Hello I'm Krestey 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 1995 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a songwriter. He was born into a poor Jewish family in the

East End of London, left school at 15 and found himself drawn thanks to an

apprenticeship on the new Musical Express into the world of popular music. He's known failure. He was a

disastrously unsuccessful comedian at one time, but his unerring ability to write words

that stay with you has made him a wealthy man.

If you've seen or listen to the musical Sunset Boulevard aspects of love or Billy or heard the songs

Born Free and Diamonds are forever and many, many more, then you're already

familiar with his work. He's one of this country's most successful lyricists. He is

Don Black. It seems to me one of the most frustrating things Don about being a lyricist is that if you do the job well

That is to say you get the lyric right. It's simple. It's concise. It just feels right. Then everybody thinks well I could have written that it's easy

they do people find it very easy to criticize lyrics very few people can say I

hate that B flat in bar 14 because that was very technical. But is it like writing a pop song?

I mean I often think when you hear a pop song that's destined to go to number one you

sort of know it, or I used to, I don't know whether I do these days, but you know it when you hear it, it sounds right,

and it's the same with lyrics, isn't it?

There's a kind of obviousness about it.

Well, it depends what kind of lyrics you're talking about.

If you're talking about lyrics in the old days or

lyrics today.

It's not so much about songs these days, it's more about records.

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