YouSaid · the spoken record

Molly Parkin

lines on the record: 47
first: 2011-05-08
most recent: 2011-05-08
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

“Well I think that in case I have Alzheimer's and forget who I am, if I had little Richard, then I'd know my name was either Golly or Molly.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you tilt this brooch, it's by Andrew Logan, one of my dearest friends, and it's got a sparkly glass brilliant red around it, and it's small heart, and if you tilt it it enlarges to fill the whole of that space. I am very heartfelt Can't I have one of my hats and a cloak to go with it?”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's difficult for me because I am a big reader, but the one that I'm awaiting it's almost finished now, but it's a book that my own daughter Sophie, who was introduced to the colony and all of that lot when she was fourteen, and she is writing at the history because she knows it all and she's the appointed writer of the colony. That will remind me of all those conversations and everything that I'd be missing.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is little Richard. This is called Good Golly Miss Molly. And he's got such life. I mean, all of these that I've chosen are full of life. They're a reflection of what I love and the sort of person that I love.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. You'll be fine with me. I've been on desert islands, and I am aloner, I have a very, very strong big, extended family life, and”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted really to write a letter, but there I was told, you know, in the fellowships, no, you don't write a letter, Molly. And I said, well, can't I just ring them up and send every sorry for the last thirty years? And they say no, that isn't good enough. And they said love is not a noun, it's a verb. It's slowly, slowly, catchy monkey with the forgiveness and for me to be forgiven.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd been trained as a bone of fide fine art. If I hadn't done that I would have been a sculptress, that is what I would have done. But when it came to”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number seven is Sarah Jane Morris, a wonderful red haired temptress its sultry singer, and she wrote this Never Forget How to Dance and If I've had bleak moments like the death of my mother was very, very bleak and friends, I never forgot how to dance, I would put on something like Michael Jackson and Billy Jean and dance.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“twenty four years It's like three things they depended on each other the addictions. That was I would take a cigarette and then I would take a drink the two went together and then I would look around as to which strangers to seduce.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sewers, yes, but I looked around and see if there was an opening and there wasn't. I slept for two days and two nights, and then I woke at something like three in the morning and my granny's voice came to me and said The pat is over no, Molly. You've just had your last drink, Bach Bach being little one. And so I never looked back. And that is where I found God right away.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was lying in the gutter. in the gold llama that I've been wearing for a week, but I had full machillage on. Well, it's a bit smudgy round the lips, of course. Do you know I lay there gleefully there is a gleeful side to drinking well my drinking, and I thought this is fun you can't go any lower now unless you get into the you know.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was in the gutter outside Smithfield, having pleasure, I don't know how many of the meat porters, but I was there because the pubs open at five o'clock in the morning.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very careful, said But he was very, very funny. And Georgie was very, very funny, and you know, John Mortimer was very, very funny, so we spent and I was very funny. We had funny tales to tell each other, and humour is quite an aphrodisiac, really, if you're drinking the right wine or not the right wine, and so anyway, it came out of control after that second marriage. I couldn't stop. I was on the Oblivion Express already.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it didn't seem too unconventional amongst the people than I was moving amongst, but perhaps they were unconventional people after all James Robson justice he taught me everything.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sixth is Michael Jackson. and Billy Jean and I had always wanted to be a so ho hostess. I wouldn't have minded, you know, rather a baldy house, really. Many people said you'd have been good at that mole. But this wasn't a border house. I was to fulfil the role of somebody who just died who was a DJ to Lula Transvestite wonderful person. And we did it for a whole year. It was based on my Welsh club, Dinah, my Welsh Valley. We're all ages came. And whenever I thought it's empty on this dance floor now, I would put on Michael Jackson and Billy Jean right from the beginning people jump on the dance floor.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pounced upon me the writing when I went to Nova, I couldn't write, but you know it was a magazine Nova and very, very visual, so they gave me the twelve colour pages because they could see by how I was dressed, how I approached colour. And then, of course, I got the writing bug and couldn't wait to leave to start writing novels.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It felt to me as if I was amongst the right people because it was a club for outsiders and it's sorely missed, I have to say that.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wanted to paint me and I don't like sitting. I'm not as sitting still kind of person. I was more interested in getting the champagne down me. And listening to him and we had a great repartee”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the colony, I mean I was made a member of the Chelsea Arts Club when I was twenty two, and that is where I met Francis Bacon, of course, and he was my boozing companion.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one is George Melly and Hogika Michael's wonderful song. This is called O Rockin Chair's Got Me George and I did enjoy a wonderful friendship, I call it a friendship, and he asked me to go when he was dying with cancer. He said to me, Oh, he said, Let's just enjoy old times, and he opened the bedclothes. Now he was asking me in for a cuddle. He wasn't asking me in for anything more seductive than that, just to hold him. So it was like a need for somebody that they knew very well. And so Georgie Melly and Rockin Chairs got me sort of hits the spot for me.