New Labour on Desert Island Discs
Labour politicians who appeared on the Radio 4 show between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s used their musical choices to try and tell stories about their politics and personal lives.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Content warning: Murder; Death and bereavement.
Gordon Brown did not get to be Prime Minister before Tony Blair, but he did get to go on Desert Island Discs first, appearing on the show in March 1996 when he was still Shadow Chancellor. Then Leader of the Opposition Blair would make his appearance on the show in November of the same year.
For the uninitiated: Desert Island Discs is a radio show, first broadcast by the BBC in 1942 on the Forces Radio, subsequently moving to the Home Service, and then in 1967 to Radio 4, on which channel the programme has been ever since. Roy Plomey, who claimed Desert Island Discs as his brainchild, hosted it from its launch until his death in 1985. It was then hosted by Michael Parkinson until 1988, followed by Sue Lawley until 2006, Kirsty Young until 2018, and since then, Lauren Laverne.1
The show’s premise is straightforward: a famous guest, that episode’s ‘castaway’, chooses eight audio recordings they would want to have to listen to if they were marooned on a desert island. Between the records being played, the host interviews the guest about their life and career. At the end, the castaway is allowed to select one book that they would also choose to have with them on the island (alongside the King James Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare), and one luxury; they also nominate which of their eight records they would choose if they could preserve but one from submersion.
After Labour had won their landslide victory in 1997 , and over their 13 years in power, several more high-profile figures from the party would also feature as guests on the programme. Transport minister (and Oscar-winning actor) Glenda Jackson and Home Secretary Jack Straw did so in 1998, Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam in 1999, Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook in 2002, Health Secretary Alan Johnson in 2007, and left-wing backbencher Diane Abbott – who in 1987 had become the first Black woman to be elected to Parliament – in 2008.
Two other former members of New Labour Cabinets would also be guests on Desert Island Discs after Labour were ousted from office in 2010. John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister and then recently elevated to the House of Lords, did so in 2012. Ed Miliband, Energy Secretary during Brown’s premiership and subsequently Labour leader in opposition, did so in 2013.
In this piece, I want to reflect upon the selection choices made by these Labour politicians, and the ways in and extent to which they used the programme to construct a musical canon that also said something about both their politics and their lives as lived in the British public eye.
Music and cultural capital
The music selected by Labour politicians tended to combine classical and traditional music with classic rock, and occasionally more contemporary records. Tony Blair’s choices, for example, comprised the fairly obscure present-day folk-rock act Ezio’s ‘Cancel Today’, pianist Pascal Roge’s rendition of Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, the Beatles’ ‘In My Life’, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s ‘Fourth of July’, Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, Robert Johnson’s, ‘Crossroad Blues’, Free’s ‘Wishing Well’, and his ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, classical guitarist John Williams performing Francisco Tárrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra’. In some cases, the lists were less eclectic and centred on particular forms of music, as with Alan Johnson’s selection, made up mainly of classic rock from the 1960s and 1970s, or John Prescott’s jazz-heavy playlist.
I will delve into the ideological and personal aspects of these choices later in the post, but I just want to focus here for a moment on the way these guests sought to explain their choices in terms of musical calibre and canon, to demonstrate and legitimise (or apologise for) their taste. Sometimes this was expressed in terms of a generational identity, attributing their 1960s musical selections to the formative significance of growing up in that decade, as when Gordon Brown chose ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles, Robin Cook ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ by Bob Dylan, Alan Johnson ‘Friday on My Mind’ by the Easybeats, and Diane Abbott ‘Things We Said Today’ by the Beatles. In other cases they had encountered the music through, and associated it with, other media: Blair, for example, first heard ‘Adagio for Strings’ on the 1986 Vietnam War film Platoon.
