Jem Rolls

Anyway, in a sense, that's extremely well-done language.

In fact, that's basically language done as well as, you know, translation you can never tell.

So I think that's language done pretty much as well as you're going to find it, Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellows.

It's a stupendous, stupendous book, really.

So yeah, just when words on the page seem to actually have a self-generating energy.

which you don't find very often, and a lot of writers say, no, I did this not remotely, or they're planning to do.

And again, I'm song lyrics, you know, just cheesy song lyrics, and Bob Dylan, you know, and just lots of, A, sort of messing around with rhyme, and just lines that say a lot quite quickly.

Chuck Berry, I remember reading, to hear what someone said about Chuck Berry, if Chuck Berry didn't have any music it would still be absolutely happening because there's so much going on in the words and the voice.

And John Cooper Clarke, I think he knows his Chuck Berry pretty dang well really.

Okay, so where are we?

Right, so this was in last year's show.

I'll be doing this across this summer.

um you know every year basically i have to come up with some big ideas i don't think anyone's ever done before i've done you know and uh and also if i cross the way i find out somebody has done it before i ignore that information because i don't need to think you know because once you start you can't be derailed with oh actually you're treading completely off this ground here yeah

I have to say that I effectively spent my entire 20s thinking about the great problem of what's wrong with the world.

And after five years of struggle, I thought I had the answer, but I wasn't sure about it, so I went back into myself and thought about it more at great length.

And in the end, I announced it to some friends that I'd come up with a great answer, and it's that rich people pay too much.

And I said it as if I'd just totally forgotten that I knew that all along, but everyone else knew that all along.

But you can go round the house, you can go very, very long round the house just to get back to somewhere completely obvious.

And just because you think you've come up with an obvious idea doesn't just mean that you've just, you know, yeah.

I was quite well grounded in my decision that this is the case but on the other hand I didn't know it all full well ten years before.