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I wouldn't dream of allowing anybody to raise a finger to me, but then I fought like a cat and dog fight, I fought back, I lost teeth, broken noses, black eyes. You know, they were scratched from stern to stern. I laugh about it now, but that's not also not very healthy atmosphere for Turin to be brought up into.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was. I was physically I wrote it in a friend's place in Mexico, and I didn't publish it, and then I thought but you wrote that because you would have liked to have read something like this because it would have helped you and having published now welcome to Mollywood the number of emails from all over the world have come say your story, Molly, is my story, and if you can move beyond it, I can too.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That lasted from my earliest memories but at seven I think I was rescued from that because I developed mastoid and went to hospital and then outbreak of war came in 1939 and I spent the whole of that time down with my grandparents which saved me.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're on disc number four and that's Ian Shaw, Welsh boy, also who I've known for many years about twenty three years, and this is called Somewhere Towards Love. When he was fourteen, he's now in his late forties, he asked for his birthday present to be a copy of Molly Parkins Good Golly Miss Molly with me on the cover with a sequin top hat because he said when I grow up I'm going to marry Molly But we are very very close friends. He wrote this somewhere towards love and it was about rejection in love something I actually haven't experienced you see though I have rejected and broken hearts. Sorry about that perhaps I regret that but anyway when he plays it as he does in concerts all over the place and I'm in the audience he dedicates it to me. Said, you know, Molly is now one hundred and seventeen and my girlfriend.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“very, very aware Very, very aware it was very frightening as a child because she would be in the front room pounding Beethoven, pounding all sorts of very dramatic scores with the door locked and then that left me I don't know well my sister wasn't with us for the first years of my life my mother couldn't cope with her and I would be there pray to my father's attention so my mother she would have made an amazing concept pianis but the nervous system wasn't there”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She had a big psychic burden, the death of her eleven of her siblings, you know. She was the only one to live, so there was great expectation on her with her looks, her personality, and of course she was a wonderful pianist. I mean she could have been thought to be bipolar now, so my mother was in and out of psychiatric wards really all through our girlhood.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O my mother you know the blight of beauty really and also she was thought to be the beauty of the valley with strange navy blue eyes like mesmerizing really and a vivacity to go with it.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elephant in Castle to go back home to Bedner, and he just stopped me with this wonderful satchmo mouth and kissed me on full on the lips. I'd never been kissed like that before, and do you know he set all my blood boiling? I went in a different path, and within a fortnight I'd lost my virginity. I said to him I'm a virgin anyway, and And that's when he kissed me anyway, there's something you talk about regret, so he's remained with me.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we've got Louis Armstrong and a kiss to build a dream on, and why I've chosen this is when I came to London, left art school and started teaching at Elephanton Castle, and I met a Welsh jazz pianist at Dill Jones, wonderful, and he said to me, Moll, there's somebody appearing in London, a black musician. He wasn't well known at that point. Louis Armstrong, and you've got to see him, Moll. And so I did go, and at the end of it Dill introduced me to Louis Answer, and I was in fragments with joy the delirium of hearing this jazz for the first time and seeing him play in his love of life which came from him, he caught hold of me and he whispered in my ear your mind for tonight, honey, and I drew back and I said I can't do that I said I've got to teach in the morning.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember we would sit in front of the fire always in front of the fire that formed me as a painter really because coals form into buildings and then she said look there's the castle crashing to the ground and then we would look up at this photograph this awful sepia photograph of Kraigenor's castle it's still there now I've been there since I would sit just by her and the serenity of this one for woman translated itself to me safes very, very safe, you know?”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the turn of a card. The whole castle and the mountains which they don't. These things matter very little to me, but it was very big in my childhood, and there was a very, very strong work ethic.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underneath the age of five TB or terrible things pleurus is very damp our valley. And also that family was adomed my great grandfather lost the castle he was a boozer and a gambler, gambling something that I have stayed well away from.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I felt my granny, but she epitomised she herself had lost eleven turin. My mother was one of only one of twelve to survive. She was very pious, very wonderful woman.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a very spiritual person, and that happened when I gave up drink. My granny's voice came to me, she came to me, she said, enough is enough. God stepped in”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it was very, very religious my grandfather was senior deacon, my mother played the organ in the chapel Presbyterian. We went three times on Sunday and in the week as well. I mean we were on living on the side of a mountain anyway, and God seemed very close, you're just at the top. But I did drop all that and boasted of being an atheist when I was started drinking when I came to London. I thought that would be a cynical. and clever and sophisticated thing to do”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second disc is Leanne Carroll and it's called three sheets to the wind, but I've chosen this one because I know I had met Bet Midler and I didn't go into that, but we were kindred spirits immediately when I interviewed her. Leanne Carroll is a fellow aquarian, and three sheets of the wind is to me in the exaltation of drinking in the open air on top of a mountain with friends or on the seashore. And she just captures it and I love it.