YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Rosen

lines on the record: 39
first: 2006-08-06
most recent: 2006-08-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that'll be good. I shall try and learn whole swathes of Shakespeare. I think I'll take the complete poems of Carl Sandberg, a writer of free verse and prose poems and paragraphs and stuff. So yes, that's what I'll take. I think I'll take Eddie's didgery do In the last months of his life Eddie would sit in the corner trying to play a didgery do, so I could sit there for hours going”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'll take Big Bill Brunsey. And that'll remind me of Bryce and me. Brian took up the guitar at one point, and every now and then I would grab harmonica which I had taken up, little blues harmonica, and I'd say Bryce, time for a blues up. And then my brother would play the guitar and I would play this appalling harmonica over it, and believe it or not, even try and sing like that. I'm squirming with embarrassment now. So this would be great. Remember those lovely times of sitting with my brother and playing black, brown and white.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last record introduced to me by my wife, and I knew of Taj Mahal, it's not his real name, blues artist, I'd even seen him perform in the sixties, and he did that thing that some of the African American blues artists did or blues musicians they met up with Africans like Dizzy Gillespie meeting up with Hugh Masacala, and this is Taj Mahal meeting up with Tumani Diabette and an album called Tunkaranke.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there are moments I kind of think it was the continuity of it. Still going on, my dad's still alive. My mum died in the seventies, but it's that kind of permanent reference point that you can come back to again and again. It was my dad's birthday the other week. I'm sitting there with my brother and of course halfway through he kind of goes The noise or something like that. My dad had this way of saying things about you I remember he always used to say you come into the country for a bit of peace and quiet and all you can hear is mad Michael shouting his bloody head off Well this phrase, that sentence has kind of carried on you know it's still being said now I suppose I miss that I miss the fact that somehow or other I don't have these kind of shared reference points that we can all sit round and say those things in quite that way everybody's kind of gone off in different directions”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not very good in the middle of the night. My wife said that the other night when he was shouting because he was teething. Shame say this, I turned over, I rolled away and put my hands over my ears. That's appalling, isn't it?”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes they're jokes and sometimes they're ironic looks and sometimes they are just as I see them as paragraphs, little scenes, fragments from a life. I think on the island I'll want to remember all the wonderful times I've had in and around schools, but in particular in London schools, and London is such a A funny, odd, quirky, diverse place, and you go into schools and kids are cheeky to you and you might be cheeky back at them and you see them banging out rhythms on the desk and coming back at you for what you've written and to sum all that up I'd like to hear smiley culture doing company translation.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can understand why they want to do it because they feel there must be something special that poetry is elevated language, that's what people want to say. I can understand that they want to say that, but I like the idea of a popular poetry that's built up out of the things you catch in the air, and I don't want to embellish them, I don't want to make them into rhyme, find a rhyme for over Dover, rover. You see,”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's a bit of a problem because when I first started, you see, I thought I was writing like some other people. I thought I was writing a bit like DH Lawrence, a bit like an American poet called Carl Sandberg, and I thought that's the way I was writing. There was a tradition of it, if I had looked a bit further, of course, if you think of the Psalms. We never think of these as free verse, do we? But if you think about it, once upon a time that was Hebrew poetry, and then the things that we know, the Lord's my shepherd, I shall not want. It isn't rhyme, there's no rhythm to it, and then that's free verse from sixteen eleven.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Good for your French boy. You can do French in the sixth form, that sort of thing. So I'm going to go off to the Ardesh, which is like cowboy country, you know. And they would play over and over again somebody called Leo Ferre, who I'd never heard of before. And here he is, singing about Paris, but you don't call it Paris, you call it Panam, which is, as we might call London, the smoke. So here it is. It's a tribute to Paris. Panama.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One whole side of my life is wrapped up in France it's always very difficult to describe this because you always sound a bit cartoncy, don't you sort of English person saying oh I love France I do so love red wine and the rest of it but when I was sixteen my dad said Why don't you go and stay with a colony de Vacons which is really a youth camp? I'm sixteen. The old man sends me off to the Ardesche.