Iain Sinclair

Private Passions

Iain Sinclair describes himself as an urban prophet: in book after book, he has walked through London, recording the graffiti, the rubbish, the electric-green scum of a canal, the things you glimpse out of the corner of your eye and perhaps would rather not see.

He brings to these pilgrimages many rich layers of reading about the city, interpreting what he sees through the eyes of past writers, particularly William Blake. In fact, he seems always to be walking with ghosts. It’s very hard to categorise his work, which is a rich blend of history, geography, travelogue, poetry, photography, literary criticism – sometimes all within a single book. Among dozens of publications over fifty years, he is probably best known for his walk around the M25, which became a film and a book, “London Orbital”. But in 2019, just before Covid, he embarked on an even more daring journey, to Peru.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Iain Sinclair talks about the journeys, which have shaped his life, and about how music has inspired those wanderings. Music choices include Stravinsky’s setting of the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”; Mahler’s Eighth Symphony; a song by Britten originally intended for the song-cycle Les Illuminations; and the singing of the Bakaya People from the Central African Republic.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3