I never leave home without my headphones. My soundtrack to London is whatever is playing in my ears, and that’s the film I’m in, usually daydreaming on the Tube. Today, the soundtrack is Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s. “Don’t Go” kicks off the album as I walk to the Jubilee Line, then jump on the front carriage as it glides off to take me partway to Lancaster Gate.
It is only a few weeks since I was in the area with my friends Sharon and Sue to see the Dress Codes exhibition at Kensington Palace. Dress Codes (now in its final weeks) is a display of Royal Family clothing that celebrates the best of its ceremonial dress collection, including pieces worn by a young Queen Elizabeth II, Diana, Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret and Queen Victoria.
I like fashion and dresses. The royals aren’t really my cup of tea, but I do like to try other teas, just to be sure. Apparently, most visitors ask to see more of Diana’s clothes – only three of her dresses are on display. Afterwards, we took a stroll through the gardens and reminisced about our (now grown) children climbing all over the pirate ship in the playground.
Today, I’m back in Kensington Gardens, this time at the Serpentine Galleries to see Peter Doig’s House of Music. If you’ve not heard of him, Doig is an award-winning painter, internationally renowned for his inventive style and tropical palate. He is well-travelled, having lived between Trinidad, Canada, the USA and Germany, and is now settled in London. A bonus is that he’s Scottish, born in Edinburgh in 1959. I’d love to hear that accent now.
Doig blends memory, reality and imagination in a new way that encourages viewers to find the narrative behind the scene. As a fiction writer, this appeals to me. But it’s his love and use of music I’m really interested in, and this is an exhibition of his paintings set to it.
I take my headphones out as I arrive – it’s free entry, by the way – and am offered an exhibition guide. I open it, and the first thing I see is this quote: “Music has often influenced my paintings. Songs can be very visual. I’m interested in what they conjure, and I’ve tried over the years to make paintings that are imagistic and atmospheric in the way music can be. Music, being an invisible art form, is open to interpretation within the mind’s eye.”
According to Doig, he can’t paint without music playing, deeming it “impossible”. I can’t travel without music. I have literally just “starred” in a video with Alison Moyet on the way here. Me and Doig are going to get along great.
I walk through to the main entrance and am greeted by a beautiful multicoloured landscape of a mural of flags he photographed near the Prosperity Club in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The flags are unfinished. I notice there are no stars or stripes on America’s. I think it looks better without the boastful detail.
The warm sound of jazz floats through the corridor, filling the air between the paintings. I see it’s coming from enormous, rare and restored Klangfilm Euronor speakers (pictured below). They are themselves beautiful pieces of art, originally designed for use in cinemas and other large auditoriums in the early and mid-20th Century. There are seats available, and the atmosphere is such that I feel like I’m in in Don Draper’s living room and he’s fixing me an Old Fashioned.
With all the lovely colours in the paintings, particularly the childlike shades of pinks and greens, I end up wandering around four times, enjoying Doig’s images of reality blended with imagination. The Lion of Judah is a recurring figure in his Rastafarian mural paintings, representing pride, resistance, and spiritual force.
There’s a “nighttime” room which encourages people to feel a bit more absorbed by the art by shutting out light. In here, almost all the comfy chairs are taken. Nobody is looking at their phones. Everybody is slowing down, allowing their senses to be filled.
The truth is, I don’t like jazz, but I wonder if it’s an added element that’s keeping me here to enjoy the paintings for longer. I see a gallery attendant move from standing by a wall to select another of the 300 pieces of music Doig has chosen – the Joe Harriott and John Mayer Indo Jazz Suite from 1966.
The entire exhibition is wonderful, an illustration of how music can unlock further creativity and add dimension to the senses, creating that extra swirly atmosphere. I see that Brian Eno is playing at one of the invited guest events, and that disco records are welcome too. Quite the spectrum of tea flavours there.
Heading into the shop at the end, I select three of my favourite Doig paintings as postcards. I decide to pay by cash. The woman at the till notices I have a lot of coins. She instructs me, not unlike a teacher, to empty my purse because she wants my change.
She’s full of elder authority, so I tip the purse upside down onto her shelf. She counts out the coins, flicking them off the edge of the counter like a bank teller, and I’m so ensconced in hearing that coin-scratch noise I haven’t heard in years that I don’t notice how much she chucks in the till. She pushes back the rest of the change towards me and says, “Have a good rest of the afternoon.”
Inspired by the Doig experience, (I’ll definitely be back), I remain headphoneless and walk back via the Diana Memorial Fountain, and it seems so much smaller now my children are “big”. As the sound of the water trickles and swooshes around corners, I envision holding little hot hands and paddling in rolled-up trousers many summers ago.
Kensington Gardens is such a lovely part of London, full of wildlife. Swans dunk down, beak deep, bums up. I stand beside two Canada geese as they dig holes in the grass, using their beaks like spades, presumably to find bugs. I later learn it’s called “drilling”, though this doesn’t feel like a good descriptor; these holes were perfectly square.
I end up walking for ages without any music on, all the way under the underpass and into W1, where I find myself in Shepherd Market, not a place I often frequent. The area was originally the site of a fortnight-long “May Fair” (hence the name), which was known for its revelry. The May Fair was eventually banned for being an affront to public decency. Today, it has coffee shops, restaurants, pubs and galleries, and a lot of velvet seats, chatter and clinking cups and cutlery, but who knows what forbidden delights still happen at night.
At the end opening of that lane, I stumble across Trumper, which I’ve passed before but never gone in. I decide to brave it. Would they kick me out for not being a man? On the contrary, I am warmly welcomed. The Victorian curiosity shop and barbers is full of “gentlemen’s items” set out behind polished glass: shaving brushes, herringbone moustache combs, cufflinks shaped like motorbikes or saxophones, fancy soaps, manicure kits, fragrances, and bath salts, and it smells like pencil shavings and pine.
I have to say, I love it. The interior reminds me of an old toy shop in Glasgow, organised beautifully with nooks and crannies for the smaller pieces. In the back, a line of barbers have their own booths, separating every customer with a red velvet curtain. Hairdryers click on and off, intermittently revealing a low hum of hair chat, but the only other noise is my steps on the wooden floor. It is sort of comforting.
I head back to Bond Street (14,607 steps), and as I alight for the final walk home, my feet start to hurt. I pop Yazoo back on for Alison and Vince to take the pain away. For me, music enhances everything, especially imagination and experience (and distraction from sore feet). But London has its own cool soundtrack too. I might enjoy it if I take out my headphones now and then.