The human iPod: Derek Paravicini

Derek Paravicini is blind and severely disabled yet can master any song after hearing it once... What is his secret?

Thirty years ago, Derek Paravicini was within a heartbeat of death. No other baby born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital 14 weeks prematurely had ever survived. His twin sister was dead at birth.

When Derek came along a few minutes later, the doctor presumed that he, too, could not possibly live. And yet, and yet... just when his mother Mary Ann had given up hope, she heard the faintest of whimpers, the tiniest of muffled squeaks. He had made it.

Three decades on, Derek no longer makes muffled squeaks. Instead, he brings a rapt audience in St George’s concert theatre, Bristol, to their feet again and again, with a dazzling range of music — an Oscar Peterson arrangement of Greensleeves, his own version of Bach’s Air in the key of G, a jaunty ragtime taste of Debussy.

You’ll have heard of perfect pitch. Well, Derek has absolute pitch — a rare gift, meaning that, when he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can identify every one. Most professional musicians can get about five.

He can master any melody on earth, has a databank of thousands of songs in his head and can play any one of them at will, improvising as he goes.

One member of the audience asks him to play Ain’t No Sunshine. Another suggests that he play it in B major. And another, that it’s done in ragtime. No problem — without a pause, his fingers flutter across the keyboard in a hummingbird blur of staggering virtuosity.

‘Goodnight Sweetheart,’ shouts out someone from the back row. In C sharp, in the style of theatre composer Jerome Kern. And so it goes on, for two hours of riotous shared joy, the latest chapter in an uplifting tale of rare talent locked in a damaged brain.

Because he was born so early, Derek is blind. The oxygen used to revive him at birth caused certain vessels in his eyes to grow abnormally, damaging his retinas, in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity.

As he is blind, he cannot read music — he can’t even read Braille. The whole of tonight’s performance — his and the orchestra’s — is encapsulated entirely within his head.

Despite his music gift, Derek’s verbal skills are limited. His English is well-spoken, clear and loud, but his capacity for thought does not stretch far.

He is an echolaliac, meaning that he echoes what you say to him, turning your question into a statement.

‘Do you know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Derek?’ I ask.

‘Yes, I know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Harry.’

‘Are you looking forward to playing in London?’

‘Yes, I am looking forward to playing in London, Harry.’

There are flashes of humour. At a recent recital in 11 Downing Street, hosted by Alistair Darling, Derek launched, unbidden, into a version of Big Spender. At an earlier concert at No10, he coaxed Cherie Blair into singing along to The Beatles’ When I’m 64.

Usually, though, Derek’s thoughts dwell on the immediate future and no further. ‘Where will we go after the concert, Adam?’ he asks Adam Ockelford, the Professor of Music at Roehampton University, who has taught Derek for 26 years. ‘Can we have fish and chips?’

This short-term view of life means he barely suffers from nerves. Half an hour before tonight’s concert started, he asked Roger Huckle, the artistic director of the Emerald Ensemble, what they were going to do that evening. On being told that he was going to play a concert, he said calmly: ‘Yes, let’s do a concert.’

For someone so handicapped, it is a godsend that his hidden talent was unleashed at all. Much of the credit goes to his nanny, Winifred Daly, who died 12 years ago.

She had looked after several generations of Derek’s mother’s side of the family — the Parker Bowleses, as in Camilla. Derek’s mother, born Mary Ann Parker Bowles, is sister to Andrew Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall’s ex-husband. It was Winifred Daly who first spotted something unusual in Derek.

Looking for a diversion to occupy the blind 20-month-old, she dragged down a small electric organ from the attic of the Paravicini home in Berkshire; the organ had belonged to Derek’s grandfather, Derek Parker Bowles, after whom he was named.

To begin with, Derek used a jumble of fists, palms and knuckles to knock the living daylights out of the keyboard. Gradually, though, with no tuition, he started moving his hands in synch, up and down the keys. Soon he was forming chords, until one day, his older sister, Libbet, came rushing into her parents’ sitting room and announced: ‘Quick, quick, come and see, Derek’s playing that hymn we sang in church.’

