Eight things we learned from Graham Nash's Desert Island Discs

The singer and songwriter Graham Nash is best known as part of The Hollies and Crosby, Stills & Nash but he’s also a celebrated photographer. Born in Blackpool he now lives in Manhattan having gone via Salford, where he grew up, and California among other places.

He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not once but twice, first as a member of Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1997 then in 2010 as part of The Hollies. He also received an OBE in 2010 “for services to music and charitable activities”.

Here's what we learned from Graham Nash's Desert Island Discs...

1. Crosby, Stills and Nash was born out of an impromptu get together

“I had come to Los Angeles to spend three or four days with Joni,” says Graham referring to folk singer songwriter Joni Mitchell. This was in July 1968. The couple first met at a Hollies concert (the band Graham was in at the time) in Ottawa in March that year.

“I got to the parking lot, there were other voices in the house and that kind of upset me a little, you know, I just wanted to be with Joni. But it was David [Crosby, previously with The Byrds] and Stephen [Stills, previously with Buffalo Springfield] and they were having dinner with Joni.”

“And after dinner, David said to Stephen, ‘Hey, play that song that we were just doing.’ And because Buffalo Springfield had broken up and because David had been thrown out of The Byrds, they were trying to get a duo kind-of-thing together, like an Everly Brothers kind-of-thing. And they had this song that they sang called You Don't Have to Cry which is on the first record.”

“And I said, ‘Do me a favour, sing it again’.”

“When they finished the second time, I said, ‘Trust me, do me a favour, just sing it for the third time’. When we started the song and I added my harmony after 45 seconds, we had to stop and laugh.”

"We were all in bands that were pretty decent harmony bands, but this was completely different. It had a magic to it immediately, and so the sound, whatever sound that is of Crosby, Stills and Nash was born in 45 seconds.”

2. Graham’s first choice was also the first record he ever bought

“I'm going to start out with a record that really changed my life in many ways,” says Graham.

“It was the first record I ever bought. It was a 78, which I'm sure there are many people out there who've no idea what a 78 is, and I traded it with my friend Fred Marsden for four pieces of toast.”

“I would always bring toast for a lunchtime snack and he liked my toast and we made a deal. I got the record. He got my toast.”

The record is Gene Vincent’s rockabilly song Be-Bop-A-Lula from 1956. It was covered just two years later by The Everly Brothers and featured on their debut album. It was also part of The Beatles live set in their early years.

3. A life-changing event happened in a classroom when he was six years old

Graham was born in Blackpool in 1942 and brought up in Salford. It was a tough time in Britain and Graham says of his early years, “I remember rationing where you had to have a coupon to be able to even buy basic bread and milk and stuff.”

“I remember collecting pieces of coal at the rubbish dump, filling my sister's pram with coal for the fire. I have very warm feelings about Salford. I didn't know that it was a slum.”

“I was sitting in Mr Burke's class, and the door opened and... this young boy came in and Mr Burke said, ‘Where can he sit?’ There was this seat next to me that was empty. He came and sat next to me, and me and Allan became friends.”

“We would sing in the school choir. For some reason, Allan always took the melody and and for some reason I always took the harmony,” remembers Graham.

Allan Clarke and Graham went on to found one of the leading UK bands of the ‘60s, The Hollies who are best known for their distinctive vocal harmony style.

4. Graham has a passion for photography he got from his father

“My father would take me and my youngest sister Elaine to Bellevue Zoo in Manchester. He would take pictures,” recalls Graham.

Then when they got home, Graham says, “He would take a blanket off my bed and put it up against the window and tape it down to block out the light,” making a temporary darkroom to process and print the pictures he’d taken.

“I always will remember the very moment that I fell in love with the photograph,” says Graham. “He put a blank piece of paper into a colourless liquid and he'd say, ‘Wait,’ and there fading into existence was a photograph of me and my sister that my father had taken that morning. It was a piece of magic that I remember to this day.”

Graham has taken pictures throughout his life and career, presenting them in exhibitions and books.

5. But the memory of his first camera will always be a sad one

On his 10th birthday Graham’s father gave him a camera, “... a little small Agfa camera had a tiny little bellows and stuff, but then the police came to the door,” remembers Graham.

“That was shocking. And they told my father that the camera that he had bought from his friend at work that he gave to me had been stolen. And who was it that sold him the camera? My father would not tell them and they put him in jail for a year.”

“The only thing that I always remember was my father talking to me at bedtime and telling me that he would have to go away for a year. He didn't tell me why... My father never spoke a word about his time in Strangeways.”

His father was never the same when he came home and he died aged just 47.

“I think he was feeling a lot of shame, feeling that he had let his family down, feeling that his life was never going to be the same, and in fact it wasn't.”

“It did affect me as a person. I've always appreciated the underdog and I've always rooted for the team that's not supposed to win, but does. I hate injustice - my passion against injustice comes from what happened to my father.”

It’s a passion that makes it into many of the songs Graham has written.

6. Graham’s first band was named after Buddy Holly

“We were The Hollies,” says Graham. “We were named after Buddy Holly - he was one of us.”

“He wore a suit and tie and he had glasses. He wasn't like Elvis, who’d slick his hair back and shake his backside and stuff. He wasn't one of those. He was one of us. I remember so distinctly when Allan and I heard that he had had died, we were both absolutely crying on the street.”

Graham’s third disc is Maybe Baby by Buddy Holly and The Crickets. The song was recorded at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, in 1957, while the band were on tour and it was released the following January. It was a Top 40 hit in the U.S., the UK, and Canada.

7. Sometimes meeting your heroes can have a happy ending

In 1962 the vocal duo The Everly Brothers played at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Being huge fans Graham and his boyhood friend Allan Clarke went to see them play but also waited for hours outside their hotel to meet them.

Graham picks up the story, “They stood and talked to me and Allan for what seemed like 20 minutes - it may have only have been two minutes... We said, 'You know, we sing together and one day we'd really love to make records'... and that was that.”

Three years later The Hollies are playing at the London Palladium. The band are there in the afternoon doing their soundcheck and the phone rings. It’s Phil Everly for Graham.

“And he goes, ‘Hey, Graham, Don and I are in town. We're about to start a record called Two Yanks in England and do The Hollies have any songs that they haven't recorded yet?’”

The brothers picked six of The Hollies unrecorded songs.

“We went and we helped them record our songs. And part of the backing band was a pianist called Reggie Dwight [Elton John], also Jimmy Page on guitar and John Paul Jones on bass [who would together go on to form one half of Led Zeppelin] and they made Two Yanks in England.”

8. Aged 81 Graham has no intention of retiring or slowing down

“I love what I do,” says Graham. “That's the thing, you know, don't give up. I love what I do, you know, don't let anybody stop you. If you have something that you love get to it, do it!”

“I can't do anything about the past. You can't buy a second of time. Even Bill Gates and [Mark] Zuckerberg can't buy a second of time.”