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Jude Rogers examines The Verb’s hunch that the bombastic 1980’s were a heady time for the concept of ‘Truth’ in popular music. We ask her to unpick Spandau Ballet’s 1987 hit ‘True’,  and to find out whether it is based on a true story. And should you ever trust a song that claims to be telling the truth? 

Simon examines the idea of a poet’s ‘true’ voice, and why we so often think the poetic ‘I’ equals autobiographical truth. He reads ‘Thank You For Waiting’ a poem which explores the way airlines categorise their passengers, and ‘Privet’, based on a true story from childhood, but with a twist.

Richard Gameson explains that the medieval scribe’s attitude towards the truth was more flexible than ours, and that they valued ‘spiritual’ over factual truth. He also explains that worried scribes would write curses into their manuscripts, to frighten later scribes into making ‘true’ copies.  

We have a brand new commission from Tania Hershman; ‘A True Story in Five Parts’, which uses found language to examine the slippery concept of truth in science and scientific language. Tania drew on found language from online scientific journals for her story, including the phrase ‘copper nano-whiskers’.