What had happened? How had he magically summoned up the capacity to produce music from within his damaged brain? ‘His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first 20 months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form,’ says Professor Ockelford. ‘And it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.’

If it was Winifred Daly whose love — and repeated singing and talking in the nursery — sparked off Derek’s talents, it was Professor Ockelford who harnessed them and moulded them into concert-worthy form.

‘The man is a saint,’ says Derek’s father, Nic Paravicini, a banker who now lives in Wales. ‘I tried to pay him and he refused. I had to force petrol money on him.’

They first met at Linden Lodge — the school for the blind attended by the celebrated jazz pianist George Shearing in the 1920s. Professor Ockelford taught Derek conventional musical techniques and untaught his unconventional ones — in particular his desire to play music as loudly as possible.

Still today, in Bristol, the professor is at Derek’s side, gently cueing his intros and tapping him on the back, encouraging him to take a bow when the audience erupts once more.

In time, news of Derek’s exceptional talent spread. At seven, he gave his first concert in Tooting Leisure Centre in South London. At nine, he was on the Wogan show.

At ten, he was presented with a Barnardo’s Children’s Champion Award by Diana, Princess of Wales. She was unruffled by the fact that he was Camilla Parker Bowles’s nephew, even though her marriage was on the rocks at the time. When Derek suggested playing Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, she laughed uproariously.

In recent years, he has played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Las Vegas and has accompanied Jools Holland. He has appeared in two documentaries about genius savants, and the show I attended was being filmed by the popular American show 60 Minutes, on CBS. Now he is embarking on his first tour with a 20-piece orchestra.

After 26 years of tuition, Derek’s playing style is much more traditional. But still Professor Ockelford is trying to work out exactly how his genius works. ‘Recent research has revealed that only one in 10,000 babies who are born at term have absolute pitch, but 40 per cent born prematurely have it,’ says the professor. ‘So there is a link. And it seems that all the brain capacity that would have gone elsewhere, into verbal reasoning or social skills, is transferred to music.’

Certainly, Derek’s emotional capacity is limited. When his beloved nanny Winifred Daly was on her death bed, she said to Professor Ockelford: ‘He won’t miss me, you know.’

She appears to have been largely right. He remembers Winifred, but has not cried over her. He very rarely cries — and then it will be over physical pain — and he has no self-indulgence. ‘He never says he’s ill,’ says his stepmother, Suki Paravicini (Derek’s parents divorced when he was five, and have each since remarried.) ‘All he’ll say, very politely, is: “Can I have a Lemsip?”’

His playing, though, has grown more emotional. Professor Ockelford has determined that Derek is not just a human iPod who can replay exactly what he has heard after listening to it once. Instead, he initially recreates pieces by recalling crucial fragments and reassembling them as he plays.

If a piece is too long or complicated for him to absorb at one sitting, he is inventive when he plays it back, reordering the snatches that he can remember, borrowing snippets from pieces with a similar stylistic pedigree or making up new material.

Whatever magic is going on in his head, certainly it is when he is at the piano that he is most at ease. As he comes on stage, led by Professor Ockelford, his steps are hesitant. His hands clutch at his trousers, fingers twisting the cloth.

And then, as he sits down, his hands reach out for the keys. As soon as his fingers hit the ivories, the hands relax. His head sometimes sways with the music, much like those other blind pianists Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.

At other times, his head is still, his sightless gaze fixed in the direction of the hammers of the Steinway, furiously striking away to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. He is doing what he was born to do.

