. Always. And when I first came into this group of hard specialists, I didn't realize their sense of humor. And the late Ken Ray, a Manchester trombone player, a lovable man, it was always broke, met me for the first time.

Together and the next day we were sitting in a cafe and he said to me, Lend me a quid. And I didn't realize that was a joke because nobody had a quid and I actually lent him a quid and he went white. And he was so shocked by this that he actually paid me back. And I was a baby in arms in this environment. This was in Ronnie Scott's band for three years and it was wonderful. It was a great education. We were a cooperative band and I used to... Help work out the wages because nobody else could divide by nine and it was a great time for three years. I'll never forget it, and I should write about it, and I probably will. You moved away from it, you backed off it, you sought a new career. Now, was that because the music was changing? Because we're now talking, well, you left music at the... 1960 wouldn't it? And that was about the time when rock and roll was starting, the jazz was fading a little bit from the start. I must say that I had a hand in the rock and roll thing because in 1958, in debt to the income tax, I took a job with the worst band I think.

Played in and it was the only band I ever got any money from and it was Lord Rockingham's 11. Yeah and when we went to the first rehearsal the producer said to us this is no good. The fourth... Taxophones you're not you're playing in June now. I want you to tune up out of tune, and I thought this is silly I know for 30 years. I've been trying to play in June now They're going to give us 30 pounds a week just to play out the cheer. And of course they got to the top of the hip parade, and they stayed at the top of the hip parade. Three weeks and we sold 650,000 copies and my fee for that was six pounds. Yes. Don't tell me that the music village is romantic. But it was about this time that I began... ...extend my musical interest. In Ronnie Scott's band there was a lot of scholastic approach to music... ...in spite of all that slapstick bidders that went on.

Actually, they'll hate me for saying this, they were all very learned gentlemen. And they used to talk about and listen to and study a lot of classical music. And this was something I didn't know nothing about. Particularly they went into in great detail and Debussy and Ravel and you can see where we're leading because they went for the composers who used What you could call modern harmonies. And they were amazed to hear somebody like Ravel had been using certain chords that modern jazz musicians of the '50s thought were very avant-garde. Have been using them in 1900. So this gave us a kind of comparative picture. Jazz we saw that what we thought was development in jazz was only a tiny corner and it had already occurred in other corners. And went to see Daffy St Chloe at Common Garden. This is how serious we all got. I bought a record in 1953 or four when I was with the band.

And it moved me so much that I never ever forgot its contents. Now you can tell from the sound of my voice that I ain't never been meant to talk proper, and that includes French. So if I say that this recording is Ravel's waltzing... Noble and sentimental and that the orchestra is a Paris Conservatoire orchestra and the conductor is Andre Crouton. I hope there's not too many Frenchmen listening.

Benny, how do you actually start writing yourself? How do you make the transition from being a jazz musician to being a writer? Well, just before I join Roddy Scott, I... Introduced to the editor of the New Musical Express which in those days was a paper much more committed to jazz than it is now. He talked to me and I said, Well, I'd like to try and write something. And they were so astonished that they could find a musician that could read and write, because they were very snobbish about that sort of thing. They said, Well, have a try. And I wrote a short story about a musician that sneezes every time he takes a deep breath. And the sneeze turns out to be the notation of a decent tune. It was very profound stuff and they paid me three guineas for it. And they said, Would you like to write occasional pieces? And I started like that. I see. Sketches of the life I was living, lampoons, jokes. And it wasn't for some years that I'd attempted any, what you might call serious criticism.

Jazz. But do you have a mentor at all? Well I have a mentor in a sense... Because this was all sort of parochial stuff until I joined the Observer as a jazz critic in 1958. And I did that as a result of an accidental meeting with Kenneth Tynan. To a jazz club one night, one went to jazz clubs every night. And this was a jazz club in either Frith Street or Greek Street. And I was with a girl, one of those girls that always embarrasses you by doing something stupid. We left the building and we slammed the door and she got her coat caught in the door. We couldn't get the door open, we couldn't get the coat out and I said I lived in Houston. I said, Look, I'll go home and get a pair of scissors and I'll come back and cut you free. This is about one o'clock in the morning. And I went home and I got the scissors and came back and she was gone and there was a piece of torn coat in the door. And

And I thought, well, that's the end of that. The place is dark and shattered and locked. And I just gonna leave. When somebody came down the stairs, and it was Kenneth Tyler. I don't know what he was doing there. To this day, I don't know. But we got talking. And he walked me home and then I walked him home back again and we walked and walked. And he was, turned out he was very interested in jazz. He was obsessed with jazz and he didn't understand it. Do when you stand up and say, What is the process? So we got to know each other like that and then a couple of years went by and he out of the blue phoned me and said, Let Would you like to be the jazz critic, the observer? You see, and I said, Yes. And he said, Well, if you submit some work, maybe, because... Kingsley Amis, who was the first jazz critic in the Sirius Papers, is going to Harvard to lecture. I didn't know it then, but I was only one of several runners. I didn't know that. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have entered, because I have a defeatist attitude to these things. I gave them some stuff and I became the jazz correspondently with the Observer and swiftly...

