Sublime thousand year tune takes the hum from the humdrum

My first job as a quasi-adult was executed in a highly enthusiastic fashion in a building in the middle of town. I operated from 111 Commissioner Street as a public policy research hack. I was full of the joys of youth — which, in retrospect, involved a great many certitudes, all of which were held with extreme conviction and which have unfailingly proven to be total bollocks. All of them.

One of my great daily pleasures was to take a much anticipated coffee break from these high-minded activities and amble down the street to visit a feisty lady in her dotage who ran an establishment called the Longplayer. It was a record shop, to state the obvious for those who might never have encountered the term before. The longplayer section was marvellous but, as with all institutions grappling with the passage of time, the owners had succumbed to modern technology and had laid on a very respectable CD section.

Jean would offer me tea “darling”, and I would have to politely decline because, in this case, tea was a euphemism for a midmorning gin and tonic and that wasn't a good look for the office where I was engaged in important matters of state, you know. Her conversation was sparkly and her knowledge of the product, superior. Plus, the idea of a little morning tipple was sensational to my unformed mind and I enjoyed the fading glamour of it all, even more than the joy of browsing for musical treats.

The day the Longplayer shut down they hosted a little party. Jean’s sons had called it and were taking an executive decision to shutter the door on this mid-century treasure. If you were a regular purchaser of the goods and charms, you were invited along with the denizens of the other inner city institutions — such as the owners of Thorold’s, the bookshop lodged above the Guildhall, which was the oldest bar in the city . Those musty book-stacked rooms were an excellent place for romance. A faded Sanderson floral couch where you could sit to ostensibly page through rarities and sneak a little kiss with a fellow bibliophile, still shimmers in the dust motes of the late afternoon sunlight, shelved in my high jinks archive.

They sent me home from the party with a bag of CD’s — now long outdated tech -and a pang of nostalgia that has lodged in my hippocampus like an unwelcome tenant who refuses to pay their rent but demands that I come to clear out the plumbing regularly. 

Here I am again with a rubber plunger and a bucket rummaging under the sink. The excavations are under way because I read about the Longplayer in London. It's not a record shop.

Housed in the only lighthouse in London, next to the Thames, it's an experiment in time or, rather, an attempt to live for a thousand years. The Longplayer is a musical track that's designed to take 1,000 years to play from beginning to end. Two hundred and thirty four Tibetan singing bowls made of brass vibrate, chime, hum and sing in a tune that was first struck or stirred into being as the new millennium began. 

I don’t know how it was for you but New Year’s Eve 2000 was a proper damp squib for me. No millenarian apocalypse, no Y2K wipe out and, in my case, a deadly dull party, which was inevitable given the levels of heightened anticipation. But I imagine it was an entirely different story for Jem Finer, founding member of The Pogues, who'd duly anticipated and planned a much more mindful engagement with the prospect of another thousand years of human existence. He recorded six tracks with his 234 singing bowls and set them off into the space time continuum. I feel a little resentful of his foresight. Where the hell is my slowly unwinding time capsule? It's 25 years later and he's enticed a whole crew of people intent on seeding the time machine into the next generation. He's training kids to ring the bowls and read the music for periodic live performances that jibe with the ongoing track you can listen to as it streams online from its home in the lighthouse.

I can only hope that 975 years from now enough generations of quixotic people will have thought it crucial to keep the Longplayer on course to play its final note.

It’s like a musical version of a cathedral, a pyramid or the Acropolis — something dedicated to the sublime, designed to outlive everyone and everything contemporaneous with its inception. Something that speaks to each passing moment, but also to the unspooling notion of eternity. 

Roughly 975 years ago Sei Shonagon sat in the imperial palace in Japan and wrote a list in her Pillow Book: “Things that are better at night: night is better for certain things. The light of the moon as it shines through the cracks in the shutters; the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves of trees; the distant sound of a temple bell; the calls of insects; the faint glow of fireflies flickering in and out of view. A gentle rain falling quietly, heard from within one’s chambers, or the sound of water flowing nearby — these things are deeply moving at night. The scent of plum blossoms carried on the breeze, or the delicate sight of cherry blossoms illuminated by the moon, all seem more beautiful in the darkness. When people speak in hushed voices, laughter occasionally escaping as they tell stories late into the night, the atmosphere is enchanting. Even something as simple as the glow of a lamp, burning steadily in a quiet room, feels more refined than during the day.”

I can only hope that 975 years from now enough generations of quixotic people will have thought it crucial to keep the Longplayer on course to play its final note. It gives me a glimmer of hope for our fallible species. All this nowness will be a blip in a long forgotten time but maybe this track will shine a beacon of life-saving light from that singular lighthouse. I hope it will still be guiding the small boats and the big ships of our mutual humanity into the sweet sounds of the long glorious night. May the temple bell still ring. May the gin and tonics still lubricate the morning shift at the Longplayer.