World's stingiest woman - Hetty Green

Back in the late 1800s, the world's richest woman was also the world's stingiest. Though she had millions in the bank, she dressed like a street hag and lived like a pauper.
As a child, Hetty Robinson learned to read from the financial pages, which she would recite to her wealthy Father. At age 30 she inherited one million dollars and, over the course of the next 50 years, she shrewdly manipulated stocks and bonds until her fortune grew to nearly $100 million.
Her financial wizardry and infamous stock manipulations confounded such formidable tycoons as Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and earned her the ignominious title "The Witch of Wall Street." But though she was a genius at making money, when developed an unparalleled hatred of spending it.
When she turned 33, she married Edward Green, another millionaire, but made him sign a prenuptial agreement not to claim any of her money. When he went broke speculating on stocks, they separated, and Hetty, though she had vast wealth, raised her two children under dingy conditions, moving from one cheap hotel to another to avoid paying personal property taxes.
To save money on clothes and laundry soap, she wore the same black dress every day and washed only the bottom portion that touched the ground. Hetty's reluctance to spend money reached horrifying proportions shen her son, Ned, injured his knee. She took him to a charity ward to be treated. Unfortunately for Ned, a doctor recognized his millionaire mother and demanded payment. She refused to pay and treated the boy's injury herself. After two years, his leg had to be amputated.
She was far too cheap to pay rent for an office. Instead she conducted her financial dealings from the bank where she kept her fortune, threatening to withdraw it if the bank officers refused to let her use an available desk. When she was feeling particularly unhappy, she would sometimes sit on the marble floor of the bank's vault and admire her notes and securities, which she filed in the specially make pockets of her petticoat. For her meals she would warm up a bowl of oatmeal on the radiator or take out a ham sandwich, unwrapped, from one of her voluminous pockets.
Hetty's lifelong stinginess even played a role in her death in 1916 at the age of 81. She suffered a stroke while arguing over the price of milk. Her son Ned hired nurses to care for her before she died, but had them dress in street clothes for fear that Hetty's condition would worsen if she realized money was being spent to pay nursing bills.
As a final irony, Ned, who inherited much of his mother's vast fortune, became an extravagant spender. He threw his millions away on lavish parties, expensive jewelry, yachts, even diamond studded chamber pots.

Germ-phobia and death rays

In the scientific world, Nikola Tesla is remembered principally for his work on the rotating magnetic field, which made possible the alternating-current generators that supply most of the world with electricity today. In honour of this achievement a scientific unit was named after him. The 'tesla' does not often crop up in layman's conversation, however, as it is used to calculate the force of a magnetic field. His name is also immortalised in the Tesla coil, a device that allows a transformer to generate high frequency current at a very high voltage. It is still used in televisions, radios and other modern electronic devices. He invented the coil in the course of his work on alternating current in 1891.

In later years Tesla was something of a solitary eccentric, often to be seen walking to the New York Public Library from his hotel, where his room had to serve as his laboratory. Although he developed a phobia for germs, it appears he did not suspect the city's pigeons of being carriers of disease; watching pleasures in life.

Peacemaking weapon

Occasionally Tesla would emerge from his hotel-room with announcements of discoveries and inventions that people found increasingly hard to take seriously. In 1934, for example, he told the press that he had devised a deathray. This was to be the ultimate deterrent that would put an end to war. It consisted of a beam of high-velocity particles that would destroy squadrons of enemy aircraft at a range of 400 km (250 miles). The details of this weapon were never disclosed.

Living dangerously

The Dangerous Sports Club is a group of eccentrics based in Oxford, England, who endeavour to 'act boldly in timorous, over-protected world'. 'Acting boldly' to the Dangerous Sports Club means acting like madmen to most other people. Why else would David Kirke, one of the club's founding members, have hurled himself from the Royal Gorge Bridge in 1982, 320 m (1030 ft) above the Arkansas River in Colorado? He was attached to the bridge by a length of elasticated cord tied to his ankles. At 260 m (860 ft) the cord was stretched to its limits, and so was Kirke: virtually unconscious, he dangled for over two hours before his companions could haul him back to the bridge.