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's got critical overtones or his hedonism is rejoicing in life and debauchery is as if you've gone down the wrong passage, which I never think any passage is the wrong passage. Like shaking hands, and I was told by much old women than me they said Mull you might think that this heady lifestyle of yours is where it's at now the best as yet to come. Really I said how can it be better than this and they said right at the end when that urges subsided then the true joy of life will be revealed to you and now that is exactly where I am so love on a very profound level comes unexpectedly and brilliantly”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These days how's the situation with the lovers going? I've lost the urges. Have you? Yes. The hormones just dropped out of my underwear on top of my shoes, I don't know where they went, but it's gone now, and it's like being unleashed from a lunatic. I mean, Georgie Melly told me that when we didn't think of it either ourselves, it was French surrealist who coined the phrase. And do you know what? When I was in the throes of all the heady hedonism, you call it debauchery, I don't call it debauchery. I think it's giving gifts, you know what I mean, and a wonderful thing to do. Was that an unfair word to use, do you think?”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“colour and stimulation as you grow It seems to come into my life and I can't say no like all those lovers very difficult to say no when somebody's got an expectant look now you said that colour is a little like lovers you know difficult to turn down difficult to disappoint”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bright red, pillar box red and black striped, and it's got a plique on it in scarlet, looking at you, I'm wondering what your house looks like. What's the decoration like inside your house? Well, think of Frida Carlo, her studio in Mexico, the Mexican painter. So the walls are painted, what colour? The whole of the kitchen is scarlet, scarlet lacquer. So it's very shiny. Then inside it's a fluorescent pink, and you must remember there are all my paintings are on there and any bits of jewels or beads or whatever I will scoop up just to put on the wall. Now as an artist you obviously have a wonderful eye for colour. It's interesting you say that you deliberately slightly set things off so they're not quite matchy matchy too much because you want to, presumably you want to be sort of stimulated. And are you constantly, are you sort of magpie like always looking for it?”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was Bet Middler and Bing Crosby and accentuate the positive. I have to tell you, Molly Parkin, I have never felt duller in my dress. In you walked today, is that an Astrakan cape, Porter? What is that made of? In a sort of raspberry colours. Fabulous. This is sort of fake fur. Yeah, it was a cushion in Oxfam until I seized it and I took it to pieces and I've lined it with silk and I've made it into a collar. It looks tremendous. A huge, huge collar. Underneath that is a sort of flowing cape in crushed red velvet. Yeah, it's slight clashing whatever I put on. It's got it disturb what's there already and the hat, of course. Can you describe the hat to me? I don't think I'll do it. The hat is beautiful.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accentuate the positive, that seems to have been the theme of my life, and I was encouraged to do that by my grandparents, by all my spinstrantes who'd lost would be lovers, boyfriends during the First World War, and I believe however low you go, there's always a little shimmer of light somewhere to concentrate on.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're so close I've made amends and we've come through any lingering resentments which I'm sure would have been there. I must say that about regret We have so much to talk about we also have to fit in of course eight discs that you have carefully chosen so let's go to the first disc of today tell me what it is and why you've chosen it”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bohemian if you tried. You know, you'd be at home on the streets of Soho in New York or Berlin. I don't immediately place you in the Welsh valleys. Don't you? No, I really haven't been there on Saturday night then. That is a very fair point. I wanted to ask you about harbouring regrets. You know, when you came in today into the studio, you had this sort of enormous and immediate smile on your face. You're very abullant. Are you somebody who looks back at the times of your life when things were more difficult and regrets that maybe you missed out a bit or you didn't quite play it as you should have? Or do you think it's all experienced, is it? I don't, well, when I say don't harbour regrets, my own mother was an alcoholic, my father was too, and it kind of runs throughout our family in the background, but my grandmother was my role model, so I am as sublime grandmother. I would have liked perhaps to have been well, I was kind, but an alcoholic mother is not what I would wish on anybody, but those two girls of mine.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have lived a life that is vivid and full of colour and richness. Is that where the delight comes from? I think I'm a typical product of my Welsh valley. I've also got Romani blood, and the Celts are a nomadic race, so I have actually had fifty four homes in adult years, and I have been blessed and have made it my business to surround myself with larger than life characters. I've learned a lot from them, especially some of those lovers. I was a painter and a writer as well. I've just written Welcome to Mollywood. I'm pleased about that at this stage in my life. It's kind of set me free this latest memoir. It seems curious to me as I sit here looking at you say you're very much a product of the Welsh valleys. I mean, you couldn't, you really couldn't look any more fabulous and bohemian.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My castaway this week is Molly Parkin, the grand dam of Bohemian living. She made her name as a painter, designer, and fashion editor, writing for Nova, Harper's Bazaar and the Sunday Times, but she became notorious for her hedonistic personal life, hanging out till the wee small hours in Soho and Chelsea with musicians and artists, and revelling in years of heavy drinking and debauchery. Her lifestyle was ruinous physically and financially, and she ended up being declared bankrupt. Above all else at seventy nine years old she is a survivor, sober for more than two decades she continues to create, painting or sewing every day. I haven't had a drink or a cigarette or slept with a stranger, which I did on a daily basis for more than twenty one years now, she says, giving up the drink means I know what I am doing day and night. Is it important to you, Molly Park, to feel?”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello, Uncersty Young Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio four. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk slash radio four.”
2011-05-08 · Desert Island Discs · Molly Parkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source