YouSaid · the spoken record

Tariq Ali

lines on the record: 34
first: 2008-03-16
most recent: 2008-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think I would probably choose a piece of devotional music from the Punjab, some of which you've heard today, because you can listen to it again and again it has that quality to it.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is one of my old time favourites, and Tom Lear was my old time favourite, and he gave up writing music when Henrik Kissinger got the Nobel Prize because he said satire was no longer possible. But this is a piece of music which was written in the 60s but applies even more strongly to the world in which we live today.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would read because if you take books with you, their companions till you drop dead. As long as I had books and writing paper and notebooks, I could last on my own quite a long time on a desert island or anywhere.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wish I could sort of be honest and say yes, but it's not true, because the New Left review today has more readers than it ever did in the sixties and seventies, so there is a layer of people out there, I don't say that the majority, but probably even more in some cases desperate for critical voices. So I think it's different from the sixties. It's not that world. But hope is constantly reborn in different circumstances, and I think it is being reborn.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try and leave it behind'cause I don't like nostalgia, and I think there is a banal reason for this obsession with the sixties that most of the people who participated or lived through it are now senior figures in publishing, politics, broadcasting. They can't get over it, and so they insist on inflicting these things on the generation today. And I really don't understand this obsession.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is Pakistani devotional singer now dead, belonging to a tradition of Sufi mysticism, and this is the strongest religious tradition in the Pakistani countryside, even today.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to supervise what you do and you don't do, and focus groups to say what they like, what you get is a blandness which is the feature I think of most of mainstream television today. I can hear the echoes of people shouting at their radios right now saying you're just a man out of time. You were making your shows when you deserved to be making them. The people who are making television now are speaking to the youngsters of today. They're speaking to an audience who is as enthused by the comedies or documentaries or music that you see. You're just out of step. No, I'm not attacking some of the comedy shows that are being done. But by and large, I think television in general has become too narrow, and this sort of culture of youth.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I didn't personally feel defeated, you know, my attitude to these things is there are defeats you have to live with them, and you have to fight back with your pen. And you decided, interestingly, that you were going to move from being part of making political history to chronicling it. Is it less satisfying to do that or more? I don't think so. It can be effected. I mean, what I did for most of the eighties and nineties was do a lot of films for Channel four, documentaries, drama, because Channel four had just been born in the eighties, so we had the most incredible freedom in those years of Thatcherism as far as Channel four was concerned, and a creative freedom always involves the right to fail. If you take that right away by employing constantly consultants and managements who are there to”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the miner strikes were very formative in the seventies, and when the mines were being closed the miners attempted one last bag and the whole country which who hadn't supported them in the seventies did support them in the eighties, but they failed and I think people didn't feel good about that, that too much was being destroyed by the wave of Thatcherism. Did you personally feel defeated?”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cornelius Cardew and the Croppy Boy So Taricali, you've been a member of a Marxist group, you'd spent many years campaigning, enthing people from the sidelines. In the 1970s you moved away from direct political involvement. Why did you do that? I think it was in the 1980s that I did that because I taught life in a small left wing Marxist group had become very introverted. People were fighting turning on each other. Crazy things were being done and I just thought one cannot be effective anymore. As Thatcherism swept Britain, did you think that anything significant had been left behind by the struggles of the sixties and early seventies?”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music was composed by Cornelius Cardew, who used to do a lot of things with us during the anti Vietnam War movement. He died tragically young, and this is his composition of the croppy boy, which is a very famous Irish tune, but which will surprise you because it's done in a very gentle mode, and it's not folksy and it's not ultra emotional, the emotion that is suppressed. So it's a tribute in a homage to Cornelius who would have developed as a very great composer had he lived.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is rarely, but it does happen. I don't say I'm not going to travel in that way. That'd be very stupid. Are you part of the establishment, really? I don't think so, and I never will be. And you know, I get really irritated when people who've been anti establishment buy into the honors system and accept all these stupid gongs which are handed out. I don't like that. I think it's completely foolish, and I hope I will die as I've lived, never part of any establishment. Tell me about your next piece of music, then.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would basically understand privileged. For that reason better than others and see it as something which is undesirable. You have children have you ever wondered, did you ever wonder whether you should send them to English public school or state school? No. And I didn't, all my children went to state schools and are quite happy as a result. And if you are invited to speak at places as you often are and people are thirsty to hear your views and somebody sends you a first class ticket for the train or a first class ticket for an aeroplane, what do you do? I accept it. I have no problems with that. I mean, especially now at this age, you know, one's in one sixties, and there are certain creature comforts which I do enjoy, and it would be hypocritical to deny it. So if someone sends me a first class train to get a plane ticket.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a difficult question because it's not easy to do that. It was much easier in the sixties and seventies because one did feel that both the print media and the broadcast media had much more space for dissenting views than they do now. So it is not easy to be as effective if you insist on remaining on the left as I do. But what about the very paradox of your existence? You almost have the bearing of somebody who is part of that ruling elite, and yet you're seeking to challenge it and to overthrow it, but it's the very thing that's given you the ability to express yourself the way you do and to be a leader of radical or would be radical men. Well, this is one of the contradictions of the system that it often produces people like myself, and not just me, but you know a whole wave of us all over the world who come from privilege.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is Verdes Don Carlos, one of my favourite operas of all time, I love the Schiller play, but its grand passion love, anger, inquisition, dissent, all the things that appeal to me brought into one opera, and with Verdi, of course, everything is marvellous. He sort of conveys passion, political passion, sexual passion, love like no one else in my opinion Carlos and Elizabeth Chuet from Act I of Verdis Don Carlos, sung by Luciano Pavarotti and Daniela Desi with the chorus and orchestra of La Scala, conducted by Ricardo Muti. I wonder then how important it is for you to reach out to the public with your radical views, to not simply be preaching to the converted, if you like. How can you make the beliefs you have, the passion you have relevant to people who don't agree with you?”