Grabbing the bull by the horns

History is full of such daredevils. The 'bull leapers' of ancient Crete, for example, used to grab the horns of a charging bull and somersault over its back. These were the forerunners of circus acts such as Hugo Zacchini, a Californian, whose fame was due as much to his showmanship as to his acrobatic skills. In 1929, Zacchini was shot from the mouth of a cannon, propelled by compressed air. He travelled over 40 m (135 ft) through the air at a speed of 130 km/h (80 mph). In the 1870s, the American circus performer John Holtum would catch cannonballs fired at point-blank range - in his own hands.

But death-defying acts can go wrong. The escapologist Harry Houdini used to invite people to punch him hard in the stomach, resisting the blow by tensing his muscles. On October 22, 1926, however, Houdini was struck in the stomach before he had time to prepare himself, and died six days later of a ruptured appendix.

Circus folk perform their dangerous deeds to make money. But people like George Willig, who climbed up the outside of the World Trade Center in New York in 1977 without ropes, or Jaromir Wagner, the Czech who flew the Atlantic strapped to the pylon of a light aircraft in 1980, have no other motive than a love of danger.

Going over the top

On the afternoon of October 24, 1901, several thousand people watched as a large wooden barrel careered through violent rapids towards Niagara's Horseshoe Falls. Swept along by the current, the cask disappeared over the edge. Seconds later the barrel rose up to the surface in the calmer waters 54 m (160 ft) below: it had survived its battering. And miraculously, for the fist time in Niagara's long history of daredevils, so had its passenger.

Strapped and cushioned inside, school teacher Anna Edson Taylor had just celebrated her 43rd birthday with a death-defying plunge into the history books. Taylor was shocked and badly shaken and had a gash in her head; but she was alive, conscious, and within a few days had fully recovered.

Anna Taylor's bravery did not bring her the cascade of riches she had hoped, and she died penniless in 1921. She is buried in a 'stunters' section of Niagara Falls' Oakwood cemetery, remembered still as the first person - and only woman ever - to survive the Niagara fall. Her advice to potential imitators was: 'Don't try it!'

Sick of the sea

Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson - British admiral famous for his participation in the Napoleonic Wars, most notably in the Battle of Trafalgar - paid a heavy price for his courage and determination. He lost an eye, an arm and ultimately his life while serving his country. But, perhaps surprisingly for Britain's greatest sailor, he suffered throughout life from seasickness.

He endured five months of seasickness on his very first voyage. And as late as 1801 - 30 years after his first voyage - he wrote of 'a heavy sea, sick to death . . .. I shall never get over [it].' Yet he was not deterred from a naval career.

Seamen were constantly exposed to deprivation, malnutrition and disease. And Nelson was as prone to them as the next sailor. During a voyage to the Caribbean in 1780. Nelson and 87 of his crew came down with yellow fever, fewer than ten survived.

Among other ailments, Nelson suffered from recurrent malaria, scurvy, temporary paralysis and possibly tuberculosis. He also frequently suffered from depression - hardly surprisingly, considering his medical history.

A truth about Father of Electricity

Michael Faraday was born in 1791, in London. At the age of 13 he started work as a bookbinder and in 1812 copied out and bound some lectures he had attended and sent them to the lecturer, the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, together with a letter asking for a job. The next year he was taken on a an assistant.

Faraday's discoveries, achieved through a combination of brilliant intuition and painstaking research, made possible the modern electricity industry. He neither sought nor accepted honours, and in 1867 died 'plain Mr. Faraday', as he wished.

Mechanical Madness

Who invented a device to remove gravy stains from gravel paths? Or a machine for pulling Christmas crackers? Or a system for eating peas without the use of either knife or fork? These were all the brain children of William Heath Robinson - and none was intended to work.


Born in London in 1872, Heath Robinson was an inspired cartoonist who satirised machines instead of people. He specialised in drawing plans for elaborate but useless machinery, involving a wealth of pulleys and levers connected with knotted string. These bizarre contraptions were mostly 'labour-saving' devices that involved far more labour than a straightforward way of achieving the same result. Their ingenuity was matched only by their total impracticality.


