Hello I'm Kresti 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 1987 and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway is a poet, a novelist and a broadcaster. Well that's the easy description.

His three volumes of autobiography tell a story as colourful, complex and vivid as any in fiction.

Here's the poet who was also a prize fighter, the fighting soldier who spent

time in a military prison as a deserter. Then there's the man sent to a mental institution

for insisting he wanted to be a writer who was later granted a civilist pension for his services to literature.

Our castaway is Vernon Scannell.

Vernon, in this extraordinary life of yours which you're about to talk about is there any room for music at all?

Oh yes, yes, music's always been very important to me. I'm not technically a musical man. I can just about read music but I couldn't read a complex score.

But simply responding to it intuitively and emotionally, I've always loved me, well for many for many many years anyway since my sort of very early teens

Music has been desperately important in what sense important? I mean what you fulfill in you? I'm not sure about that I suppose that's a

sort of psychologist's field doesn't it I just know that if I don't hear any

music for a time I do get a kind of almost physical thirst for it.

And what about the way you've chosen these records, these eight records, how have you arrived at that choice?

Not in a kind of autobiographical way because I can't quite remember, in some cases I can remember

when I first heard the pieces, but simply eight records which I would find indispensable but I could also pick another

eight in any moment. Right let's have the first choice of music what is it? Well I'd

like to hear Beethoven's fourth piano concerto or the opening movement or part of it. Oh, The Oh, Oh, As part of the opening movement of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto

concertoebao orchestra.

Weneskennel, let's go back to this childhood of yours.

You're in fact brought up in Lincolnshire, weren't you?

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