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LAURIE ANDERSON SITS IN FOR IGGY POP - VINYL WEEKENDER (320kbs-m4a/260mb/1hr53mins)
BBC Radio 6 Music broadcast: 13th April 2025
Joshua Idehen - Mum Does The Washing [Harbour Lights]
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė & Vaiva Grainytė & Lina Lapelytė - Sun & Sea (Marina): Song Of Exhaustion, Workaholic's Song I
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė & Vaiva Grainytė & Lina Lapelytė - Sun & Sea (Marina): Chanson Of Too Much Sun
Terry Allen - Oh Mom
Jenny Hval - To Be A Rose [Smalltown Supersound]
Woody Guthrie - Going Down the Road (Feeling Bad) [Universal Music Group International]
Connie Converse - Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains) [BWSCD, INc. d/b/a SC Distribution]
Stereolab - Lo Boob Oscillator [Duophonic]
Dickie Landry - Fifteen Saxophones (Excerpt) [Unseen Worlds]
Ani DiFranco - Revolutionary Love [Righteous Babe]
Kesha - Children Of The Revolution [BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd]
Lollise - The Booty [Kalanga Soundsystem]
Baka Forest People Of Southeast Cameroon - Yelli 1 [Ryko/Rhino]
ANOHNI And The Johnsons - Everything Is New [Secretly Canadian]
Allen Ginsberg - Father Death Blues [Omnivore Recordings]
Lou Reed - Street Hassle [Arista]
Skeeter Davis - End Of The World [Old Gold]
Asaf Avidan - Different Pulses [Universal Music Division Label Panthéon]
Dar Disku - Baar Baar
Jackie Wilson - (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher [Brunswick]
Dur‐Dur Band - Halelo [Awesome Tapes From Africa]
Crass - Do They Owe Us A Living?
Thelonious Monk - Ruby, My Dear [Columbia/Legacy]
Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs - Foggy Mountain Breakdown [Legacy Recordings]
Arthur Russell - That's Us/Wild Combination [Audika]
Stevie Wonder - Higher Ground [Motown]
Pulp - Babies [Universal-Island Ltd.]
Bad Bunny - NUEVAYoL [Rimas Entertainment LLC.]
Sun Ra - Somebody Else's World
Lou Reed - The Power Of The Heart
DESERT ISLAND DISCS: LAURIE ANDERSON (320kbs-m4a/133mb/58mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 12th January 2025
Laurie Anderson is an artist and performer who came to fame in the UK with her 1981 hit O Superman. Her work spans music, film and multimedia projects which interrogate our relationship with technology and tell stories about the world we live in.
She was born in Chicago in 1947, the second-oldest of eight children, and started learning the violin when she was five. She studied Art History at Barnard College in New York and took a Masters in Sculpture at Columbia University.
In the 1970s she was part of the downtown New York art scene and her friends and contemporaries included Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark and the choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown. One of Laurie's first performance art pieces featured a symphony played by car horns.
In 1992 she met Lou Reed, the singer and songwriter who fronted the Velvet Underground. They were together for 21 years until his death in 2013. Laurie is the head of Lou's archive which is at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and open to anyone who wants to learn more about his musical adventures.
In 2024 Laurie was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammys and a Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
BOOK CHOICE: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
LUXURY ITEM: A dog collar
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Gracias a la vida - Violetta Parra
Presenter Lauren Laverne
Producer Paula McGinley
Chubby Checker - Pony Time [AudioSonic]
Mercedes Sosa - Gracias A La Vida [Universal Music Latino]
Tusen Tankar - Triakel [MNW Music AB]
Philip Glass Ensemble - Part 1 [Nonesuch]
Ken Nordine With The Fred Katz Group - Flibberty Jib [Master Classics]
Lou Reed - Doin' The Things That We Want To [RCA]
The Magnetic Fields - Washington, D.C [Merge]
Soul Coughing - Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago [Roundhill]
THE FIRST TIME WITH... SERIES 23 - 3. LAURIE ANDERSON (320kbs-m4a/132mb/58mins)
BBC Radio 6 Music broadcast: 14th March 2021
Laurie Anderson, the prolific American performance artist, composer, musician and writer chats in-depth to Matt Everitt about the pivotal musical moments that have shaped her life and career. As an electronic music pioneer Laurie has invented several devices from voice filters to the 'talking stick' which she has used in her many recordings and performance art shows.
Laurie began studying classical violin at the age of five and later performed with the Chicago Youth Symphony. She left her native Chicago and in 1972 obtained a masters degree in sculpture from Columbia University in New York City.
One of Laurie's early performance art pieces was 'Automotive' for which she orchestrated car horns and in 'Duets on Ice', she wore ice skates frozen in blocks of ice, playing a duet with herself on an altered violin, replacing the bow hair with pre-recorded audiotape and the strings with a tape head. The piece ended as soon as the ice melted. Laurie came to rely on a driving rock beat as a backdrop to many of her word-oriented pieces and she became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the eight-minute long single "O Superman", which reached number two in the UK singles chart. The piece was part of a larger multimedia stage work 'United States I-IV' and was included on the album 'Big Science' in 1982.
Laurie has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, curated the Meltdown Festival at London's Royal Festival Hall in 1997, and became NASA's first artist-in-residence in 2002. Laurie collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on 'Landfall', inspired by Hurricane Sandy, which won a Grammy Award in 2018.
Beginning in the early 90s, Laurie was in a relationship with musician Lou Reed; they were married from 2008 until his death in 2013.
Laurie Anderson - It Tango [Warner Bros.]
Chubby Checker - Pony Time [Real Gone Music]
Unknown - Unknown strings
Jean Knight - Mr Big Stuff [Stax]
Jim Davies - Is Anybody Home?
Brian Wilson & Laurie Anderson - They're Marching Along (Demo) [Local Reduction Institute]
Laurie Anderson - Time To Go [Nemo Productions]
Laurie Anderson - Is Anybody Home [Nemo Productions]
Laurie Anderson - It's Not The Bullet That Kills You (It's The Hole) [Holly Solomon Gallery]
Philip Glass - Music In Twelve Parts, Part 1 [Nonesuch/WBR]
Placido Domingo - Ah! Tout Est Bien Fini-O Souverain
Laurie Anderson - O Superman [Warner Music TV]
Brian Eno - Fickle Sun (III) I'm Set Free
Lou Reed - Men Of Good Fortune [Flexipop]
Arvo Pärt - Frantres For Eight Cellos