His masterpiece was probably the miniature house he built in 1934 for the Ideal Home exhibition in London. Its occupiers, a staid middle-class couple, descended to breakfast on ropes through trapdoors in the ceiling. As they landed on their chairs, their weight depressed springs that put a record on a radiogram and squeezed milk from a concertina to feed the cat. In the nursery, a machine powdered the baby's bottom.

Bibliographical Face of St. Columba

St. Columba (c.521-97) Irish born missionary and first abbot of Iona, a remote island off western Scotland. St. Columba was born in Donegal into the family of the Irish High Kings. In 546 he founded the monastery of Derry, in Ireland. In 563, with the help of 12 other monks, he established the monastery of Iona, an establishment which became the centre of Celtic Christianity in the north of Britain.

As well as being revered as a warrior saint whose help was often invoked in battle, he is credited with copying nearly 300 books in his own hand and writing three Latin hymns.

Carlyle’s Hard Work

World famous historian, essayist and thinker Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was born in Scotland, for a time Carlyle taught and contributed to the Edinburgh Review. His Life of Schiller, first printed in serial form in 1823-4, won critical acclaim, but it was the publication in 1837 of The French Revolution which established his literary reputation. In it he expressed the view, to be repeated in his later works, that great men shape the course of history.

The manuscript of Carlyle’s first volume of The French Revolution was mistakenly burnt by a servant. It took him two years to rewrite.

Profit On The Line

Thomas Alva Edison was not only a great inventor, but an inspired businessman. His entrepreneurial talent first showed itself about the age of 12, when he obtained the concession to sell newspapers and confectionery on the train running between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan.

His profit on newspapers depended on exactly matching supply to demand. So, with charqacteristic enterprise, he persuaded a friend who worked on the Detroit Free Press to show him proofs of the lead stories in advance, so he could estimate the probable level of public interest and thus sales for the day.

His greatest triumph as a newsboy came in April 1862, when the first accounts of the bloody Civil War battle of Shiloth hit the headlines. Seeing the chance to make money, Edison bought 1000 copies of the Detroit Free Press on credit and arranged for news of the battle to be telegraphed up the line ahead of the train and posted in the stations.

Word spread fast through each small town and crowds packed the stations, frantic to read more details of the fighting when the newspapers arrived. Edison was able not only to sell all 1000 copies, but to hike up the price considerably as he went along.

Not content with selling newspapers, Edison moved into journalism, setting up a printing press in the trains's baggage compartment to produce his own local newssheet, the Grand Trunk Herald. Retailing at three cents, it rose to a circulation of about 700 - the first newspaper ever printed on a train.

Edison finally overreached himself, however, by setting up a chemical laboratory in the baggage car where he would experiment in his spare time. When one of his experiments caused a fire, both he and his equipment were unceremoniously thrown off the train.

Eccentric Geniuses

Both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were complex and contradictory character. Despite his powerfully analytical mind and his astonishing mathematical genius, Newton held many strange beliefs. To the end of his life, he studied alchemy and the transmutation of metals, that is, how to turn lead into gold. He wrote many curious manuscripts concerning the end of the world and the prophecies of Daniel, which so embarrassed his friends when they discovered them after his death that these writings remained hidden for years.

As a child, Albert Einstein had a poor memory and spent much of his time building card towers or solving jigsaw puzzles. Einstein stopped going to school when he was 15 ; the next year, he failed the entrance examination to the Zurich Polytechnic. When he finally entered the Polytechnic, he hated learning so much that, he later claimed, he lost all interest in science for 12 months. Scraping through his final examinations, he worked as a tutor and then as an examiner of patents in Bern.

It was not a promising start for the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Yet, only three years after taking up his job in Bern, Einstein became world famous for his Special Theory of Relativity.