YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Abbott

lines on the record: 52
first: 2007-02-11
most recent: 2007-02-11
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

“It's really hard to work this one out, but I would have to go for Paul Weller, a tank on Madison because it's such a hot on fire and makes you rage productively. I love it. That's an anthem for me.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of saved the Bible for someone else, I leave it behind. I'd leave that. I think the Shakespeare I'd take because I'm a writer, whether I understand it or not, I love trying to understand it, but I don't quite. And I think the book I would take would be... complete works of Arthur Miller because I think he's one of the most fantastic men who teach us men how to write women and women to write men. It's just these are beautiful kind of androgynous passionate writer who teaches people how to basically shout beautifully. I love it.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wait for a burst of flak. Roberta Flack singing first time ever I saw your face and it's just one of those songs that actually it relates to Saskatchewan, it relates to my children, people I trust and people who respect me and yeah I love it for that.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah I love Saskat now more than ever. I might cry No, no, I love Saskett more every day. It really surprises me that you can have somebody this much more than when the last”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm ashamed of the way I've screamed at the children for things that they don't know they've done, and it's because I've seen elements of myself in them. My dad is Bone Idler, you know, and that's the politest thing I can say about him at the moment. And if I see them being lazy, I just scream so violently. I only go, oh my God, it's not their fault. I've been running. I've been the opposite of lazy for a reason. But they've converted so many things with me that I didn't like at all. And Saskia and I have put a lot of work into being good parents, and they know I'm flaky and unreliable, but they know I'm totally reliable, and so not flaky if they need me not to be.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was when I knew that I unconditionally loved them. And when that happens and you get a child and you realize that you have no choice in this, this is bipolar. Suicide is a constant presence in your life. And it's not like you actually feel suicidal, but you don't stop thinking about it. There isn't a day goes by. It crosses your mind every day. And I was plagued by it for a long time. And then you go, but now the contradiction was when my children would say five and three and you're walking down the street. Of course, you would die for them. You'd do anything to save their lives. And you look at a bridge and think, oh God, that's high enough. I could get on that. And it's just a thing that you can't get rid of. And when you're weak, that's when it gets you. Except the love for my family and children is so powerful and so much greater than anything that could make me damage them in that way. They were my immunity.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now a very expertly obsessive drummer, and this is a track from his band I'm just proud of it's two and a half times better than me. I love it.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is a track from my son's band Kid four or seven seven, they're fourteen years old, and the reason I love this track I love any track that they write is when I first had kids I was terrified that I would be expected to know what to be as a father, because my dad taught me nothing good to use. And so I was terrified of what kind of a job I'd make as a dad, and it was when Tom got to about Tom's fourteen now and Annie's twelve, and when they were both about seven and five I realised I'm not bad, but it's the point at which you reel that Margaret Mead say your kids can be two and a half times what you are for the better or worse, and the worse terrified me. And I love it that they are so different from me, but they contain bits of me that I would hate about myself, and they've converted them into kind of respectable molecules.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, I think I'd die. And it does sound psychiatric put like that, but it's a really powerful thing to learn to do properly and truthfully, and I think a lot of people just mess about with it.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh God, yeah, yeah, I can't not write. Yeah, I'll write every day and I can't remember things very well, so I have to write. Yeah, no, I write every day”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, lithium and antidepressants, not always, and I'm really lucky because I can burn it off so I don't get the downs.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. You go to the flame. I don't want to get scorched. I'm not a self-flagellator. I'm not self-inflicted wounding. That's a past thing. But I'm really careful to go close to it. Yeah, I love bolting off left or right. And I've taught myself how to do it safely and for money.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning how to talk on paper without being contradicted is one thing and I think everybody should learn how to do that for themselves. But at the extremity of my mood swings became really rapidly productive and became plays, films and things like that.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it forced me to write. I think that was an emotional immune system kicking in where I think that's how I became a writer.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six records town called Manis by Paul Weller The Jam, and it just remains one of my all-time favourites because this taught me how to shout. I remember hearing it and I'd become a writer by then writing for Jackie magazine as well and writing photo love stories and stuff like that when I heard Paul Weller he talk like an intelligent person who'd learnt to rail against the world and this song was so powerful, powerful an example of that it was a turning point in my life when I learnt how to become more powerful in terms of what I felt about myself. I felt well calibrated by then but I was still I still am really angry but now I know how to use it.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went for an interview. I was writing radio plays on the first radio play I ever wrote was for the Radio Times. I think they still have it, the drama Radio Times drama competition. And in order to enter your play, you had to be professionally sponsored. And of course, where I lived, that just wasn't a possibility. And I wrote to Alan Bennett and just somebody knew where he lived. And I just kind of took a punt on it and sent him a letter. There next day I get one back. He said, yes, of course, you've done it right away. Never send a script first, always a letter. And yeah, I'd be glad to read it. in what seemed like a two year cycle.