My Turntable, My Time Machine

Photo by GC Shutter

How does your city sound in 2020?

When I’ve been on social feeds or texting with friends, you see pictures, memes and messages about how the cities we live are now wastelands. Everything is shut, there’s nowhere to go, everyone has locked themselves away.

But earlier this year, when I would ride my bike around Berlin having full Vanilla Sky moments, I was struck the hardest not by the visual emptiness, but by the almost silence. Apart from my breathing, as I stood in the middle of Museum Island, all I’d hear was wind strolling through the streets, trees rustling as the birds took off, dogs trading insults somewhere in the distance.

Nature was a long way from growing back over the grey buildings and kicked-in bridges, but its sounds had reclaimed the concrete, towers and open squares.

Around this time, with my ears newly pricked up, I took a lot more interest in what music I was playing on my sound system. I use the term ‘sound system’ very loosely. Since I moved into my apartment two years ago, I’ve had this small Bluetooth speaker. It’s a hard working relic from the days when I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stay in Germany. Back then I didn’t want anything I couldn’t pack in a bag and retreat to the airport with.

It has served me well. But a few weeks ago, my friend Uli said to me, “You love music. But music thinks you hate it. Because you play it through that little speaker.”

Uli had a point. I do love music. And I’d been thinking for a while that it was time for an upgrade. So we went hi-fi shopping. Or, closer to the truth, I bought a time machine.

I haven’t walked into a proper hi-fi store in nearly two decades. But a man gets to a certain age where a proper sound system is the only dignified way to think about going ahead in your life. Scotch in hand, tuxedo on.

After choosing a gorgeous black chunky amp with built in a streamer, and then a pair of speakers that gently licked my ears, I was ready to head to the cashier. Then Uli suggested a turntable. At first I thought, fuck yeah! Then the boring part of me started prattling on about how maybe I should wait till I’ve set the system up and see how I like it and blah, blah, blah.

One thing I’ve got a lot better at in the last few years is taking that internal monologue, and fitting it out with a pair of cement shoes. So as that voice enjoyed the view from the bottom of the Spree, I added one very sexy turntable to my order. Then we did a little vinyl shopping. 

Here’s the first thing I noticed about vinyl. You find out very quickly what music you actually really love. When you’re about to pay 25€ for something you already have for free on Spotify, it has to mean something. Which means for me, it has to be a record where not only are all the songs great, but there are precious memories pressed into its grooves. 

Because the second thing I discovered about vinyl is that, like a book of photographs is to Instagram, so to, is a turntable to Spotify. 

The needle hit the first record, and in a few warm crackles, the warp drive went in full reverse back through the decades.

Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz was Scott and I driving through the Karoo Desert between Johannesburg and Cape Town. In a stolen BMW. With a bullet hole in the driver’s door. Scotty is one of my oldest mates, and we lived and worked together for four years in Singapore and South Africa. Leaving skid marks in the driveway of our old rented house, we headed south to a new gig on the Cape. How this car fell into our possession is another story. But with windows down, hot Platteland air blowing through cabin and everything we owned packed into the backseat and trunk, we barreled through the Karoo desert, with Lenny telling us how it was. That we needed to Let Love Rule because he’d Built This Garden For Us.

Protection by Massive Attack was the trip hop soundtrack of my first advertising agency job in Sydney. To this day, they are one of the few bands who’ve changed my whole understanding of what music can be. Back in the 90s when you joined an ad agency, you joined a gang. Like Massive Attack’s music, it was all new. And it was all amazing. And as I discovered more and more what my brain was capable of, at this crossroads of art and commerce, Protection was the album that accompanied me as I scribbled away in the office. Or worked late at my dining table in my tiny apartment. And it was the album I played when I dropped my bags in a small hotel room in Singapore in my first overseas move. Protection is the sound of infinite possibilities.

Talking Book by Stevie Wonder is the Stevie Wonder Album. No disrespect to Songs In The Key Of Life and Inner Visions, but... Blame It On The Sun, Superstition, I Believe, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life. Talking Book is the shit. My memory of my parents record collection is that I discovered Stevie Wonder amongst all the classical, opera, and Beatles records. But I could be wrong. I may have heard Talking Book at a family friend’s house. Childhood memories are elastic mashups of impressions and half remembered snippets. But whenever these songs come on, I’m immediately transported back to a house in a small mining town in Canada.

It snowed 6 months of the year where I grew up in Northern Manitoba. And as the white piled up on the windows, I’d fall asleep on the sofa listening to music with my Dad who was wearing a kaftan he’d sewn himself. Mum sang along from the kitchen.

Guero by Beck. When I first heard Beck’s music, and that it had come out of LA, I knew one day I was going to live there. Somehow his blending of rap, hip hop, Latin, shoegazer and electronica sounds exactly like the feeling of driving on the big streets and through the small neighborhoods of that strange little city by the edge of the ocean.

I’d moved to LA to make it as a screenwriter. I arrived with my clothes, my laptop, and the phone number of a friend of a friend. Guero came out just after I arrived, and I played it non-stop as I gambled with my time on Earth trying to win an Oscar. I blasted Guero through one and a half speakers in my I’m-just-driving-this-till-I’m-famous Honda Civic. And I rolled the boulevards plotting how I’d get to the top floors of those shiny buildings that lined Miracle Mile. 

Guero is the day-glow taco stands on Pico, the musty smell of the vintage stores in Los Feliz, a booth at Fred 62 eating breakfast for dinner, and the midnight drives from the East Side back to Venice. Windows down, inhaling the salty air after I’d passed under the starlit 405, fires raging in the Hills.

Upstairs at Eric’s by Yazoo. Like every teenager in the 80s, I was obsessed with Depeche Mode. Just Can’t Get Enough was the song that ate the world alive as I saved up all my money from stacking shelves at the local supermarket to buy a pair of Doc Martens. The scandal of the year was when Vince Clarke abruptly left the band to start a new project called Yazoo with the singer Alison Moyet.

Only You was the lead single off the album. I don’t know what the original story in the song was, but the lyrics “Wondering if you understand, It’s just the touch of your hand, Behind a closed door,” were everything that the anxious, still in the closet me yearned to experience. Gay men often talk about their relationships with Torch Song Divas. Alison Moyet was mine. She gave words to the desires I felt standing across the street from gay bars in the late 80s, and still not having the courage to go in. But watching the men stroll in and out of these places so casually with their friends, I hoped I’d be one of them one day.

Back in Berlin, I lay on the couch, with the albums and their lyrics and liner notes spread across the wooden floor. It was a rush to reconnect with all these landmark periods again. Because the third thing I discovered with vinyl is that it’s a conscious choice, not an algorithm. You choose an album, you put it on, you even have to get up again to turn it over. It’s a physical commitment not a digital push. Streaming had turned me into someone who was around music. The turntable has reminded me of how to be with music.

This year, I’ve often been angry about how many memories we all never made, in places we couldn’t go. But in a year where so much felt taken away, the turntable and the records gave me something back.

My life.

With music, I was in the past not to regret, but to revel. In the great times that I’ve had. And the places I’ve lived. With the wonderful people I’ve known. But also to remember all the men I’ve been, compared to the one I am today. Whole chapters I hadn’t thought about in years poured out through the speakers and filled all the empty spaces that 2020 left in its wake.

What an unexpected joy to end this year on a high. Putting on a record, lying back on the sofa and listening to my entire life.