The Art of Rest by Claudia Hammond

Author:Claudia Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Canongate Books

4

LISTENING TO MUSIC

Once a month on a Friday night a group of middle-aged men meet up in a house in Peckham in southeast London. They all have beards, but then so do most men in Peckham. They do a variety of jobs – teaching, photography, one is a comedy critic. They gather for one activity, an activity they approach with some seriousness. Yet when they meet in the pub beforehand they seem to dawdle. It’s clear they have met with a purpose in mind, but no one is hurrying to get to this month’s appointed house. Then one starts chivvying the others along. At the house they find spots in the living room where they can relax, the quickest bagsying the sofa and the armchairs, the others settling down on the floor, leaning against the wall. It’s time to begin. It’s time to listen. A record is about to be played. Only one man, this month’s ‘chooser’, knows what it is. He heads over to a silver and black turntable atop a fifties-era sideboard. He places the stylus onto the record and the music begins.

This is Vinyl Club. It’s the ageing music fan’s equivalent of a book club, where friends rotate around each other’s homes each month, taking turns to discuss a chosen book. But the rules of Vinyl Club are stricter than in most book clubs, which in my experience involve as much gossip and wine drinking as literary criticism.

Once the music has started no one speaks. All talking is forbidden until the listening is done, or more accurately half done. Only when the A side of the album has finished do the men have their first opportunity to make their feelings known about their host’s choice of music. The reason, the club members tell me, is that without this rule, no one would listen properly to the music. They’d all start reminiscing about their teenage years when they first saw Led Zeppelin or the Sex Pistols or David Bowie or whoever. And as fun as that is – they get to it in time – the point is to immerse themselves in the music and experience its redemptive powers.

It is indisputable that music affects us psychologically, so in this chapter rather than ask what makes music special, I want to discover what the evidence can tell us about how we can make the most of music to achieve restfulness. Brand new research from the Anna Freud Centre shows that listening to music is one of the most common self-care strategies used by people under twenty-five. The Vinyl Club shows that people double that age, and older, find it therapeutic too.

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