Occasionally, these politicians expressed a self-depreciating awareness that their choices might be interpreted by listeners as betraying a lack of taste. Ed Miliband, for example, acknowledged that his choices of ‘Take on Me’ by A-ha and ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams could be seen as ‘cheesy’. Inversely, Alan Johnson, when introducing his one classical music selection, the fourth movement from Gustav Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 5’, rejected the notion of a distinction between popular and classical music. Another way in which some politicians demonstrated a sense of wishing to be more cultured was by choosing instruments as the luxury items they would bring with them, in order to use the time to attain or improve their proficiency. Jack Straw, for example, chose a saxophone, saying it would be ‘quite an achievement’ for an ‘Essex boy’ like himself to learn to play one, while John Prescott selected a keyboard, stating his regret at not having learned an instrument when music brought such joy to him.
Music, identity, and ideology
As Straw’s remark above in particular demonstrates, musical choices sometimes revealed a sense of being of a working-class background, or at least relatively ordinary social status. Many Labour politicians who appeared on the show recounted experiences of childhood poverty – Glenda Jackson, for example, chose a bath as her luxury item, having grown up without one – as well as a sense of lacking the privileged backgrounds and accompanying refinement of some of their peers, and at times they directly framed individual choices in terms of class identity. John Prescott selected ‘A Town Called Malice’, because of its usage on the soundtrack to Billy Elliot, noting how it captured the tensions between working class masculinity and a desire to express yourself artistically. Mo Mowlam was, as she noted, of a lower middle-class background, but opted for John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ as one of her choices, stating that while the class composition of politics might have been changing, the song still resonated as articulating ‘the establishment’s’ capacity to make you feel small, regardless of whom you were.
Politicians related their choices to other different forms of identity as well. Gordon Brown expressed his sense of Scottishness on the programme by choosing Kenna Campbell singing the 23rd Psalm in Gaelic, which she performed at the 1994 funeral of another Scottish politician, Labour leader John Smith, and Scottish rock band Runrig’s version of the Scottish folk song ‘Loch Lomond’. He counterpoised this by also selecting ‘Jerusalem’, as sung by Liverpool Cathedral Choir, which he said encapsulated a sense of a ‘new Britain’. The choice of hymns, furthermore, reflected Brown’s own Christian upbringing, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the centrality of private religion to his life and worldview. Diane Abbott, meanwhile, in picking the Temptations’ ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ as one of her tracks, highlighted the importance of Motown in offering Black representation when she was a child, while also describing Buju Banton’s ‘Driver A’ as emblematic of her parents’ native Jamaica.
Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these choices and the way they were introduced, was a recognition of the inherently political nature of music, and an attempt to communicate something about their ideology and beliefs through them. Robin Cook laconically acknowledged as much when he followed his own ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, Richard Wagner’s ‘Siegfried Idyll’, with the more ‘politically correct’ choice of ‘Spartacus and Phrygia Parting’, from the Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus.
Diane Abbott was generally more overt in her weaving of her songs into a political narrative, perhaps most notably in her ‘Castaway’s Favourite’, Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s version of the South African national anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, linking to this to her own formative experiences in anti-apartheid activism, and then of travelling over to South Africa for the first post-Apartheid elections in 1994. Yet the movement against Apartheid was also mentioned in 2013 by Ed Miliband – whom she unsuccessfully stood against for the party leadership in 2010 – as a touchstone in his political development, having met the South African activist and journalist Ruth First as a child, six months before she was assassinated in Mozambique by the South African Police in 1982. He too therefore selected ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ for his playlist, except the version from the 1987 film Cry Freedom, about the Black South African political activist Steve Biko, at whose funeral it is sung. Gordon Brown had previously chosen the title track from the film as one of his selections back in 1996.
Music, personal life, and hinterland
However, there was a competing imperative with this politicisation of music, to segment music from politics. This was firstly a logic of the programme itself, intended to tell the narrative of a great public life, with all of its milestones, but also to reveal something of the human person and relationships behind that. This was granted a more specific intrigue when the interviewee was a past, present, or potential future government minister, but it still cohered to a broader template that went beyond the Political-with-a-capital-P. Musical choices on the show stood somewhat as formulaic interludes in that narrative, albeit with their own explanations attached, rather than being tightly interwoven within it.
