This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Disks. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Mr. Darns, how well do you think you could adjust yourself to Londoners?

Well, I would miss certain people, a few people very much indeed.

But the vast majority of people I think I could get along quite happily without.

As a musician would you prefer to have scores rather than discs?

I would rather have scores. You would have discs.

What would you want music to do for you on your Desert Island? Are you looking back?

No, I don't think so. I would like music to remind me of certain cultures, certain countries for which I have a greater fiction.

And I'm certainly not in any nostalgic way with it looking back to the past. Quite the country I'd rather look forward to the future.

What part of the country do you come from?

I come from Birmingham. You were, I believe, a musical prodigy. You started performing at a very early age.

Well, my sister, who is four years older than I am, started to have piano lessons when she was seven.

She copied her at home. And I think when I was five, I also started to have lessons on the piano and on the fiddle.

I was also singing. I was a choir boy from very early age. My father was, both my parents were very religious.

And he was a chorister and I was a choir boy.

And you became a choir master while he was still at school?

My, I was a choir boy until my voice broke, which then I was thirteen. And I had been learning the organ as well during my boyhood.

And when I was thirteen, the next Sunday, in fact, I was an orchestra choir master at another church.

What did you do when you left school?

I left school when I was just fifteen. I got matriculation, but my parents were very poor and I had to leave to earn some money.

And I worked in various factories and offices, and I ended up in the city of Birmingham Gas Department, where I earned the princely sum of sixteen and ten pounds a week.

Had you already ambitions to make music your career?

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