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 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a magazine editor. He's wary of... Today because he was given a unique chance but he might never have made it. Born into a London slum he spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and Despite his natural talent and intelligence drifted in and out of crime. As an adult, he turned his hand to poetry, playwriting and printing. It wasn't until he was in his mid-forties that the big break came. An old friend asked him to become the editor of a magazine designed to be so...

On the streets by an army of workers who could pocket the profits to lift themselves out of poverty. Today it's one of this... Country's most successful publications. Mike Castaway has been awarded the title Editor's Editor and made an MBE. He is the editor-in-chief now of the big issue, John Bird. It was as it turned out absolutely the Job for you John the editorship did you have any idea when it was offered to you that this was a job that was going to change your life not really Gordon Roddick who who was the guy who came up with the idea who started the body shop Anita had been in New York and bought a copy of the street news I Thought it was a great idea and was going to try and run it over The UK. This was being sold by the homeless in Europe? It was sold by the homeless. What they were doing was they were buying the paper and then selling it. And getting themselves off the streets. So he thought it was a great idea. He approached me largely because I'd been in the print.

Loads of magazines. I'd also sold papers on the streets. I'd also been ex-homeless and I was also an ex-offender so that probably covered lot of the people who we were expecting to work with. But how did he know you? Well I first met Gordon it was it was a we were both Nasally challenged. In other words, we both got big conks. And I was on the run from the old bill in 1967, the end of '67 just before Christmas. And this large big nose Scotsman came into a pub in Edinburgh with a load of his rugby mates. And he made some comments about me and some people I was with so I went over to kind of challenge him and then we then started talking strangely about poetry and we found out that we we would both...

Large nose poets. But you can't have stayed friends all that time. No. He obviously then became a millionaire as we know through the body shop and so did you sort of bring him up to touch him up for some money? Yeah I did actually. What happened was I fell out of contact with him because I got very involved in and we were always arguing about revolution because he said politicians were, you know, the lowest form of life. Was politicising my life. And so we didn't fall out of our friendship, we just fell out I'm on the telly like 10 years ago and I thought, oh, that guy's become incredibly rich. So I thought I'd better beat a path to his tour. Then the idea of the street paper came up and he... You've got to do it. But we say street paper but very much not a pity paper which I think is what the New York one was wasn't it? The big problem with the street paper in New York was you you would buy it because you felt sorry for the person or you were deeply interested in

social problems of homelessness. So therefore it was in a strange sort of way a kind of elitist publication. It didn't appeal to people across the, you know, the interest barrier. If you were a social worker, great. If you were a homeless person, great. But if you were somebody going into an office or into a shop in Oxford Street, you wouldn't be interested in it. So what we've tried to do is have a, I hope I used the word correctly, a penetrable product. So that everybody wants to get in there and read it and it has all sorts of qualities that make it a very high use value. And in a nutshell what does it do for the people who sell it? First of all it gives... People the opportunity of earning a legitimate income, it then becomes a way of them gaining in self-esteem and moving on. It also... For some of them unfortunately is the only form of legal income that they're going to get and it keeps them out of trouble. Very cool. Well, this is Arthur Tracy.

Really loved Arthur Tracy, he had a big kind of booming kind of voice. And it's also, he was known as the street singer, so it's about the streets of Paddington and it always reminds me of Paddington. And it reminds me of that sense of celebration that used to get in the streets that unfortunately has disappeared and I'm one of the people with a lot of other people who want to reselevate the streets. ♪ A list of robins in her hair ♪

# Who's bosom snow has lay # Arthur Tracy, the street singer singing Trees, and that was recorded in 1935. So, John Bird, you were the ideal person to edit the big issue, not least because you care passionately about... Spirit of the street, a spirit that you've grown up with. How small were you when you got your first taste of it? Well I was I was bored In Paddington just off the Portobello Road, just after the Second World War. The Jerry's had a go at Paddington because of the rail links, so there was, it was a big debris. Lots of slums, lots of broken buildings, bomb sites and all that. As a kid you ran around oh yeah I actually was a bit more adventurous than my brothers and there were five four

there was four at the time it went on to be five I used to wander down from the slums into Kensington Gardens and all sorts of things like that And really just enjoyed wandering around. And what sort of people did you meet as you went? Well, some of them weren't particularly nice, but most... Them. I have to say there was a kind of concept and I don't want to sound as though there's I'm talking about some golden period but there was a sense especially in Paddington that we all kind of belong to each other. Everybody was your aunt and everybody was your cousin and little girls would come up and if they looked at you and thought you were a little bit dirty they'd spit on their hanky just like their mothers did. And wipe your face, which was terrible, but you got on with it. And there was this kind of real sense of that we were all in it together, you know. - And your father was a labourer and your mother... Was a barmaid and they together didn't pay the rent very often. They had this kind of allergy to the rentmen.

