Monday – to Hackney to Alex Mayor’s studio. We work on a Fosca track, “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”. Kate turns up to add backing vocals, while Rachel and Tom are laid low with illnesses. I feel guilty about dragging Tom from his sickbed to his computer in his Hemel Hempstead cottage, to remotely oversee some tracks which haven’t transferred from his sessions properly.
The track is deliberately free of all synths and keyboards, because I’m fairly sure Fosca haven’t recorded an electric guitars-only uptempo pop song before. I always loved those mid-80s New Order songs when the band would go from the computer-heavy likes of ‘Blue Monday’ to songs like ‘As It Was When It Was’, a simple guitars, bass and drums indie pop tune. I think there’s also a rather pompous liner note on a Queen album boasting that it was recorded without synthesizers.
Deliberately going guitars-only for a synth-heavy band is a more androgynous, bisexual approach to making music. And yes, I did just type that last sentence. Somebody has to.
Last Thursday: I meet up with Lucy Munro in the British Library cafe, to receive a copy of the enormous and brand new RSC Complete Works Of Shakespeare. Rather brilliantly, each play has a little running glossary in the Arial font. So it’s less stuffy and more friendly. Ms Lucy is responsible for editing the version of Pericles, and is rightfully excited that the next time the Royal Shakespeare Company perform the play, they will use her version.
I used to belong to the RSC Fan Club – or the Friends Of The RSC or whatever it was – in my teens, and my first trips up to London unsupervised were to see the likes of As You Like It at the Barbican, with Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw. This would be about 1985. There’s a photo from this production in the new Complete Works, alongside similar stills covering the company’s history. I look fondly on all the ones I saw myself, and enviously at those I’ve missed: David Tennant in Romeo & Juliet circa 2000. Not that you can tell it’s him: his face is obscured by someone’s arms – presumably the Juliet of the day – in what looks like a fairly passionate embrace. The photo section ends with a still from the Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter version of Antony & Cleopatra. Which has only just finished in London.
A visit to the British Library rarely goes without one noticing some beautiful students around the building. I think this isn’t so much because the place attracts the good-looking, but that a typical visit to such a large and popular place will involve one’s eyes scanning the faces of hundreds of lone strangers, and it’s more a question of statistical probability than anything else.
Moreover, such students tend to be in the flattering state of lone contemplation, because reading is not a shared activity. Libraries are no place for couples or families. They separate people, sending them off to commune with the words of strangers and the dead. Even though many of these comely specimens might be dating, they appear to be single purely through the serene act of lone study. Reading in public makes one look tantalisingly available.
