Public and narrative selves in Desert Island Discs

Abstract

The Desert Island Discs interview—ostensibly a private chat—is an entertainment format in which public figures are on public display and able to display themselves as types of public selves through discussion of ‘private’ musical tastes, experiences, values, and connections to others. This chapter examines castaways’ narratives in aggregate form, as patterned practices of display. Castaway narratives reveal six thematic ways of accounting for their musical choices: (1) situation of listening, (2) container for extra-musical matters, (3) link to a person or people, (4) resource for care of self, (5) castaway just loves the work, and (6) described in terms of music pedagogy. Comparing individual castaway narratives with this more general set of narrative patterns, and controlling for occupational group, and within that, gender, offers new, and otherwise undisclosed, information about individual castaways and their public presentation of self.