Readers Requests: My Desert Island Discs

Neil asks what my Desert Island Disc choices would be. For those unfamiliar DID is a very long running radio programme where guests are asked to imagine they have been marooned on a desert island and can rescue eight music tracks of their choice, one book and a luxury from their ship before it sinks.

This is damn hard you know! I'd find it much easier to choose eight books - but not much. I'll just bite the bullet and ignore all those great tunes I'm just going to have to miss out, although Natalie Portman rapping or the funky gibbon didn't make the short list..

As it Morrissey's birthday I think we should start with one of his later works which contains the immortal and brilliant line; "You have never been in love before you've seen the dawn rise behind the home for the blind". It contains that Bragg/Pogues romanticism of the urban environment mixed with the miserablism of the Cure. Splendid.



There was always something about Germ Free Adolescent that captured my attention. Constrained and restrained I think the way the sentiment of the music works with the lyrics is slightly hypnotic.



When I first heard Bill Haley singing Rocket 88 on John Peel sometime in the eighties it absolutely blew me away. It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be 'Rock and Roll' which would have instantly consigned it to the dustbin. Once again my stupidity gave me the edge and allowed me to enjoy this glorious song about his lovely car.



Well, we can't have all this jollity so let's switch to Pulp's 97 Lovers, from before they sold out by selling actual records and being able to pay the rent and that. This song is the eighties for me.



Joan Baez was someone I only came to in later life and it was her Diamonds and Rust that first sent shivers up my spine. It still does.



And if we're speaking of spines shivering then we have to include Lennon's working class hero. There are few greater songs that have been made in the last one hundred years than this.



Where would any selection of music be without Kate Bush. I've selected Breathing out of a number of possible tracks simply because it seems to epitomise the ferociously tangental approach that Bush always brought to music.



Lastly I'll go with Tracy Chapman's I'm Ready partly because it's the tune I'd like played at my funeral and partly because it's such an entrancing song.



Feel free to play along at home.

Oh, but before I forget I get to take a book and a luxury too. Well, the luxury has got to be a freezer full of bacon. I could be out there a long time you know!

The book? I think I'll go for the Three Musketeers simply because it's so full of life and fire. It would be a good way to remind myself of the pleasure that other people can bring as I sit in the delicious peace of the lapping waves and bright stars of my little island.