Hello, I'm Kresse Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is Barry Manilow. His stellar music career has taken him to the very pinnacle of showbiz achievement.

To be a hugely successful performer is one thing to sustain that success over 35 years.

Is something else entirely. His life began, he says, when aged 13, his mother

bought him a piano. It took her five years to pay for it, but there's been a pretty good

return on her investment.

Despite Rolling Stone magazine describing him as a giant among entertainers,

I am, he says, just a musician, a one of the band kind of a guy who got lucky. Really? That's exactly the way I feel and on my passport it doesn't say

entertainer or showman or even singer on my passport it says musician. I mean I think all

of us that came from Brooklyn, New York like I come from Barbara and Neil, Mel Brooks

we all seem to be shot out of a cannon and we go catapulting

over the Brooklyn Bridge into a life.

That's what it seems like it.

The same magazine I mentioned a rolling stonier describing you as this giant among entertainers.

They've also described you as the greatest showman of our generation and yet I hear I read that you never really intended to be a performer.

No I never did. I wanted to be a arranger or a conductor, a producer, maybe a songwriter if I was lucky a people that I used to accompany. They were all crazy and that was not me. That was not me.

Just explain then to people who don't know how come somebody who who trained

classically to read music, who understood music, who saw himself as a backroom boy, if you like.

The guy whose face would never be on the album cover.

How did it come to be on the album cover. How did it come to be on the album cover then?

Well, what happened was that I was, I really wanted my songs to get out there. I really believed

...