Desert Island DiscsYoung should be concentrating her efforts on exposing guests who implausibly pick classical music for their desert-island listening. While senior politicians and pop are hard to swallow, it's just as difficult to believe claims by people in their 30s or 40s that they would be listening to Shostakovich, et al, while on the island.
If you'd asked me at the age of, say, twenty, what discs I would take to a desert island, I wouldn't have said Shostakovich because I hadn't listened to him, but I would have said: Hindemith, Stravinsky, Debussy, Moussorgsky, Mahler ... and maybe some Gilbert & Sullivan.
I didn't buy anything of what could be called pop or rock until I was ... oh, let's check Wikipedia ... until 1983, when I bought Synchronicity, by The Police. I took it home and closed all the windows.
In the 90s, a German friend of ours played us some heavy-metal. He was embarrassed that we listened to it so attentively. I wrote (drunkenly) lyrics for his band "Hellwar" just so they would have an original song that wasn't in broken English. I don't know if it was included on the album they recorded and which was voted as one of Germany's worst heavy-metal albums of some year or other in some obscure fanzine.
One year (1993 if Wikipedia is to be believed) I bought (on the recommendation of the New York Times) P.J. Harvey's Dry. I used to astound friends and co-workers with it. I could probably have run for office in the U.K.
Last year, or the year before, Isabella developed a passion for the music of Bob Dylan, and so I am reasonably familiar with his voluminous output, and know many cheerful facts about Bob. I might even be convinced to go to his upcoming concert in Toronto which would be a first for me (i.e. any kind of what could be considered a "rock concert.")
But if I were to go to a desert island today (and you might suppose I am already living on one), probably most of the disks I'd take would be considered "classical".
Of course, I have just this year turned fifty.