Reputation among readers who didn't know me as an old man. When they met me they said Gosh, we imagine a much older man, which meant I wrote in a boring way of course. I stayed there 19 years, which is a long time, and I think that finally kind of got me going. And by the end of the 19 years, I'd long since stopped playing. What about another choice of record? Stopped playing, I got more interested in the history of the music, which is a funny way around to do it, but it wasn't until I stopped playing and began writing that I started to think about all the... Stuff I'd played. Now, I noticed that on the head of the music, when we played, that The same few names kept recurring and it finally got home to me that there was a kind of aristocracy of composers in the field that I was talking about. Of course I knew about George Gershwin, but I don't think one can get to know them intimately until you've played all their music many times and it seemed to me that Gershwin's music you couldn't really make it tired. It was a...

Always fresh and it was always new and exciting. And the other thing was in my childhood, I hadn't liked Fred Astaire very much. It seemed to me that he had a funny head and I didn't really quite. I could follow the romances of Ginger very closely and I couldn't even do a waltz, so the tap dancing meant nothing to me. As I got older I changed, though it would be nice to have been a tap dancer. He isn't fairly good at enunciating the lyrics. Came round over the years to the realization that in many ways Fred symbolized a lot of my life for me because when I hear him to this day I think of Top Hat When I was about nine, I saw Top Hat and all the rest of the dams in distress, all of them, Or again music from my childhood so I'm not sure I can judge this music dispassionately wonderful and I think he's wonderful but I wouldn't know I think it's part of me and this medley you can hear Fred singing three songs

And it seems to me the three songs are as beautiful today as they were when he wrote them. The British Museum had lost its charm. How long, I wonder, would this thing last? But the age of miracles hadn't passed. For suddenly I saw you there. And through foggy London town the sun was shining. ♪ Everywhere ♪ Fred Astaire, didn't you, any? Yes, I did. I wrote a 13-part life for Fred, and, uh, odd enough, met him at the Him afterwards. He was a little bit disconcerted that anybody should make 13 hours of radio out of his life because he's very humble and modest and keeps saying, Well, I only did my job, only went to work. Charming man and I think that that type is probably dying out in the urbane, well-mannered, suave gentleman.

Guy you've chosen, Sinatra, plays a part in our history too, doesn't he? I mean, we're of the same generation. Yes, indeed. What does he remind you of? What's Sinatra about? He reminds me of the romance and the pains of disappointment of the late teens and the 20s. Romantic troubadour of our generation and he deals in the small talk of love and romance and unrequited passion and he does It better than anyone ever did or ever will. You hear the conversational exchanges that we've all... In a way it's being taught how to make love, to live, to converse, to... Enjoy the minor pleasures of life and it's a major contribution difficult to choosing one sonata record. What is not difficult impossible? I've chosen the one I have partly because it's it's sung so well. It's silly Secondly because it's written by somebody that I'll talk about in a few moments It's written the words are written by Johnny Mercer, but sinatas performance is incredible

*music* ♫ Take it one for my babe ♫ ♫ And one more for the road ♫ You're the only man who knows read every one of the hundred twenty three editions of wisdom and from it you compile four wonderful anthologies. How did that idea start? I'll tell you how it started. I was reviewing books for the spectator in the seventies, about 73 or 4, and I got given the that year's wisdom review. And I reviewed it as if it had been a novel. Trying to find out who the hero was and who the villains were.

And I said at the end of the review, all it remains now is for wisdom, I have the sense, to reissue all the wonderful past wisdoms that we are not able to get hold of. And thought I'm more of it. I got a letter from the high executive of Ford Motor Company saying... We will subsidise an anthology of the best of wisdom. I went to wisdom and they said, what a good idea. Which the Ford executive disappeared to Europe and his successor wasn't interested. But after that I pursued the idea. - So how long did it take you to read them? - About five years. - It is, yeah. And as I said before I started it, I had 20/20 vision. 20/20 pairs of glasses. It really did do from my eyesight because it's a lot of small print. It's a great self-indulgence. It's more than just a history of cricket, of course, isn't it? It's a social history of England. You can extract from it everything from... I mean, I found in it a man...