Or the rent lady, I remember it was a lady, which unfortunately came to a head in 1951. I'd just come back from school, I'd just started school and there was all the stuff on the stairs outside the house. So we moved in with my grandmother, who lived above a woodcutter in a little mews just around the corner, Burlington mews, it's all going... And we actually lived in a room and we shared... Bed with my mother and father and my two brothers. They were one end and we were the other end. And my youngest brother was in a... A draw on the floor. So my parents were what you might call economically challenged or economically inept but you know we we survived I think. Wasn't that the area where Christie lived, the murderer? I mean, about that time, surely. - Oh yeah. I was in that area about '52, '51 when Christie was caught and we used to have this terrible little jingle which is, Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get a bottle of whisky.

And when she was there, three bodies were there all belonging to Christie. And he was the bogeyman and my mother and father and everybody would say, if you don't watch out, we'll get Christie after you. So he became the. Kind of latter-day Jack the Ripper for us. Record number two. My next record is is Ravel's Bolero but played on a piano as opposed to orchestrated. I don't like Bolero. I think Bolero is an ugly when it's orchestrated because it's so syrupy and all that. If you strip all that away and you play it on the piano, it is incredibly refreshing.

- Louis Lorty and Alain Mercier playing part of Ravel's Bolero. Eventually, John, as a result of being evicted so many times or being technically homeless, you and your brothers were sent to an orphanage. You were still very small, and it was apparently a terrible experience. Why? - I just sunk. My brothers became... Part of the system. You know, they'd gotten well with the nuns and all that, and I just didn't. And I just became, I started running away, um, starting fires, doing everything. But you said they were violent with you? They were pretty violent. Um, they, you know, they did give you a good clump. They were all largely weird. Who had been picked out of the bogs of Ireland and they were my first experience of what you might call intense injected charity.

Kind of put me off it for life. So one way or another you turned to crime as you say you ran away what were you doing shoplifting petty theft? Yeah well I was there about three years I think and when I came out we the family re-formed in just near the world's end on the New Kings Road you know that kind of area between Fulham and Chelsea and I just I don't know what happened to me I obviously lost the plot and I I became an arsonist almost overnight and just kind of was nicking anything that moved. And in the end you were sent to a detention centre which I think was meant, as it was called many decades later, to be a short...

Dark shock but it didn't work for you. Yeah, it was a boot camp full of people largely who'd left the army and they were incredibly disturbed. You know, if you didn't run they'd kick you and if you did run they'd trip you over and then they'd spit on you and punch you and all sorts of things like that. These were the people, I was sent there by a wonderful socialist magistrate called Lady Mary. Baroness, lovely lady. Great reformer. Wonderful lady, wonderful record and I remember she said to me because I'd been stealing bikes and doing other things, it was a kind of cocktail of wrongdoing, she said we're going to send you for a short sharp shock because people like you got to learn to respect other people's property. And all that stuff and great, I mean, I'm a firm believer in making sure that you teach people how to respect other people's property. But it was a real horrible experience and it made me much madder. The first thing I did was go around and beat up a few of my mates.

Who'd been beating me up. And then I found myself pulling down a fence in the local park. She sent you somewhere else and this time it was the right place yeah yeah she started the process I ended up at the quarter of London sessions where I was sent to a approved school which was a And they believed, and I think they've done away with the system and I don't know why, that He believed in giving you a job, training you in certain skills. I did GC classes, never got the GCs. I learned all sorts of things. Gardening, I learned all sorts of things about woodwork and plumbing and all that sort of stuff, I began to settle down and I began to see a kind of road out of it. Record number three. Record number three is quite interesting because just before I left Approved School, which was a wonderful old school called Pippa House

It was called Park House School, but the building was Peabaro. And one day somebody came back because he didn't have a job. And this guy came back with a little disk, a little demo disk, and kept playing it and playing it because he was the friend or the... Of a new group of West London lads and he kept playing 'Come On' by the Stones and he was a mate and this was 1963. The Stones hadn't made it yet, this was their first record and in a way it was quite interesting because I hated it and then He made us listen to it so often that I really got to love it. And it is probably one of my favorite pop songs.

