Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1978, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week, our cast away as the young English conductor, Simon Rattle.

Eight discs, Simon.

If you have the choice, would you rather take scores?

I think that's a part of my life that I would be trying to forget about by now.

I would be trying to search for perhaps a new side of my personality.

And in fact, most of the scores, which would be any use to me,

are stuck firmly in my head.

I hope. I wonder how long the forgetting process would take.

No, I'd be very happy to have just the sensuous pleasure

of being able to listen to these discs.

Do you get time to listen to records in normal life?

I do. I do. I tend to listen to them for relaxation.

And in fact, very few of these records are things that I would now listen to for relaxation.

I was rather surprised to find actually the choice of discs.

Where do we start? What is the first?

Well, the first thing is an excerpt from Ravel L'Enfoet-Eleis Sautelage,

which was the first large-scale opera I ever conducted.

It was when I just left the Royal Academy of Music,

and I went back there for three months on the staff,

which was the most strange ambivalent experience, I can assure you.

But it has actually very strong emotional memories of me

...