Twenty-Six Addresses

Where The Luxury of Listening has gone so far, and what was already listening in each place before it got there

By Rafi Mercer

An order list puts everything in alphabetical order, which is the least romantic way to watch anything travel. It may also be the most honest. Camden sits above Cardiff. Chelmsford sits above Cleveland. A Victorian spa village in the Highlands sits next to a parish in Bedfordshire. A lake town in Saskatchewan falls between Ramsgate on the Kent coast and a city just south of Seattle.

Twenty-six copies, nearly all of them sold in the last six weeks.

Each one left with a note in my handwriting and the same small dot on the cover, the one I only later realised was the centre of a record. What I hadn't considered, until the list grew long enough to read properly, was what each copy would be arriving into. A book about sitting still with music doesn't land in empty air. Every one of these places was listening long before the parcel got there.

Chelmsford comes first, because in one sense everything starts there. In June 1920, Dame Nellie Melba sang into a microphone at the Marconi works in the town. People who had never been in a room with her heard her anyway, in one of the first advertised public broadcasts of music in Britain. Before that evening, to hear a voice you had to be near it. After it, the voice could come to you, into a front room, a kitchen, a chair by the fire. The whole idea of home listening, music arriving in a private room and asking for attention there, has one of its earliest dates set in an Essex town that most people only drive through.

Cardiff has Spillers, which has been selling recorded sound since 1894 and claims to be the oldest record shop in the world. It opened before the vinyl record existed. Its early customers were buying phonograph cylinders and shellac, formats that sound almost medieval now. The shop has outlived every one of them. It is still trading, still in the city, still putting music into people's hands. A book about listening arriving in the same city feels less like a delivery than a return.

Methuen, Massachusetts, has a building that exists because of one instrument. The Great Organ was built in Germany by the Walcker firm and installed in the Boston Music Hall in 1863. When Boston no longer wanted it, Edward Searles bought it and eventually built a hall around it. It is a room shaped to fit a sound, rather than a sound squeezed into whatever room was available. I think about that more than I probably should. Most of us fit the music to the room we already have. Methuen did it the other way round.

Toronto holds both sides of an argument about listening in one city. In May 1953, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach shared the stage at Massey Hall. A full room, one night, and a recording that still carries the air of the hall in it. Eleven years later, Glenn Gould, the city's most famous musician, walked away from the concert stage altogether at thirty-one. He spent the rest of his life in the studio, convinced that the truest listening happened not in a hall of two thousand people but alone, at home, with the recording. Toronto was right both times.

Houston slowed things down. In the 1990s, DJ Screw took records and pulled the tempo back until the voices thickened and the bass settled somewhere low in the chest, cutting and repeating phrases so they hung in the air longer than they were meant to. His tapes passed hand to hand across the South Side and were played in cars moving at walking pace. Chopped and screwed is usually filed as a hip-hop style. It is also a listening philosophy: give the music more time and it tells you more. A whole regional culture was built on that idea.

The rest of the list compresses. Cleveland is where Alan Freed played rhythm and blues to white teenagers on the radio and held the Moondog Coronation Ball in 1952, often called the first rock concert, which is why the Hall of Fame sits by Lake Erie now. In Renton, Jimi Hendrix is buried at Greenwood Memorial Park, and people still come to stand there quietly. In San Rafael, the Grateful Dead kept their rehearsal studio, Club Front. They were a band so preoccupied with what the audience actually heard that they built the Wall of Sound to get it right. In Oakland, a few miles down the shore from Pinole, Yoshi's has kept jazz going at Jack London Square. Greenville, North Carolina, is an hour's drive from Rocky Mount, where Thelonious Monk was born. Iowa gave the world Bix Beiderbecke and his cornet, a sound people described as bell-like, clean enough to cut through a room. Regina Beach sits in prairie songwriting country, the same Saskatchewan that raised Joni Mitchell and where Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in the Qu'Appelle Valley.

On this side of the water, the list reads like a map of British listening in small type. Camden, with the Roundhouse and a sixty-year run of rooms that stay open late. Marlborough, where Nick Drake went to school, and no artist asks more of a quiet room than he does. Edinburgh, where folk sessions in pubs like Sandy Bell's run on an unspoken rule: you listen before you play. Strathpeffer, whose Victorian Pavilion still fills for ceilidhs, dances where the listening happens through the feet. Ramsgate, with its small Music Hall that draws people down to the coast for artists who could fill rooms far bigger.

And then Studham.

I don't know Studham's listening history. The parish doesn't announce one, and nothing in any archive I could find marks it. That may be the most important address on the list. Most listening has no plaque. It happens in rooms no one ever writes about, on ordinary evenings, and it is no less real for being unrecorded. Chelmsford gets the date in the history books. Studham gets the rest of the story, the part that happens after the broadcast reaches someone.

Listening culture doesn't spread the way a trend spreads. There is no launch and no moment where it tips. It moves the way this list moves, one room at a time, each one a small, private decision to stop and pay attention. Melba's voice went out into the air in 1920 and found its rooms on its own. A book is slower. It has to be printed, written in, and sent. But it arrives the same way in the end, into one room with one person, who decides whether to sit down.

Camden to West Des Moines. Twenty-six copies.

Somewhere on that list, someone is sitting down.

Where can I buy The Luxury of Listening?

The book is available through the Tracks & Tales shop and ships worldwide. Every copy comes with a handwritten note. If you're buying it as a gift, reply to your order email and the note can be addressed to the person receiving it.

Why is Chelmsford important in the history of listening?

In June 1920, Dame Nellie Melba sang live from the Marconi works in Chelmsford in one of the first advertised public broadcasts of music in Britain. It marked a turning point: music no longer needed you to be in the room where it was made, and listening at home became possible on a wide scale.

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