♪ Sounds like thunder ♪ And their version of come on. So life was a kind of process of self reinvention for you by the sound of it John wasn't it first the petty criminal who became the poet I think that happened yeah yeah

I'm 15, I had a girlfriend called Lily Lemon, who didn't like me being a kind of scruffy working class oik and suggested that I read and I started to read. I started nicking books of poems from the King's Road. I nicked the Beat Poets and I read the poetry because it was so easy. I thought I can do this kind of stuff and I can, you know, chat up the birds, so to speak. And that was what you, because you also had, seemed to have had this ambition to become middle class as well. Oh yeah. I was really cheesed off with, with, with working. Class life because I couldn't stand the idea of going to work. There was, I mean, I was pretty avant garde, you know. And also I didn't particularly like the kind of heavy level of aggression. I mean, though I have been accused of being aggressive on occasions, I just wanted to get out of that kind of stuff. And then I found that I got interested in reading and writing and I became a horrible little ex-working class snob.

Go down with Bird becoming the revolutionary because I mean then you were kind of collecting money on the streets for the workers. Yeah well it was difficult for me because I did... I became a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party later, when I was 21, and I became a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party. Member of an organization that preached or suggested that there was this kind of heroic Class and I didn't know any of these heroic workers all I knew was all the people who were on the fiddle with me in the kind of slums and you know poor housing of West London and the West End I didn't see this heroic working class. So it was rather difficult and also they didn't particularly like the fact that I had this atrocious sense of humour where everything was funny, you know, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I wanted to start a magazine called Melt, which is Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Melt's capitalism I was going to call it. And I thought it was great

You know, so we never published it. Record number four. Record number four is, um, it's evolutionary angle to it, though it may not sound so, Bobby Darin singing Mac the Knife. I became very interested in Brecht, very interested in the music of Kurt Weill. Then I had the pleasure of seeing the 1971 production of the Thropney Opera, which obviously Vanessa Redgrave was in, who I think then became a member of the party that I was. The Workers' Revolutionary Party. The Workers' Revolutionary Party. Not that I ever got anywhere near her. I mean the only thing I ever did for her was to deliver her papers. I was not likely to be on the political committee or the central committee. That was left of people like Vanessa Redgrave. ♪ Now look at that one ♪ lies a body just do

Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife. So that was the evolution of John Bird, sometime Heinz Bake Bean Kanner, sometime Gardner, sometime Minicab Driver, sometime, to be fair, writer, designer, printer of magazines. What were your motives when you took on the editorship of the big issue some seven years ago? Was it more business than social concern or vice versa? It was really important in those days, back in the early 90s, which seems like a lifetime ago in some ways, Many people having a go at homeless people. There were people, the police were being asked to be social workers and sweep them off the streets and all that and they weren't, that wouldn't have been the answer. So what we wanted to do was stress.

Importance of work that they by their own efforts would get off the streets. So therefore I was very, very insistent that homeless people bought the paper, which outraged homeless people, outraged the public, outraged the charities and other organisations who said you can't turn people into sellers and just for some some mercantilistic or capitalistic things. You know, and I said, I said, no, what we're going to do is we're going to give all the profits away, all what is left over will go into social change for homeless people. But we are going to say to people, you have to be responsible for your own social transformation. It is not enough to simply give you another bowl of soup. Or another blanket. What we said was that you are given ten papers to start with and you're inducted into the paper and then you go out and sell the paper and if you want any more you come back and you buy it.

I mean these days it's a pound isn't it? Yeah. So what would they have paid you for that paper? Well at the moment they are paying 40 pence for a paper which they sell for a pound so they're making 60%. But you have to be beware don't you? falling into the trap of saying we've invented a wonderful system that is having marvellous effects when that happens. Isn't always true. I mean, people will actually look at people who get sent to halfway houses, you know, and say, Isn't it marvellous that a halfway house, but they might never arrive? We say that our work is good, bad and indifferent, like most people's work in life. We're trying to improve the good, get rid of the bad and improve on the indifferent. But the thing is we will never be beyond criticism because we're working with people who are themselves good, bad and indifferent. Who are themselves riddled with all sorts of social problems.

