Baz Luhrmann picks 8 songs he couldn’t live without: “music is the fabric of storytelling”
Born in 1962, Baz Luhrmann earned his nickname after his friends began comparing his unruly hair to the TV puppet Basil Brush. After moving to an isolated settlement in New South Wales, he took up ballroom dancing, having come across a leaflet advertising classes while travelling on a bus. The hobby would become the subject of his breakthrough feature with the 1992 project Strictly Ballroom, which was followed by Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsby and, most recently, the critically acclaimed effort Elvis. Here, Luhrmann names the eight tracks he couldn’t live without.
Famed for his bombastic visual style, Baz Luhrmann has spent the last 30 years blurring the boundary between high art and popular culture. His eight-track selection is equally transgressive, with excerpts from Puccini’s 1896 opera La Boheme rubbing up ‘Changes’ by David Bowie. Introducing the track on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs program, Luhrmann said: “My dad was in the Vietnam war. He was very anti-hippie. He was very anti-the alternates. And we had very short hair. We were beaten up for it. It was a really big difficulty for us to be socially accepted”. One day, Luhrmann went to a friend’s house, explaining that “they were surfers and they were probably smoking weed”. It was here that Luhrmann heard the opening bars of ‘Changes’, stating that it “scared me, and yet I was compelled towards it”.
Discussing Bowie’s impact on youth culture, Baz continued: “What he said to our generation was ‘you didn’t have to be one person.’ You could continue to experiment with your hair, with your look, how you felt. You could go into different characters. That was new.”
‘Che gelida manina’ from La Boheme, Luhrmann’s most-treasured selection, represents a very different moment in the director’s life. “I remember the first Iraq War had just broken out, and when our production [of La Boheme] came on, which was sort of a stripped-down Brechtian version of it with this young singer, there were more letters to The Australian, our biggest paper, about La Boheme than there were about the Iraq War breaking out. You know, it was such a controversy.”
You can see Baz Luhrmann’s full eight-track selection below.
The 8 songs Baz Luhrmann couldn’t live without:
- ‘Changes’ – David Bowie
- ‘One’ – John Farnham
- ‘Spanish Flea’ – Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
- ‘Suspicious Minds’ – Elvis Presley
- ‘Che gelida manina’ from La Boheme – performed by Luciano Pavarotti, composed by Giacomo Puccini
- ‘Unfinished Sympathy ‘- Massive Attack
- ‘Lady Marmalade’ – Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, MYA, Pink
- ‘No Church in the Wild’ – JAY Z, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, The-Dream
