The Back Stairs
Why the Listening Club was never meant to be a stage — and what a school staircase taught me about scale.
By Rafi Mercer
The noise always arrived from a distance. Two turns of a corridor and a fire door that never quite closed, and by the time it reached me it had softened into something I could hold. Footsteps above. A door somewhere below. A voice travelling the length of the English corridor and changing shape as it turned the corner.
There was a staircase at my school that led up towards that corridor. I remember it more clearly than I remember most of the classrooms.
It was not grand or important. It was not a place anyone was meant to notice. A back staircase, slightly removed from the main flow of the school. At break times, I would sometimes sit there.
There is some irony in the fact that it led to English, because English was not a place in which I felt especially capable. Before I could read and write well, I was still the same person I am now. I was not less intelligent. I did not have fewer thoughts. I simply could not always get them into the form the world appeared to require.
School was built around forms. Read this. Write that. Sit here. Speak now. Understand the rules, including the ones nobody explains.
I found much of it difficult, but not because I was unaware of what was happening. The opposite was probably true. I was aware of too much.
I could hear the friction between people. I could sense the alliances, the games, the small changes in tone. I could tell when somebody meant something other than what they said. The normal world seemed full of movement and politics, all of it happening at once. Other people appeared able to enter it without thinking. I could enter it too, but it cost me something.
So I found the back stairs.
Sitting there was my way of gaining permission to be like everyone else for a moment. Nobody had formally given me that permission. I had made it for myself. I could sit outside the main current and listen to the school carrying on without having to take part in every part of it.
From those stairs, the world became manageable. Somewhere, somebody laughed. Somewhere else, a teacher called for silence. The building had its own rhythm, and once I stopped trying to keep up with it, I could hear it properly.
Time slowed down there.
I did not have language for any of this then. I would not have called it listening. I would not have called it regulating myself, or finding stillness, or stepping away from overstimulation. I only knew that I felt better on those stairs than I did in the centre of everything.
Sometimes people came to find me.
I remember that too. There was something lovely about being found. Not dragged back into the noise, not questioned about why I was there, but simply joined. Someone would sit beside me for a while, and the staircase would become a small shared place rather than somewhere I had gone alone.
Nobody needed to do very much.
That may have been the beginning of something I have only recently started to understand. Sometimes listening is all that is needed. It can be enough.
We live in a world that measures value through activity. We are expected to respond, contribute, explain, perform, react and move on. Silence makes people uncomfortable because it appears as though nothing is happening.
But something is happening.
When we listen, the world becomes larger. We notice what has been covered by the rush. We hear the room, the person beside us, the space between one sound and the next. We begin to understand that attention itself is a form of generosity.
I learned that early, although I did not know I was learning it.
The Listening Club began without a grand theory. I was not trying to build a media platform or design something for the largest possible audience. I was doing what I had always done: finding something worth listening to, stopping for a while, and perhaps inviting one other person to sit with me.
It might have been my wife. It might have been my best mate. It might even have been Oban, who has always shown a surprising enthusiasm for jazz and slow beats.
That was enough.
The difficulty came later, when numbers entered the room.
Once people begin to arrive, it is easy to start asking who else might come. You broaden the music. You second-guess your choices. You imagine an audience and then set about satisfying it. Without noticing, you move from listening to programming.
The question becomes: who will come if I choose this album?
That was never the original question. The original question was: what happens if I stop here and listen?
Most media is built around the idea that more people must always be better. More reach, more views, more attention, more scale. Perhaps the Listening Club does not need to behave like most media.
Perhaps one person is enough.
One person, one hour, one shared piece of attention.
One is not a smaller version of the room. It is the room.
If one other person stops what they are doing and listens properly, then something real has happened. For one hour, time has changed shape. The usual demands have been suspended. Nobody has been asked to perform. Nobody has needed to keep up.
Someone has simply sat on the stairs for a while.
That may be what I have been building all along without quite realising it. Not a stage. Not a broadcast. Not a platform designed to please everyone.
A back staircase.
A place slightly removed from the main corridor, where the noise reaches us differently. A place where someone can sit alone without feeling abandoned, and where another person might occasionally come and find them.
I still remember those school stairs because they gave me something I could not find elsewhere. They gave me a way to remain inside the world without being overwhelmed by it. They taught me that stepping away was not the same as disappearing. It was a way of returning to myself.
Today they feel closer than ever. Perhaps that is because I now understand what they were. Not somewhere I went at break time. The beginning of a life built around listening.
And maybe the work now is simply to keep making that place available.
To choose the record. To slow the room down. To sit there long enough for someone else to find it.
And when they do, not to ask anything more of them.
Come and sit here for a while.
You do not need to speak.
How many people should be in a listening session?
One is enough. A session is not measured by attendance but by whether the hour genuinely changed shape for whoever was in it. Everything larger is just that same hour, repeated.
What actually happens in a Listening Club session?
One album, chosen in advance, played through in full, with a group gathered around it. Nobody is required to speak, contribute or perform. The album carries the hour.
Do I need a hi-fi system or a record collection to take part?
No. Listening culture is often described through equipment, but the equipment is not the point. What matters is that you stop, that the music is given the whole of its time, and that nothing else is competing for your attention.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
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