Peter Blake

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 1997

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Only this week's castaway on Desert Island Discs could place the singer Madonna in the same picture as the Madonna and Child, or follow a painting of the National Gallery's 10 most beautiful faces with a collection of its nine prettiest bottoms. Today the pop artist Peter Blake explains to Sue Lawley how his work is inspired by his favourite things; like Marilyn Monroe and Max Miller for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album cover in the 1960s, or his more recent painting of Tarzan and his family at the Roxy Cinema in New York.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: When The World Was Young by Peggy Lee Book: Lempieres' Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk Luxury: A gym

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a painter. Today at 64 he's a pillar of this country's artistic life,
0:36.0	a member of the Royal Academy, a commander of the British Empire, and until recently associate artist at the National Gallery.
0:42.0	It's been quite a journey for the electrician... Recently Associate Artist at the National Gallery.
0:43.0	It's been quite a journey for the electrician son from Kent who pioneered the British
0:47.4	pop art movement and designed the psychedelic cover for the Beatles L.P. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band.
0:54.3	Currently working on, among other things, a shrine to Elvis Presley, he says that his
0:59.0	paintings are all about celebrating life. He is Peter Blake and the life that you celebrate
1:05.6	Peter is your own really isn't it it's all your own tastes all your heroes and
1:09.7	heroins Marilyn Monroe Henry, Tarzan.
1:13.0	Yes, most of the things I paint are certainly heroes of mine,
1:18.0	or I think what I'm interested in is the society at the edges of things I mean a brief
1:25.2	synopsis of pop art is that it started in at three points in the mid-50s in America
1:30.4	with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in London at the ICA with the
1:35.1	independent group with Eduardo Polozzi and Richard Hamilton as a main
1:39.0	core and they I think intellectualized about popular culture and that became their form of pop art and I at the same time was at the Royal College of Art and I think I suddenly thought well my life's quite interesting, I'll paint the things I do.
1:56.0	And that became my branch of pop-up.
1:58.0	Which were what children reading comics, people on Brighton Beach, Fairgrounds.
2:03.0	Yes, the things I was doing were going to professional wrestling matches with my mom and my aunt,
2:10.0	going to Fairgrounds, going to a modern jazz club in Darkford every week and I was only 15 and living a kind of
2:19.8	Northeast Kent sort of street life the equivalent of.
	...

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