Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the singer Allison Moyet, hers is by any

estimation a story of success. Three Brit awards, tens of millions in record

sales and a career that has spanned 30 odd years.

It all kicked off in 1981, just three months after forming Yasu, she was on top of the pops performing

her first hit. Given that remarkably smooth start it might be

tempting to think her achievements have come easy. They haven't. She found growing up

tough had prolonged agrophobia and depression and significant weight problems also cast a shadow.

Well now in her early 50s she says I was always an odd girl. I had managed to alienate

a lot of people I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry

and created a lot of neurosis for myself. So, Allison, why, is it true that at one point you actually took a hammer

to your gold discs and

destroyed them along with all your diaries and your stage clothes.

Oh absolutely, but that was very recently and had nothing to do with sort of like,

you know, a fit of madness more to do with the fact that I became really tired of possessing things you know

for me you know gold discs have no more they're not significant they're just

something you put on the wall to tell everyone that it comes in how much money you

earn do you mean and I'm not the sort of

person that would want that around my house anyway and it does come to a point

where I think there's something not very healthy in seeing yourself as a

...