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next track is T Rex Children of the Revolution, which is still, you know, it's just every time I hear it, it makes my heart sing because it's about standing on your own, knowing you can engage with a crowd. And I'd learned how to be sociable. I'd learned how not to look like a patient. And I've been taught how to do that. And I think T-Rex and Mark Boland, he was one of those things that was one of those bands that were just renegade.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I started writing behind my back. I didn't want to do that. I certainly didn't want to look like somebody was going to be a writer. But I knew it was creeping up on me. I didn't give my consent for that to happen. It just happened.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they had a car, they had a television, a television that stayed where it was put. It was like Penelope Keith for me, and they rescued me in a really casual way, and so it was a lot more peaceable than being hijacked by the state. I wanted to go, I knew I couldn't go back, and I stayed there till I was eighteen.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and I stayed a patient voluntary impatient to do group therapy and stuff like that. And so I went to live with foster parents after that who were a kind of working class foster parents, not. Except they were loaded. You know, it was two people in one house worked, and I'd never seen that in my life before.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was like the shameless pub, and it was a lock up. It was 28 days section, so you're imprisoned. And it was just extraordinary, except that I just knew I was going to get repaired. And the real criminal thing was having to stand back and look at my family from the outside, looking at me and them and us. And I think I got a picture of what we looked like. And that was a really terrifying thing. And I knew I was on my own. I knew I had to be independent. The word independent was a real word for me at that point.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's a product of having a history of psychiatry from the age of 15. And I started, I remember when I went into the, it was called Ward 9 in Burnley. It was the most shocking thing that had ever happened to me. But on day two, I mean literally day two, I remember sitting there going, oh my God, I'm in the right place. I know I'm in the right place, and I'll get fixed.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's John Lennon, and I think this connects with what I've just said, because I think imagine my anthem for realising there was no God, because I wanted to know that I had something to believe in. And when I realized you didn't have to believe in anything but yourself, I was fine. I think once you know you can fix things for yourself, I became fine. And imagine even though I couldn't stand the Beatles, I think John Lennon's work was tolerable. But this one was just special for that reason.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“attempted suicide and the first time I attempted it I jumped off a car park roof and I landed three floors down and cracked my leg so nobody ever knew and so for the next year I was just absolutely blind with rage and fury and fear and I was trying to hold on to all that stuff and I just attempted suicide again with knives and barbiturates and so I got sectioned taken into the bin in the lockup and it was it was just the rudest most alarming thing that ever happened to me”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did you do with that? Oh, we cached it through. There was a bloke called Checkbook Fred. He was the only person we knew with a bank account.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and he well, I thought he was giving me too much homework. That's really unfair because he knows I can't have to do homework at school. I only realised what he'd done when one of the stories I got, he delivered a cheque for ten pounds and he sent it off and sold it to Titbits magazine and he gave me a ten pound cheque and it was in my name and it was brilliant.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, of course, in that school, it took a while for the teachers to technology at all because I had five brothers go through the school before me and they'd all been... But there was a teacher at school, and he was a Canadian English teacher called Bill Bradley, and he made me I thought he was really punishing me because I was good at English. I was always writing stories. I always say I learnt to write as a means of talking without being contradicted. And, you know, because then a family with that much noise, you just go, I'm not even arguing with you.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They acknowledge the letter and took me to see a doctor to see if I could get a tonic, which I got a vitamin C whatever and dumped me back in the house. It was too big to get hold of. It was a massive family with a big track record, and I think we had too much baggage for any individual to choose to engage with. So I think for the next two years, I just progressed into a really foul, foul depression and attempted suicide. But that took from thirteen to fifteen. I held on for two more years.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd sky school play trump from school, and spend the whole day on my own, and not lonely, I mean, on my own because I just couldn't bear noise, I couldn't bear people because the house it was virtually sixteen hours a day was absolutely screaming with noise. I mean, there's one point at which I actually wrote to social services and asked to be taken into care, because it wasn't that I didn't want to be in the family. I knew that life was damaging me. I think that was the first time I realised I wasn't very well.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't tell anybody until I told my wife when I was 28, Saskia, my wife now. I told Saskia she was the first person I'd ever told.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think everybody had difficulties like that, say private ones. You just couldn't share them because if they became public, they became lethal to the whole family.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a good attender at that point. By the time I was about 13, I started to drift off, peeling away from school. I just couldn't deal with people. And I wasn't aware that I was ill. The year dad left was I got quite brutally raped, and that was another type of thing that you weren't allowed to deal with, because if the police became involved, I mean, there was just no way of even telling my sister what had happened, because then she would have created a fuss, she would have done it for me, and then the police would have been called in, and the whole thing would have totally fallen apart. And so you had to sit on so much stuff. I think everybody was popping left, right and centre, or needing to pop.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arth Connie and Sweet Soul Music, I think was the big anthem of Wigan Casino When You Went Out Because you parted all night, you danced all night. You basically went to Wigan and scrambled off to lift back to Burnley the following morning so you could spend your train fare or your bus fare.