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 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a songwriter and a poet.

Now 68, she was born in New York to wealthy Jewish parents,

but abandoned her bourgeois background

to pursue a life of Bohemian excess.

She mixed with the famous writers of the beat generation such as

Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac and Timothy Leary introduced her to LSD. The

unknown Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand appeared at the nightclub she ran with her husband and in the

the swinging 60s she ran with her husband and in the swinging 60s she came to London

and never went home again. Drugs, sex and human miseries make up the raw material

of her work which has been recorded by

among others Ella Fitzgerald Shirley Bassie and Bet Midler. Popular on both

sides of the Atlantic her style is highly sardonic. She's written, I may write a verse that is funny,

but mostly laments are my thing,

for somehow the song of the honey seems less

than the song of the sting.

She is Fran Landisman.

One thing, however, is true, Fran, you like rhymes.

I do like rhymes.

It always rhymes, does it?

It's funny because when I first came to England and I began Michael Horvitz invited me to read with the poets

...