Adam Smyth

In September, I invited people to record themselves reading a short passage from an English translation of Rousseau’s Confessions:

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

The sense of his own uniqueness that Rousseau describes here is something that everyone feels. He is an individual set apart from what he calls the ‘numberless legion’, but he also speaks for everyone. Being different from one another is something we have in common. One of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or something from which copies can be made: at the heart of originality is the potential for duplication. Rousseau says he was cast from a mould, like a pot on a production line, but the mould has been broken so there can’t be any more copies.

My father, Alan Smyth, was a viola player. When I was young, in the 1980s, he mentioned a couple of times that he’d played with the Beatles. He wasn’t very interested in them; growing up, I wasn’t either. Years later, now that I’ve become very interested in them, I think often about his casual aside. My dad died in 2002. In early 2020 I made contact with his musician friends to ask if they had any memories of his playing with the Beatles. John Underwood, the viola player in the Delmé String Quartet, played on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in April 1966, on ‘A Day in the Life’ in February 1967, and on ‘She’s Leaving Home’ in March 1967. John said my father didn’t play on these songs, and he couldn’t remember if he played on others.