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barbara, whose husband died in a car smash, told me I'd have dreams. There'll be beautiful dreams, she said. None came for a year then they started coming. He visits. He stands in his grey check overshirt. He knows he's died. Once he said he was sorry that he didn't tell me it was septicemia. I said I was sorry that I didn't know it was septicemia. Sometimes he's at a distance in the way was when I would drop him off in Drury Lane in time for the matinee. Sometimes he's been close on the sofa, doing his crazy hugs or lifting me off the ground with all his massive indestructible might.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, as I say to children, I kind of talk through my pen, that's what I do. So I started talking through my pen about what had happened, about what I thought about Eddie, and also in a way sort of taking my own pulse. How did I feel about this today and yesterday and tomorrow and so on?”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sadly on occasions they don't You will see cases like this come where the doctors, either the GP or the hospital, they miss it too.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I did, and at that time I didn't know that meningitis can take another root, and it was the septicemia kind, which is the kind that poisons your blood.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very last thing that night I went up and I mocked his forehead and I mocked his hands because he did feel very hot. I thought it was funny the parasitamo doesn't seem to be working. I popped another couple of parasetamol into his mouth and gave him some water. I had to get up in the morning quite early and then I went in at about six and he was dead. He was lying in the bed I could feel immediately he was cold and stiff, and I rang nine ninety nine and the ambulance guys told me to pull him out of the bed onto the floor and I can remember pulling him out to the bed and he was completely stiff and they came over. Within five, ten minutes quickly put their fingers on his neck to feel the pulse, said, He's dead, like that, and that was it.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was working as a crewman in the theatre. Would be very tired during the day, and I came back from doing a performance in Bristol. I came home. And he was lying on the sofa saying he felt a bit fluey, so I gave him parasetamole and a drink, and so we spent the evening together, and I was watching Telly, and I think I went off and wrote an article and came back, and he said he was very groggy, and he would get up every now and then and have a drink and sit down again. In the end he took himself off to bed.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number five, this is John Doctor. He's a fiddler from Donegal. He must have been born in the eighteen nineties, and what I love about Irish fiddling when it comes from that tradition is that really this is a it's like a testimony to the unnoticed. There's a thing we do about what we call roots music or folk music or whatever is that we forget the just incredible skill that these guys have and so I think I'll think about that when I listen to Miss Ramsey on my Desert Island.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it seems like it, yes. In fact, I wrote about it, I read the poem about it at a meeting on one occasion at a poetry reading, and a guy came up to me afterwards and said, You didn't mention the Christmas trees, old chap. And I said no, no. And he said, by the way, it's not Stoneham, it's Stonham. He was my boss.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No idea until I think. Oh, twelve, thirteen years later I got a knock on the door from what they call an investigative journalist, and he knocked on the door and said Have you any idea why you were sacked? And I said, well, I think it was because I couldn't get up in the morning. And he said, no, you never thought it was because of your politics. And I said, no, no, I don't go in for that conspiratorial stuff. I don't buy that. And then the following Sunday out came the great story that the BBC had these little Christmas trees on people's files if they were suspect, and that there was an officer from MI five sitting in room one oh four. His name was Brigadier Ronnie Stoneham”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, not at all, not at all. No, I thought maybe I hadn't been very good at getting up in the morning when we were filming something called Sam on Boff's Island for schools TV. I thought maybe that's why or something like that, and then I was invited in to see HST, head of staff training, Owen Reed, and invited me in, he said we've been very, very glad to have you on board, Mike. But we think it would be better if we went freelance. I thought brilliant, you know, I did that thing in Yiddish it's called felling, swelling with pride. I felled, I thought, I am going to be a freelancer. And you know, it took me the time it takes to get from the Langham to Oxford Circus tube station, which is about two hundred yards, to realise that I had actually been fired. I think it took me that long to realize”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number four, well, I think I'll need to remember. I don't know, felt that the shackles were falling off, all that sort of drabness that I remember from Pinner and those front rooms without the lights on. Suddenly the lights did come on in our lives, and to remember that I think the best person to remember it with would be Aretha Franklin and my favourite track, Spanish Arm.