Adrian Chiles and Martyn Ware

Books and Authors

BBC

Society & Culture, Books

4.2 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week broadcaster and writer Adrian Chiles and musician and sound artist Marty Ware join Harriett Gilbert with their reading suggestions. Martyn nominates A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess which he says has influenced his career as a musician. He even named his band Heaven 17 from a reference in the book. If you can get past the brutality and violence it's a novel that throws up many moral questions about the nature of good and evil. Both he and Adrian Chiles are fascinated by the use of Russian language throughout the book. Adrian Chiles chooses Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s it's a slow burn love story of a couple who meet at a writers' conference and begin exchanging letters that lead to a deepening friendship and feelings before they make their way to the glamour of New York City. Nina Simone's Gum by musician Warren Ellis receives a resounding Hooray and thumbs up from both Adrian and Martyn as Harriett's choice. It's an eclectic book about the importance and emotion of objects centred around Ellis' custodianship of a piece of chewing gum discarded by the singer Nina Simone at one of her final British concerts. Ellis spotted her take out the gum and put it on a towel on the piano before beginning her concert at the Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre which was being curated by Ellis' friend and bandmate Nick Cave. After the singer left the stage Warren Ellis jumped onto the stage and took the towel and kept it safe for twenty years in an almost shrine like setting before releasing it into the world and realising the emotional power such an object holds.

Produced for BBC Audio Bristol by Maggie Ayre

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to quickly tell you about some others.
0:05.2	My name's Andy Martin and I'm the editor of a team of podcast producers at the BBC in Northern Ireland.
0:11.3	It's a job I really love because we get to tell the stories that really matter to people here,
0:16.3	but which also resonate and apply to listeners around the world.
0:19.6	And because the team is such a diverse
0:21.2	range of skills and strengths, we have trained journalists, people who love digging through
0:26.0	archives, we've got drama and even comedy experts. We really can do those stories justice. So if
0:31.8	you like this podcast, head to BBC Sounds where you'll find plenty more fascinating stories
0:37.1	from all around the UK. BBC Sounds where you'll find plenty more fascinating stories from all around the UK.
0:40.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:44.3	Hello, I'm Harriet Gilbert. Thank you for downloading a good read, the podcasts,
0:49.2	where two guests and I recommend books we love and describe why we love them.
0:53.5	We don't always see eye to eye,
0:55.0	but I hope you'll find some great reading suggestions here. Hello, with me today, the writer and
1:00.2	broadcaster Adrian Childs, currently presenter of the mid-morning show on BBC Radio 5 Live,
1:06.1	and best known on TV for his football coverage and The One Show. His most recent book is The Good Drinker, How I Learn to Love Drinking Less.
1:16.2	With Adrian, the musician Martin Ware, founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17,
1:21.4	and author of the memoir Electronically Yours.
1:24.5	Martin's also one half of illustrious company which creates spatialised sound compositions.
1:30.4	Martin, would you start us off, your choice of a good read, please? Yeah, well, HEM17, my band,
1:37.4	derived its name from this book, which is Anthony Burgess's O' Clockwork Orange. I suppose it started with the film, actually,
1:45.6	and then I went to read the book,
	...

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