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

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

The program was originally broadcast in 1980, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. Our cast away this week is a soldier, a scholar, and a writer. General Sir John Hackett.

Sir John, you have many interests. Is music one of them?

Oh, always, yes. From my quite early youth it has been.

Have you any musical skilled yourself to play an instrument?

Uh, yes, badly.

What?

Well, a piano little and a clavichord, but my hands are not as good as they they were and so I did less. Do you sing?

Not if any of my friends can help it.

You have eight records. What's the first one you've chosen? Well we ought to go back a

little here because it's a starting point in the high scene which I was brought up

in Adelaide in South Australia. We had a lot of music but mostly opera or piano and I

used to listen mostly to concerted music like the Quartet from Rigoleto or the Sextet from Lucia

de Lamamois, and sing away in a voice which was just breaking and so disqualified me from being a treble in the Jerome Graham School Choir

and I was such a bad base that I'd never got picked to play again.

But in this time I discovered myself a most remarkable thing. This was the time that I fell in love with

Kirubino. I found this record on a white single-sided 78 H.M. V.

And I was about 15 years old.

And this sound, this gorgeous voice of a source of a

a young woman playing a very pert page in white sat in bridges with a dear

little sword this captivated me more than I can say and from the first time that I ever heard

...