Rewind Radio: Vital Mental Medicine: Shackleton's Banjo; Yoko in Her Own Words; John Lennon: the New York Years

John Lennon, murdered 30 years ago this month, would have appreciated Ernest Shackleton's description of music as 'vital mental medicine'. Both men were great English explorers…

John Lennon with his son Sean in New York, 1977. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

When Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed in a thousand miles of Antarctic pack ice in November 1915, he allowed each of his crew to take 2lb of possessions from it, including their boots. Only one exception was made to this rule: he let his meteorologist Leonard Hussey also salvage his banjo from the sinking ship. Even Hussey was surprised by that decision, but "the boss" was adamant: "It will be vital mental medicine," he said. And so it proved.
Vital Mental Medicine, Tim van Eyken's account of the events that followed, made magical snowbound listening. His narrative was intercut with old interviews with Hussey and extracts from the memoirs of some of the rest of the 20 men who were left to live in an ice-covered shelter made of two upturned lifeboats for four months on Elephant Island while Shackleton set off in a dinghy to South Georgia for help. The men spent a good part of
the time making up songs about each other, and playing them at Saturday evening concerts. Van Eyken memorably replayed a particularly rousing chorus in honour of Frank Wild, the ship's second-in-command, which was given its first airing on midwinter's day 1915. The men ate fried penguin's feet, but it was the "brain food" of Hussey's playing, as one of the group observed, that really sustained them.
Music, as Shackleton well knew, had always been as good a defence as anything against cold and dark and oblivion. You were reminded of that many times in the various tributes to John Lennon, another great eccentric English explorer, who was murdered 30 years ago last Wednesday. Of all the archive material, the most moving was an unheard, fragile version of "Imagine" that was included in Yoko in Her Own Words, Nina Myskow's searching and eloquent interview with Yoko Ono. The track had been played on what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday to mark the lighting of the John Lennon Peace Tower, a column of light on an island in Reykjavik harbour, where it had come across the frozen water out of the darkness, before the tower had been switched on.
Yoko was her familiar riddling mix of candour and self-promotion. At one point she seemed determined to suggest that she and Paul McCartney were comparable songwriting talents, both equally in Lennon's shadow. Myskow moved swiftly on. The interviewer's tone, sometimes blunt, was a relief from the near religious solemnity that seemed to inform the two parts of John Lennon: The New York Years, narrated with Sunday School inflections of awe by Susan Sarandon. Despite a wealth of low-voiced insight from various American friends, you couldn't help feeling that the most vital Lennon, mischief-making, funny, unsanctimonious, was being weighed down with a burden of reverence. The point was proved in the clips from old interviews with the man himself (in which he sounded more the banjo-playing kid from Liverpool, than the beatified Beatle), and of course in the music: "vital mental medicine" indeed.