Budgie and Juhea Kim
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
NAUSEA by Jean-Paul Sartre GO WENT GONE by Jenny Erpenbeck LAURUS by Evgeny Vodolazkin
Budgie is best known as the drummer with Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures, as well as The Slits. His memoir The Absence: Memoirs of A Banshee is published in July 2025. Together with the Korean novelist Juhea Kim he chooses his favourite book to discuss with Harriett Gilbert. His choice is Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre because he it resonated with him as a young man finding his place in the world.
Juhea Kim is the author of two critically acclaimed novels - Beasts of A Little Land and City of Night Birds. Juhea's choice is set in 15th century Russia and is the story of Arseny, a healer who makes a pilgrimage through plague ridden Europe to Jerusalem. Laurus by Evgeny Vodolazkin is a densely packed novel that deals with fundamental questions about the purpose of life and death. It's also extremely humorous in parts.
Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck is Harriett's choice. Set in Berlin, it is the story of a newly retired German Professor and how he becomes involved with a group of African asylum seekers trapped within a bureaucratic system that bounces them back and forth between Italy and Germany with no resolution in sight.
It's produced by Maggie Ayre for BBC Audio in Bristol
Photo credit Billy & Hells
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:03.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:06.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:11.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift, |
| 0:17.5 | we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. |
| 0:22.8 | They didn't know that I was different. |
| 0:25.7 | You had kids together. |
| 0:27.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.5 | Then you met. |
| 0:28.3 | Then we met. |
| 0:29.2 | The Gift. |
| 0:30.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.1 | BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.9 | Music, radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:38.9 | What an astonishing thing a book is, wrote Carl Sagan. |
| 0:43.2 | And not only do we agree with him, we're going to recommend some we find especially astonishing. |
| 0:48.6 | With me today, our first, the legendary drummer Budji, most famous for playing with Susie and The Banshees and The Creatures. |
| 0:55.8 | Budi's book, The Absence Memoirs of a Banshee drummer, comes out next month. |
| 1:01.6 | With him is the author Duhay Kim, whose debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land, |
| 1:06.4 | became an international bestseller and is currently being adapted for television. |
| 1:11.0 | Deu Hay's second novel, City of Nightbirds, was published in January. |
... |
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