All sorts of baggage and we will always have to struggle to win the battle to enable people to stand on their own two feet. But the point is isn't it that you know that that's possible because it's exactly what you've done for yourself? Yeah there is a kind of element in there yeah the big issue was wonderful because people suddenly queued up to Believe in me. I hadn't been believed in for a long time. I learned to develop the pattern knowing what I was doing and then once I'd learned I then developed the ability to know what I was doing and it is all about having the confidence and that's We have to give homeless people, even though they will louse up, even though they will make problems. We are not perfect, they're not perfect. Record number five. Record number five is back to a bit of posh music.

Busoni's variations on fugue in free form on Chopin's Prelude in C minor opus 22. I know that is very posh. I discovered Busoni when I was at college at the age of 37. Not an awful lot was going right for me and I became a mature student or a manure student as my daughter used to call me. And did the equivalent of O levels for 37 year olds which was to do a humanities degree at Ealing College which is now the University of Thames Valley, a wonderful place. And I went in and did this course and found that the most fascinating part of it was the music faculty. They were these people who were totally devoted to music and you could sit there and talk to them and go on. And I found that I...

I actually had quite a musical appetite. This music is so much the kind of music that I love listening to. Though it's posh, it has this kind of real meaning and is not simply, you know, just some kind of background music. You have to listen to this.

- Daniel Blumenthal playing part of Busoni's variations and fugue in free form on Chopin's Prelude in C minor, Opus 22. John Bird obviously who knows and loves his London and now you'd like to be its mayor. Why? What do you want to save it from? Well, I'd like to save it from what you might call a dysfunctional democracy which is about a cabal of well-intentioned burners of the midnight oil who will conspire to make sure that their opinions have got over, that their kind of democracy, which is a representational democracy, which is they're going to be the best people to stand up for the interests of Londoners and and the quality of London life. I don't believe in that anymore. I don't, er, I've lost my faith in the people who

Want to represent me, I don't want to represent anybody else, I want to represent myself and I want hundreds and thousands of millions of Londoners. That we cannot rely on other people to save our streets. To save our communities. Our communities are rotting and the only time that they ever gain any meaning is when people take control of the community. I believe very strongly is that we give so much power into the hands of politicians, into the hands of MPs. And they have their surgeries and their surgeries are often made up with people coming back again and again with the same problems. They are not an expression of what the community requires. But how can you be that? If you became mayor you would be that policy. I would, what I would be doing is I would be going down and spending a tremendous amount of time freeing up the community.

I would be going down and I would be spending as much as possible of effort in saying to the community, You have to do it yourself. The parallels with Dick Whittington are inescapable of course, you know, the boy born in poverty who stands for mayor. How do you rate your chances? Are you going to make it? I, I, well I'm... Have you got a cat? I have, I had a cat. Yes, I think he ran away. Have you got a spotted, spotted handkerchief? I'd say that I... I stand a very good chance of lousing it up for a lot of other people, or some people anyway. Record number six. Record number six is Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry in August in New Orleans 1961 recorded Come On. We heard the earlier version by The Stones. The Stones has this kind of wild kind of, you know, going down the pub, enjoying yourself kind of...

Particularly musical in a way. This is Chuck Berry laid back, missing the beat on occasions and really being underplayed so to speak. I love it because it's like two ends of a culture even but they're only separated by two years. Everything is wrong since I left for you baby I really want to see you and I don't mean maybe I'm doing everything trying to make you see That I belong to you honey and you belong to me So come on I wanna see you baby come on I don't mean maybe come on I'm trying to make you see That I belong to you and you belong to me Come on ♪ Come on baby, come on ♪ And his version have come on. A lot of people would vote for you for mayor, of course, if you could clear the streets of --

the homeless and beggars and drunks of course. Have you a policy that could achieve that? There is no policy, as long as you have a free society and people are free to fall through the... So to speak, as long as you have a situation where people become mentally unstable. of course when he was Prime Minister, that a lot of people who slept on the streets did so because they chose to. Is there any... Well, there is a truth in it because if you were to go into some of these Victorian... And even nice Edwardian hostels, or you were to live within the regime of people saying do this, do that. It's a terrible thing for people to do and people have sometimes... Chosen to sleep on the streets. I remember when I was sleeping on the streets in the early 60s I used to go into Salvation Army places and I hated it. I just hated that kind

