Castaway Chris Salmon loses himself in the BBC's vast Desert Island Discs archive
There was a splash of publicity earlier this year when it was revealed that the BBC was to create a full Desert Island Discs archive on its website. A few months on, it's proved to be one of the most addictive and worthwhile music-related sites on the web, despite its clunky url of bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs. The fully searchable database of the choices of all 2,875 guests to have appeared since 1941 is a mine of pub quiz trivia. (The only guest to have picked a New Order song? Nigella Lawson.) Better still, there are 548 episodes (with music clips) available to download in full, for free ? of which 88 feature a musician as the castaway. Most of those ? including memorable appearances by Morrissey, John Cale, Neil Tennant, George Michael and Jarvis Cocker ? are also available directly from iTunes' podcast section. Spend half an hour browsing and downloading, and you need never be bored on public transport again.
With nine picks, Ian Dury is one of the most popular choices for Desert Island Discs castaways, but his son Baxter has yet to be chosen, despite having made three very decent solo albums. To help promote the latest one, the terrific Happy Soup, Dury's label recruited 10 students from London's Met Film School to make a music video for each track on the album, with Dury's favourite set to receive �1,000. The results, being posted throughout this week at thisisfakediy.co.uk, are well worth a look, with the best of those uploaded so far including the 50s detective pastiche for snappy opening track Isabel and the mix of animation and film for the downbeat Leak at the Disco. They, and even the less-inspired ones, certainly serve to highlight what a strong collection of songs Happy Soup is. Job done, then.
It's more than two years since Israeli musician Kutiman unleashed his astonishing ThruYou project (thru-you.com), in which he made songs by mashing together dozens of musical parts he found being played by (mainly amateur) musicians on YouTube. Now he's back with more ingenious editing. At the end of July, he uploaded a wonderful video of Led Zeppelin's Black Dog spliced together from more than 70 performances of the song found on YouTube (bit.ly/kutizep). Then, last week, he took a turn towards the political with This Is Real Democracy (bit.ly/kutireal), a frenetic, beat-driven track again sourced from YouTube musicians, but spliced with footage of politicians, demonstrations, riot police and burning cars. The video provides, as Kutiman puts it, "my reflection of what is going on around the world". It certainly offers a suitably intense snapshot of what 2011 has often looked like.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/28/desert-island-discs-baxter-dury
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