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she had she had become a broadcaster. My mum in the late sixties, early seventies was working in schools radio with a wonderful producer called Joan Griffiths, and she would be when I come home from university, she would be sitting there with a pile of poems on a desk and going I can't find a way to get from scissors to toenails. I just need some sort of link. You know, if you have a poem about scissors and a poem about toenails, something like that. And so I would dash upstairs and write a poem about scissors cutting toenails, you see, and I'd come down and go, would that be any use to you, mum? And after some trying, she put one of these poems in one of her broadcasts, you see, shameless nepotism. There it was, and the producer, Joan Griffith, she said, Has this Michael of yours has he written any others? So really it did come via my mum, yes.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was, yes, I'd written a play called Backbone. Sort of about the marriage between my brother and who was to be his wife, but it was also based on a relationship that I was going through. I kind of mixed it all up.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And so, you know, we went in, I sat down and he went in a very kind of peremptory way of behaving. I said, I would like to change course. From what to word I'd say from medicine to English. Can you write a sentence? And I said yes, and he turned to my father and said, What do you think of this? And my dad said, Well, and he prepared this huge speech a la London University. And he said, well, I think mostly that it's quite a good convince your father, convince anyone. Haven't got your money, fifty pounds will let do bye. And it was out the whole thing took about thirty seconds.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did I did, that's right. So the problem was to you have to go and see somebody, don't you? But the boss of Wadham College at the time was an extraordinary blow called Sir Morris Bower. He had a very strange way of talking and it kind of went up and down and sort of Stephen Fry times three, you know.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I spent a year at Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and I thought I don't really want to be doing this. How can I get out? And my brother was at Oxford at Wadham College, and my brother had told me how people did switch courses around at Oxford, and so I applied and I got in.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and sounds and it had never occurred to me that you could make it into a whole acty piece. We'll have Big Will Brunsey singing black, brown and white, so there we are in the suburbs. My brother and I were listening to this wonderful blues guitarist and singer Big Bill Brunsey, and this song about discrimination before Martin Luther King, the song comes from nineteen fifty one we were listening to it in the fifties. Here it is, black, brown and white.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The man on board is the captain of the ship. The name of the man was old Ben Brown and he played the ukulele with his trousers down with his trousers down and he was dancing about doing this my face my jaw just dropped and I was looking I had no idea that you could do that with this stuff I'd written I don't know why I'd never made the match”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'd produced mind your own business And I arrived at this school, Princess Frederica, an inner city primary school in Kensal Rise in West London. And I'd been invited there by a wonderful deputy head, an Irish guy called Sean. He put me in front of it must have been three or four hundred kids, three or four hundred primary school kids, and said And now, boys and girls, this is really wonderful we've got the man who writes all those lovely poems Michael Rosen and I stood in front of his kit and I was just horrified and this was about the first time I'd sort of been anywhere near an audience that size and like that and so I held the book in front of my face and I went a ship in the darkness at the end of the trip, the man on board, the captain of the ship. The name of the man is old Ben Brownie, played Ukley with his trousers down and I saw the look of horror on his face. And so he just suddenly turned to the kids and he went It doesn't go like that, does he, boys and girls? And there was this huge roar No, Mr McAlay, no and he said How does it go? And the whole school went The ship in the docks at the end of the trip.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number two will have you and McCarl singing four times a day and it's from an album called Shattle and Cage. You and McCarl was quite a presence in our house. I think people forget about you and McColl. They remember that he wrote, first time I saw your face or maybe dirty old town, but he was a great discoverer. He was a great archaeologist and discovered This whole body of song and poetry that was made up in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that we don't really have a word for it, but you could call it industrial song. The songs and ballads that working people made up through the time of the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Fourpence a day.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But your brother would Oh yes, four years older than me, and he was like a teacher as well, my brother, you know. He thought, I don't know quite why he took on this job, but he thought that everything he learnt at school he had to teach me. So can you imagine, you know, I'm at primary school and he's teaching me algebra I don't understand it anyway.