Secondly, for participants in a political project like New Labour, an integral objective in any public appearance like this was to present themselves as relatable to the not necessarily especially political median voter, and therefore to avoid coming across as particularly ideologically zealous, to convey their choices in ways that made sense on a personal level (but also communicate a degree of gravitas appropriate for someone holding or hoping to hold high office). It meant conveying a sense that they had a ‘hinterland’, a set of interests that extended beyond politics, to use the phrase popularised by another former Labour minister, Denis Healey, in quoting his wife Edna’s disparagement of Margaret Thatcher for lacking one.2
Labour politicians on Desert Island Discs did pick songs they associated with particular moments in their professional lives, such as Diane Abbott – somewhat ironically, given her status as a vocal backbench critic of New Labour – choosing D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ as reminding her of the 1997 general election victory it had served as campaign song for. Yet they were equally likely to choose songs that exhibited their hinterland, such as horses enthusiast Robin Cook picking Aly Bain’s ‘Tame Her When Da Sna Come’, about the taming of Shetland Ponies, or baseball fan Ed Miliband choosing Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’, associated with his favourite team, the Boston Red Sox.
Even more frequently, they chose songs that reminded them of loved ones. Tony Blair, for example, chose ‘Clair de Lune’ because it was his late mother’s favourite song, and ‘In My Life’ because it was a song his father taught himself to play again after a stroke, while Ed Miliband played a live version by Edith Piaf of ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ that his parents had had on record, and Diane Abbott selected Harry Belafonte’s ‘Scarlet Ribbons’, which she recalled listening to with her parents on their radiogram as a child. Robin Cook selected several songs that he associated with his second wife, Gaynor Regan, and John Prescott with his wife, Pauline Tilston. Jack Straw chose the Verve’s ‘History’ as a song that his adolescent children were fond of, while Alan Johnson included Halima’s ‘Beneath the Sun’, which his music engineer son had been involved in making.
Yet such selections were also inherently political, precisely because of the extent to which those family ties connoted something about their politics and their status as politicians. Discussing their parents meant talking about their social background and nodding at least to their own early political influences, not least in the case of Ed Miliband, who as Leader of the Opposition defined himself extensively both in relation to and contrast with his father Ralph Miliband, a Belgian Jewish refugee turned renowned Marxist academic, and who had died when Ed was 24.
Moreover, both Cook’s and Prescott’s public reputations had been somewhat dented by their infidelities, the former having left his first wife, Margaret Whitmore, for Regan in 1998, while the latter in 2006 had admitted to an affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple. In both cases, dedicating songs to their wives worked to partly re-legitimise themselves and their personal lives. Similarly, Straw’s choice of a song favoured by his children was of a part with his discussion of the controversy arising from his son Will being caught selling cannabis as a teenager in a newspaper sting, making his tough stances on drugs and juvenile crime as Home Secretary seem hypocritical.
In this way, appearing on Desert Island Discs as a Labour politician and selecting songs involved assembling a particular type of progressive musical canon. It entailed building a soundtrack to the story of their lives as politicians, albeit one that might stand somewhat apart from that story. It meant giving cues about what types of music politicians of their stripe might value, what their social background was, what combination of ordinariness and sophistication they possessed. It meant subtly or openly demonstrating their commitment to causes such as social equality and antiracism. It provided a vehicle for talking about what sort of person they were, who the people that mattered in their lives were, and what that said about their political values as practiced, easily comprehensible, everyday behaviours.
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For an overview of the programme’s history, see Julie Brown, Nicholas Cook, and Stephen Cottrell, ‘Introduction: Desert Island Discs in Context’, in Julie Brown, Nicholas Cook, and Stephen Cottrell (eds), Defining the Discographic Self: Desert Island Discs in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–27.
Denis Healey, Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 507.
This was great. You may want to look at the similar playlists US presidential candidates provide.
What a fascinating survey. I occasionally listened to desert island discs over the years more for the self consciousness that each guest had about what their selections were meaning. 1997 seems so far away now, particularly looking at this before social media existed.