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

The program was originally broadcast in 1981 and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. This week our cast away as the novelist Morris West.

Morris is music a major interest of yours?

Yes it is.

I'm uneducated in music in the sense that I've had no formal training.

I wanted to play the violin when I was a student of the Christian brothers and the teacher was a horror.

He terrified us all and so I didn't learn the violin.

Do you use music as background when you're working? Every day I go

into the study and I begin the day with either Mozart or Haydn simply

because they're nice orderly people and as a creative

person I hope I'm often confused I've got a head full of characters that I can't

make any sense out of and so this this ninth-eighth-eighth century order where everything went by the rules, even

music is a help.

So that's playing when you sit down at your typewriter, or do you write long hand? I write long hand and I can't

write to vocal music and I have to write to orchestral music because there is a person

behind the voice.

That's evocative music for me.

I see.

That's the music of place, the music of circumstance,

and of course being a man who sings most beautifully in his bath I

like to have models to go by.

Well what are you going to start with?

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