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you see, my parents be sitting nodding listening to this really seriously, but of course my brother said, why don't we get it up as an act? You see? And one of us would do the other would do. And we do this act at the kind of least appropriate moments, like breakfast or something like that. And of course my dad would go, the noise. There we are. And he would disapprove. They were both teachers. Yes, that's right. My dad's secondary, my mum primary.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recordings of Perid's reading their own poems, and my parents would say I think the boys would like this Yeah, right, you would hear the announcer say and now we have a very rare recording of the poet WB's William Butler Aids reading his poem Lik Islev in his free. Before we had played with this recording we would like to point out the rather extraordinary incantatory style of delivery of the poet WBS, and also we would apologise for the poor quality of the recording as it was recorded on wax cylinders. And then you hear poor. And his faraway voice going”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Title track from the 1963 original cast recording of, oh what a lovely war. Do you think poetry Michael was always destined to be your medium? Was it always going on in the house in Pinner? Yes, my mum in particular I can see her sort of sitting on the sofa dreamily thinking about WB Yates and yes we used to have records as well. We used to have records of Dylan Thomas doing who was under milk. Well it was under Milkwood and there was also Richard Burton reading Fern Hill and my brother is all part of the takeoffs of my dad and so on. He would do takeoffs of these things so you know there's a little bit he goes and it was all shining like that. Your mother was obviously quite a character. Oh, absolutely. We shared a bedroom, you see, so he would like, and I think he used it as he stage really. I mean, he was sort of on one side of the room acting out the molesworth books and my dad never let me see you doing that again.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Like that. So, my brother used to walk around going The noise every time I made a racket, you see, and it would sort of disarm my dad just as his hand was going up to his forehead to go the noise like that. Great stuff, more to come. Let's have your first record. What is it? It's oh what a lovely war and really it's to remember the wonderful times my parents used to take me well we used to slap right the way across London from the suburbs where we brought up in Pinna all the way down to Stratford East in East London so in my teenage years there I was going to see oh what a lovely war and it would be good to have a little bit of irony I thought on the island it wasn't a lovely war was it as we know only too well so oh what a lovely”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the way it was, you know. My brother was brilliant at imitating my dad. Well, my dad, if he wanted you to be quiet, okay, he didn't say shush or shut up or be quiet, he just used to go like this.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my head of things that have happened to me. Well, you tapped into a rich seam, which is your life, which is quite colourful, as we shall hear. Give us just a quick poem to give us the feel of your family before we go into your first record, and then we can plunder it after that. This comes from my first book, which is Mind Your Own Business, and it goes like this. Father says Never let me see you doing that again Father says Tell you once, tell you a thousand times come hell or high water his finger drills my shoulder never let me see you doing that again. My brother knows all his phrases off by heart, so we practise them in bed at night.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very convincing, and you certainly wouldn't fabricate that for effect, would you? No, there was a polytheen bag under his shirt, I think. I think I wanted there to connect with the fact that bodies are real. I liked the material thing that there was his body and we could stroke him and we could see that his hair went on growing after he died. And my brother actually took photographs of it and they're appalling but in some way or another reassuring because he did die and that's the real thing about his death, so that was I think why I wrote that. I understand that but it is intensely personal that's all and you share all of these things just about Eddie but all sorts of things about you. I mean there are whole swathes of strangers out there who know everything about you It's a strange thing you have to give you have to give an awful lot of yourself if you're your kind of poet, don't you? Yes, somewhere or another I've become a kind of confessional poet, but I can draw things out.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't tell Phibs because the poem won't work. If you tell a fib about what you're feeling, the next time you read it you'll be embarrassed by it. You'll feel awkward about it, and it won't do the brain work for you, because when you write about something honestly, when you look at it on the page, it can talk back at you and you can look at yourself almost as if you're another person. You've written, of course, very honestly about the death of Eddie, your eighteen year old. I mean, I winced to quote it, but it is what we're talking about Right when you got your son's body back after the postmortem, you write I put my hand on his chest and it rustled under his shirt they dressed him in a bin bag they must have cut him about to find out what happened.”
2006-08-06 · Desert Island Discs · Michael Rosen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source