A TRIP TO LONDON: AN ODE TO ART AND THE POSSIBILITIES
A few years ago I talked to my friend about art. We were trying to define the word or at least describe what it means to us. My idea of art was a form of expression that stimulates a specific feeling. The feeling, in my point of view, would be a subjective one, that is dependent on a person's inner being. In other words, art is in the eye of the beholder. So, how does this apply to the music we listen to while traveling? I believe that seeing a person's travelling playlist could be a mirror image of their perception of the location they visited. Experiencing a city through someone's headphones could be the same as walking a mile in their shoes. So, let's take a walk down the streets of London through my earphones.
The trip started with a flight from Zagreb to London. As we sat on the plane, the lights turned off so the plane could take off. My stomach dropped flying up into the sky, and the excitement started to kick in. Almost instinctively, I put my earphones on and turned on Paul McCartney. The song “Uncle Albert” to be precise. It was released in 1971. on his album RAM. Talking about the song, McCartney said that there is no particular meaning to it, but rather it was a surrealist piece of art. He compared it to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which I also love very dearly. This piece, sound-wise, has a few different parts. It doesn't sound homogeneous. While listening to it, you might feel like you are watching a movie because the song takes you on a fully thought-out journey. An absurd one at that, including made-up terms such as butter pie and monkberry, which came from his children, who called milk- monk. The soft, gentle, and apologetic start is followed by a playful shift crowned with words Live a little/get your feet off the ground/get around. Listening to it felt like watching the beginning of a movie that I had been anticipating for months. Which sort of was the case at that moment. In my head the song sounds like hope and a playful outlook on the future. It was the perfect choice to start the trip off with. To be honest, it was stuck in my head the whole time I was in London (IT'S JUST THAT GOOD).
The first few days we went to Portobello Road, Columbia Road Flower Market, and Soho. Walking through these locations, the first thing you see are the backs of people's heads looking around the crowded streets. I felt overwhelmed by all the shops, food vendors, festive decorations, and the sheer amount of people walking around. Thinking about these locations, the first few notes of the song “Angelica” by the British indie rock band Wet Leg start playing in my head. This upbeat track is the perfect representation of the playful, dynamic feel of the crowded streets. There is an idea that suggests that by putting your finger in the ocean, you are connected with the whole world. I felt like that visiting these locations. Be it by walking around all the food vendors and smelling different types of food from all over the world or looking through the windows of small business shops with carefully curated handmade items or smelling the Christmas trees a mile away from the Flower Market, different cultures are represented everywhere. The lively sound of Angelica embodies the ongoing feeling of movement and the continuous process of uniting all the people (and cultures) who live in the city by celebrating their differences. The perfect word to describe the streets of London (on the weekend especially) is alive. The city is fully alive and breathing with each person that joyfully experiences all that it has to offer.
The fourth day of the trip was spent visiting the National Gallery and going through all the tourist hotspots. In the evening we decided not to take the tube home but rather a bus (a double-decker at that) and enjoy all the festive decorations the city had to offer. After a whole day of walking and talking, my friend and I decided to share a pair of earphones and listen to some music. We were lucky enough to catch the frontal window seats on the upper floor of the bus, which made us feel like we were flying through all the festively bejewelled tree branches. I always have a Christmas playlist ready to go, so I pressed shuffle, and we were transported to another dimension. How is it that by putting earphones in and listening to music, we simultaneously detach from reality while also feeling all real-life emotions even more intensely than we could ever feel them in real life? That being said, all of the emotions that were felt that day sank in while listening to Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah.” A song we've all heard a million times gained a new dimension that evening. I felt shivers down my whole body and was overwhelmed with emotions when listening to the words: it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift, in which Cohen describes the structure of the song building up to the monumental chorus. At that point we were approaching the Waterloo Bridge overlooking the city. The song perfectly accentuated the build-up of excitement in that moment. Seeing London at night felt almost movie-like; my friend and I looked at each other and smiled from ear to ear knowing we've been waiting to experience this for a long time.
The most prominent feeling I felt on the fifth day was gratitude and wholesomeness. We came to London to visit my family. My aunt was having her birthday dinner that day. We sat around the table under candlelight talking about anything and everything. Being warm and safe inside the house while it was windy and raining outside felt like being in an intimate bubble in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world. We listened to vinyl on the record player, and I couldn't help but think about the word home. I have always believed that home is defined by people, not a location. Home is a feeling rather than a place. As someone who moved out of home at 18 to go to university, I've needed to redefine the word quite early on in my life. While listening to Nina Simone on vinyl, we sat for hours enjoying each other's company. My favourite song of Simone's is “Little Girl Blue” from the same-titled album. The piano in the start of the song sounded like a memory being formed. It sounded like the feeling of experiencing a moment and simultaneously feeling it become a memory in the present moment. Listening to Nina Simone has always felt comforting to me. Just like her music, that night at the candlelit table, feelt like a warm hug on a rainy day. What a lovely evening we've had.
The last day of the trip we woke up early in the morning to catch the bus to the airport. The first thing I saw that morning was tree branches fighting for their life against the wind and a huge amount of rain pouring down. With raindrops flooding my coat and the scarf I wrapped around my head (because an umbrella wouldn't help you in that type of weather), we got into the warm bus. As I was mentally saying goodbye to London and looking at all the architecture through the bus windows, I put on the song “Girl, Where Are You” by Ronald Langestraat. The song is off of his album Searching, recorded in 1984. All the recordings on the album represent the author's personal way of searching. I, myself, also felt like I was searching for something while sitting on that bus. Every time I experience something for the first time, be it seeing an exhibition, exploring a new culture, or visiting a new city, I start to feel like there is a new part of me lighting up. Listening to Langestraat sing the words, Girl, where are you? felt personal. Visiting big cities can be inspiring in so many ways. The things that sparked my light the most were the coexistence of many different cultures and the brilliant emphasis on art while making it accessible to everyone. This led me to think about the bigger picture of my life. As we were approaching the airport and the trip was coming to an end, I was thinking about everything that I am now and everything I will become, asking my future self: Girl, where are you?
There is a great line by a Croatian band, Hladno Pivo, that would perfectly summarise my thoughts and inner world while visiting London, and it goes: Sa 20 se život činio kao švedski stol/A na nama je samo da odlučimo kamo/Sve će se drugo već nekako naći. (In the twenties, life felt like a buffet; the only thing we had to decide was where we wanted to go, and everything else would fall into place.) So I would say that my projections on the city were hope, gratefulness, and the extraordinary (while somehow also ordinary) feeling of endless possibilities as a twenty-something-year-old.
Photos by A Very Personal Studio.