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dad took that. Any statutory benefits, he kept the book. No, she had no money, no money. I had three jobs. I worked in a barber's. I did a news round and I worked in the corner shop.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put into them. And we were like rats. We had to be invisible to the authorities. So you couldn't collect benefits. So we all kind of did small jobs or worked in the corner shop and you chipped it into a pile. But they were.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was eleven when Dad left. And there was no distress that he'd left with his girlfriend. It's a bit of a sigh of relief that there was more room in the house. I think that's how we noticed that suddenly somebody had a chair, you know, you've got a chair to watch television or read a book or whatever. No, actually we did neither of those things. I've just made that up. We didn't have a television. And you didn't read books. Not at home. But we couldn't claim benefits. We weren't allowed to claim benefits because she shouldn't have been looking after us. She was still under 18.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad, I gone to great lengths in broadsheet interviews, I sent him copies of all of these things to show that Frank wasn't based on my dad, but my dad was livid about shameless. And what if people thought that was me? What if people thought I did that kind of thing? And of course he didn't. My dad wasn't a big drinker. Certainly never, ever, ever engaged with drugs. And in fact, never moved. But his biggest complaint was when did I have long hair?”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frank is the father, and he's a drug addicted dipsomaniac who basically hits his children, takes their money and spends it on drugs. And everybody likes him. And I remember with Frank that there was no redemption for what he'd done, and he was just absolutely socially repulsive and didn't deserve the children he got. But when he's unconscious on the floor, you're in stained trousers, drunk on their money Debbie kisses him on the forehead. She loves him. She absolutely adores him, and I think that's the way those families are structured.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behavior that we don't want to. Absolutely there is, and it's a weird way of trying to demonstrate warmth. I knew what Frank looked like. Frank is the”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bobby Gentry owed to Billy Joey I can never hear lyrics I've got a real dyslexia with lyrics it wasn't about that she's just so sultry and so careful and I think she was such a patient singer and I just loved anybody who could sing like that with a husky voice as tidy as this one”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“dangerously tolerated visitors and she would send you a note reminding you that it was her birthday on the seventh of December and stuff like that. You remember that now and I tell my kids that they go no and this is the bit that I've been trying to accommodate since she died four years ago. I don't dwell on it. It's only when people ask me and my kids ask me a lot about this now and I was really shocked recently when my son said but did you have a lover? I went oh my god.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I found out, I've personally found out the address at which she was rumored to be living. And I went and knocked on the door and she answered it. And it was just absolutely shocking. and it was a really shocking revelation about her, I remember being angry at exactly the same time as I was totally relieved that she wasn't dead. And she was living with a bloke with a son exactly my age. I think we were a day apart on birthdays, and so I was swapped. You know, it's nine year old. You've been swapped. From that point on we were then kind of really.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't discussable really because it was such a dad had been left by mum was the way it was perceived. I'm being more generous to her now than I have been the whole of my life, but you weren't allowed to engage with concern for her, because we'd been left in the shit. So tacitly, you know, if she was to blame for leaving us like this.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My younger brother was three at the time. No, she wasn't there in the morning. And it was a devastating thing. And I think my younger brother still every day goes through a memory of that somehow. And it was such a shocking thing, I thought at first she must have died, because there was a note that was left, and she was going to come back on that day. The three youngest were going to be taken with her, but she never did. And she never came back and I thought, ah, that note was a lie. Somebody wrote that note. And I thought that for like six months. And I can't imagine what I looked like, but I remember having nightmares every single night about what might have happened to her.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It happened overnight, and it was just my dad's just bone idle. It was only when you realize later on that she was doing three jobs and doing everything in the house. And she disappeared overnight.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. And because it was such a big family in a tiny house, you've got everything really, you know, the kind of hardcore side of life came at the same time as everything else. It's kind of sex or violence or anything like that. It came at the same time as Sweet Things did and growth things did and happy memories sit side by side with that stuff.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For architecturally it was quite close. You know, the two parents left my 15-year-old sitting. Well, I think it's just approaching 16 when she was nine months pregnant. And she took over the family and she became the matriarch. And there the similarity ends. I'm not purging anything. What I'm doing is learning how to tell stories from the past that make television more appropriate, more real.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one was a really strong memory of the family being Hull, and my younger brother was a toddler. It was just this like two years old. And everything looked right about the family. It was a tidy baby in a family and we all cared for him. And it was a really strong image of a family in full flow. And even though there must have been absolutely no money, we were never aware of that. You never knew what you looked like from the outside. And I think it's the only memory I've got of the whole family being together in one place.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, beach boys are good vibrations. My memory of my first engagement with a radio. We never had appliances or equipment much in the house. And I remember this radiogram. It was just such a really convincing kind of first encounter with an entertainment world, I think.”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, but it's colourful and chaotic in the average working day you sit there with about 300 people in your head and then go downstairs and try to look calm and it's yeah pretty psychiatric really”
2007-02-11 · Desert Island Discs · Paul Abbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source