A lot of them have improved, I have to say. So the truth is that they're there because they don't want to be in the hostel, but they're not there because they want to be homeless in the first place? No. Well, some people do choose to be homeless. I don't think there's many of them in the UK. I've just come back from the US and there's quite a number of people who've made a decision to drop out of society. But I think that represents a very, very small section even in the US. The important thing that we have to remember is that often the streets... Are a reflection of what has gone wrong in society, not just what's gone wrong in the life of the individual. But then, you know, Tony Blair in said to your magazine in an interview for the big issue didn't he when just before the last election that he believed in zero tolerance that these people should be moved on as they are The state you know the police just push and push and push them on. Yeah that's that's quite... Interesting for me because I banged on at the time about the fact that if you try zero

And they were trying it in the King's Cross area, then what you'd do is you'd move the problem elsewhere. And if you go down to Covent Garden-- you will see that the shopkeepers are very distressed and people in the streets are very distressed because Problem has just been moved on some of us. So what should the government be doing about it? You've got to create the social support for getting people off the streets and keeping them off the streets. Many of the people on the streets do have personal... Problems do have problems... But what does this mean, create the social support? What does that mean? Well that means unfortunately you've got to spend some money and spending money wisely is giving people the chance... They can move into a house, move into some form of accommodation, have some kind of support worker, and be given some form of employment where they're not going to be pushed out of the door simply because they can't... Keep up. You need those, unfortunately you need a lot of the kind of sheltered operations

Give to older people. You need the handouts that you say are not the right thing. They're not handouts. A handout takes you nowhere. No one has been ennobled by handout. Somebody the opportunity of stability, of actually being able to re-motivate themselves, is not a handout. Record number seven. Record number seven, erm, is salad and er, the, the number I've chosen is Kent, about ninety-one... 1992 I came across them through friends and I was just blown away by this kind of strange almost combination of white noise and all, just a kind of cacophony of sometimes unrelated sound. I mean, I don't want to make it sound too intellectual, but I just love this kind of...

Exuberance and it you know this it reminds me that once I was a youth Salad and kint for salad. Their album Singles Bar. So how will an urban man survive on this desert island, John? No concrete, no clubs, no camaraderie, no boots? I'd probably go mad.

I'd have a load of problems. Could you hack it though? I mean you've hacked so much else by the sound of it in your life. Self-sufficiency isn't a problem for you is it? Self-sufficiency isn't the problem. I think the problem is meeting people. I love meeting people. You know, I'm not the most humble of people but I've been made by people. Gordon Roddick remade me, Anita Roddick remade me. I would find it very difficult because I'd probably want to be remade at least once a year. And there wouldn't be anybody there to help me with the remake. All this rubbish about people being independent. We're all... there's a scheme that... Dependency. We're all dependent on each other and that is why I wouldn't be able to survive a desert island. I would probably have to take up smoking again. I'd have to have loads and loads of rolling tobacco and just smoke myself to death because I don't know if I could wait five or seven years to be ready.

Last record. Is Duke Ellington's Caravan? I would say that Duke Ellington is one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, and he would be remembered as that. Duke Ellington and his orchestra playing Caravan. If you could only take one of those eight records, John. Which one? I think I'd have to take the Duke Ellington because I'd probably need cheering up a bit and reminded of smoky rooms late at night or early in the morning. What about your book? What is the Bible and...

Shakespeare. Yeah, well, being a kind of obsessive Londoner, I would love Ben Weinreb's Encyclopedia of London. It's a fantastic book. I've been delving into it for many years. They modernize it every now and then. It is essential reading. In there there's all sorts of weird information like the the air-rated bread company which is now on the Sainsbury's site in Camden in town, the ABC tea rooms and things like that. It's got all those kind of nice little echoes. I'd probably add sections and enlarge sections, so it would be a working book. It would be a book that if I was there for 10 years, God forbid, it would probably be 50,000 And what about your luxury? Well my luxury would have to be a Mont Blanc pen. It's not simply the cachet of having a posh pen. It's just a beautiful writing implement. John Bird, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Thank you. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4. of four.

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