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's a stupid story. I had a friend Ken Thompson, who was working with me on town magazine, which was owned by Michael Hesselte, and the fashion editor of that magazine was Ken Thompson, and he would get clothes into the office, and I think Aquascutum sent him in three Macs, and there was a lovely red mac, and Kent said to me, You better have this for the, you know, whatever, and I had it, and I wore it on one demonstration, and it became very famous, but I think the actual people who had made it were extremely embarrassed.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they didn't totally realise what was going on till afterwards I remember my mother saying when she read my memoir of that period she said God I hadn't known what had happened to you in Bolivia I'd have been worried sick but you know parents are always like that”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't actually, and I guess it's because when you're young, you really don't care, and I was thinking both in Vietnam and even in Bolivia that so if one's killed so what? So many other people are dying, what makes you that special? You know it's not bravado I wasn't frightened of death I'm much more scared now I wasn't frightened of death at that time and in Bolivia it was quite bad you know they could have knocked you off without anyone knowing and said it was an accident in Vietnam you could have been killed by the bombs but it didn't bother me that much”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent six weeks in Cambodian Vietnam in sixty six and early sixty seven at the height of the bombings, and this was my first direct experience of war. Anne, I am happy to say the last, and you know, travelling through that country you couldn't travel during the day because it was being bombed. We had to travel at night to see so much destruction, dead bodies, mangled children. It never left me it's a memory which haunts me still.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is jazz. I love jazz, and Alice is the middle name of my companion, and we've been together now for over twenty five years, so we play it occasionally, and it's very nice.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I remember in february sixty five picking up my copy of the Guardian and there on the front page Malcolm X assassinated, I remember weeping actually I was really upset that this had happened.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It strew Malcolm came to speak at Oxford in I think it was sixty four. And he was a very, very intelligent guy, and we had a long talk that day. And I remember when I was leaving him that night, you know, you say the way you say to people, I said, Malcolm, great, it'd be lovely to meet you, and I hope we meet again. And he suddenly said, I don't think we will. And I said What why? He said I think they're going to kill me. I said, Who's going to kill you? He said the establishments the nation of Islam, one of them, and I just sat down again because I said to myself a thought passed either this is a very great man or he's a hustler. How can people talk like this”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know about that. I think it was the election in which I fought in one was very bitterly contested between left and right, so it was very political, and my opponent was Douglas Hogg, and I remember half the shadow cabinet came to vote for him, which made it even more exciting, but it was quite a polarized election, and”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the food at college, I mean that's notoriously bad. It's like being in prison, but it's the cafes were pretty awful too, and I finally found an Indian lady in North Oxford who would cook every weekend for people like me who'd just come and were in a state of shock at how bad the food was, and then finally it forced me to learn how to cook, but I would never have learnt how to cook had I not come to England.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a terrible fog and mist, and I'd never been so cold in my life before. And I arrived at my college in Oxford and got my rooms and found there was no heating in the bedroom and the blankets were skimpy, but I got used to that, but the real sense of shock, I have to be honest with you, was at how bad the food was. I mean people living in England today would never believe this, but coming to Britain in the sixties the food was just a disgrace.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is just something I've always liked, I mean I love Dietrich Fischer Diskau singing, and Goethe's poem said to music, and Prometheus, of course, is the great rebel amongst the ancient gods because he gave the earthlings fire and had to be punished for the rest of his life. So anyone whose radical has to identify with Prometheus.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found out many years later when my parents came to see me at Oxford, and I was so angry because my mother said I knew if we told you you would never go, and this is absolutely true. I would not have left had I been told that they wanted me to leave.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they decided that because I had become extremely active in the student movement against the military dictatorship, and my mother's brother, one of them, was a senior figure in military intelligence, and he came home one day when I wasn't there, and said to my mother, get him out of the country or he'll spend the next five years in prison.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was nothing to do with religion despite what the country's been called till very recently religion has been a very soft business in Pakistan. No one took it too seriously. It was part of your culture if you wanted to pray you prayed if you wanted to fast you fast it wasn't so important for the everyday life of people it still isn't, but there's more religiosity today.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so, I remember it was october fifty eight, and my father coming home and saying, you know, there's been a military takeover, and we were in a state of shock why this happened, what was going to be the result of it, and my father's sister was married to a leading general who became the new minister for interior, and I remember she came to see us about a week later, and she said that this is a very anti communist coup, so all of you had better be careful.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they did occasionally see the contradictions in that, but they tried to ignore them and get over them. My father you know at one point had thought he would be a politician, but then came this group of people and said Pakistan is a new state which has been created, and it doesn't have any real newspapers, so why don't we set up a chain of newspapers? And they were genuinely secular, progressive in favor of socialism in a broad sense, and they had a big impact.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is something I didn't discover till later in life Howard Brenton and I were writing a play together called Moscow Gold for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the director was to be John Dexter, who died alas before he could do the play, but as we were discussing the play with John Dexter, he said I've got the music for the play. Do you know Shostakovitch? So I said, Yeah, and Howard said we knew the symphonies. He said no, not the symphonies, the string quartets. I'd never heard them. And this particular one is quite gentle compared to some of the others which can be very harsh, but they're all wonderful.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But since politics had stopped them getting married and then finally politics actually facilitated it, it was difficult to get away from it.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my father went, joined the army, and wedding photographs show him in a very snazzy lieutenant's uniform looking very cocky indeed. That's how they got married.”
2008-03-16 · Desert Island Discs · Tariq Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source