Not the best way to hear the record. The best way to be with the record.
One album. One room. The story first — then the record, in full. We open with a guided deep dive, then the lights go down, the phones go away, and we play it end to end. Fifty-five seats, listening together.
A guided deep dive into the record — where it came from, how it was made, the myth and the meaning. The story first.
A short break. A light refreshment. A moment to let the first half settle before the needle drops.
The album, in full. Lights low. Phones away. Heard in company — the way a record was meant to be heard.
Jonathan Wingate spent years as the spokesman for David Bowie and Sir Bob Geldof before turning to journalism. He writes for The Times, the Daily Telegraph, Mojo and Rolling Stone, and has interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin and Robert Plant to Björk, Smokey Robinson and Tony Bennett. A regular voice on BBC television and radio.
Five records. One host who has spent a lifetime in the room where the music is made.
The band walks off the map and into the ice. Guitars dissolve; something colder and stranger takes their place. The sound of a century turning over.
Ten songs written with the skin off — love, leaving, and the long way home, sung so plainly it still stops a room. The record everyone borrows from.
A voice like a cathedral with the doors thrown open. Ten songs — borrowed, broken open, made to ascend. The most haunted debut of its decade.
Twenty-eight minutes, one voice, one guitar — recorded in two late-night sessions and left at the front desk without a word. The quietest record ever to echo this loud.
Jazz-warm and water-loose — the Echoplex glowing, the voice slurred to honey. The title track was written for Nick Drake; the whole record drifts like its name.
The whole of Volume One — Kid A to Solid Air. One membership card, shown on the door, your seat held at every salon. £18 a record.
28 Heath Street, Hampstead, London NW3 6TE. Hampstead station, Northern line — thirty seconds from the door. Fifty-five seats. Every one close.