Who saved Charles Dickens from being hit on the head with a cricket ball, to the King of Tonga who had to make it illegal to play cricket in the islands six days a week because they weren't bringing in the harvest. ...and died of blood poisoning as a result of a nail in his cricket boot. One man decreed that he be buried in the coffin, wearing his umpire's coat with a cricket ball in one hand and six stones in the other. All kinds of extraordinary people and situations. Wonderful. Another choice of record, Benny? Well, in the last ten years, I've read a great deal of English literature for the second time. It's particularly Victorians. Became more in love with that century and was struck by the parallels between some of the stuff I read. Some of the music of Edward Elgar. I know one is not supposed to read into the music, all these parallels, but I can't help it.

When I hear Ravel, I think of the Impressionist painters. And when I hear Elgar, I hear that tremendous pageant of England that was really... Marching to its doom in 1914. I think of it as a kind of... Farewell wave to some vision of pastoral England that I never knew, which I did. And the sadness and the beauty and the sweetness of the violin concerto strikes me in that And the version I've chosen is by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Nigel Kennedy playing the violin.

Many people make much of the amount of work that you do and you really have an extraordinary output in radio and newspapers, magazines, televisions. And stage whatever you're there. I think with you that the job is a hobby and the hobby is a job isn't it? Devoted my entire life to avoid going to work which is absolutely true. I could never ever have contemplated the thought of going to work and I was willing to do anything at my hobbies And for instance, I never dreamed of writing a book about cricket. It seemed to be absurd. And it was a hobby of mine which spilled over into print, and it's a complete fluke. I've now published, I think it's five or six anthologies of cricket, and I'm writing another one now. But that's absurdly, it's a hobby. Jazz music was a great hobby of mine. Literature was a passionate love, which I never ever remotely considered a beer profession.

People say, Why do you work so hard? And I don't know what they're talking about. I get up in the morning, I can't get to the typewriter. It's absolutely true, I cannot get to it quick enough. I get up in the morning I have all these notes I scribbled by the bed the previous night to prepare what I'm going to do the next morning I can't wait to get to it yes I suppose I get right this block one day. They all say everybody says it comes. But at the moment I'd not experienced that. There's always so many things to do. Okay, let's have another choice of record now. Final choice. No Choice is dedicated to one of the most remarkable and I think lovable men that I ever met in In the early 1970s, one of the greatest of all lyric writers, Johnny Mercer, came to London. I didn't know this at the time, it was at the last throw of his career. He couldn't get work in America. To write the musical called The Good Companions and in the course of his journey to London I met him and we did a couple of broadcasts. Yeah, then I got very friendly with him. Mercer was one of the great romantics of modern life.

Verse and I once said to him how does it feel to be one of the most popular poets in Shakespeare and Well, he said, It's been easier for me, because Shakespeare didn't have Howard Arlen and all those others to write with me, which is a lot of fun. Humble way of doing it. My last choice of record is such a marvellous experience when you hear the whole album. I can't really describe it. It's Johnny Mercer in the early 70s standing up on the New York stage with a pianist, nobody else. Telling his life story through the songs. In this medley he closes his medley in 1972 with the last four that he wrote and of the four are... I commend the last two for the marvelous tenderness and...

Emotional awareness that he put into them. Anyway, this is An Evening with Johnny Mercer. ♪ Moon river ♪ ♪ Wider than above ♪ ♪ I'm crossing you in style ♪ They had a preview of this picture, Breakfast at Tiffany's in San Francisco. They had one of those conferences afterwards. Didn't go too well, because it was a big hit, but it didn't go too well at this preview. So the producer Marty Racon said, Well, I don't know what you guys gonna do, but I'll tell you one thing, that damn song can go. Some very wonderful Johnny Mercer. Benny, we're now on the desert island. Are you going to enjoy the experience, do you think? No. If you ask me what I do all the time, it would be sulk. I'm very bad when the... Are not entirely comfortable and favorable, are not very good in adversity, I say well where is the deep freeze, where is the television, where is the sofa, where is the electric light

There I suck, I don't try. It's a weakness of character. You're going to have a very, very difficult time then. You've got the records. You have to imagine that seven are washed away, you're left with one of the eight you've chosen. Which one would that be and why? I think it would be The Evening with Johnny Mercer because a) I knew him pretty well and He's demonstrating a craft which I would dearly love to have mastered. It's a craft not all that... Appreciated but I think a great craft despite that. It would be a reminder to me of how good a lyric can be. And what about the book? What's the book you'd take? Well, I'm going to cheat. There's a thick book called a quartet of comedies and it's got... ...four novels by H.G. Wells. It's got Kip's Love of Mr. Lewisham, The History of Mr. Polly and The Wheels of Chance. I would take that book as a... Reminded me of what the first initial impact of good literature was.

My mind. And what about the luxury object? Well I suppose I could get by with a paper and pencil for the writing, in that case it would be a saxophone with plenty of reeds. Benny Green, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

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