More about: Colleen 'Cosmo' MurphyClassic Album Sundays

The scent of incense drifts onto the street from the low-lit back room of Brilliant Corners, a small Japanese restaurant and bar on Dalston’s Kingsland Road. Inside, brick walls, wooden floors and the best sound system an audiophile could wish for make up the mise en scene of Classic Album Sundays, the communal listening experience that welcomes a small group of strangers to hear a record from start to finish. Its brainchild is record collector, DJ, and Loft Party alumni/David Mancuso mentee Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy - the most influential vinyl head you’ve never heard of.

“Even though I was born in 1968 I have the idealism of a hippie” she smiles from before her vast wall of records, picking through the principles that she and her projects have at their heart. “I like open door policies…I’ve always felt people can be united through music.” It’s an ethos that was strengthened by her close involvement in Mancuso’s legendary Manhattan Loft parties: all-night affairs in which people from all walks of life came together to dance to the latest records.

Like those evenings, Classic Album Sundays provides an inclusive, welcoming space, and is designed to return music fans to the communal listening experience of the 1980s and before. “When I was growing up, I’d invite people over to hang out and listen to an album in my bedroom. Of course it’s great listening to music alone,” she smiles, “but it started to seem like people were [only] having isolated listening experiences in their earbuds.”

Birthed ten years ago, CAS has since presented hundreds of albums - D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left among them - to dark, scented rooms of music fans both green and seasoned. It’s a concept that has translated well online in 2020, though to attend one of these events in person is a breath-baiting, ritualistic experience. From the pre-event discussion to the lowering of the lights, to the moment that the needle touches the wax, it’s a blissfully analogue enterprise.

Nowadays, it seems that the British public are coming back around to the CAS way of thinking: 2020 is likely to see a thirty-year high in vinyl purchases, a habit that Murphy has seen die and then slowly resurrect over the course of her forty years in the industry. “I started out working in record shops in the 1980s and I remember clearing out the vinyl bins to make way for these new-fangled CDs. Some people from my generation got rid of their vinyl collections, and then they started kicking themselves,” she remembers, “When CDs were first marketed it was like: ‘oh, its the perfect medium! you can throw it like a frisbee and it never skips!’ But there is no perfect medium.”

Reel-to-reel tape, she concedes, is probably the very “top” for an audiophile, though as albums are rarely available in this format, vinyl takes an easy second best. “Digital doesn’t seem as close to the actual musical event,” she explains, “whereas you have to engage with vinyl. Having something that’s tactile and probably also has it’s own aura - for instance if it’s a second hand record and has travelled around to different houses and turntables and owners - is a huge difference to something that’s a combination of 1s and 0s.”

Digital has its benefits and tape its specialities, but vinyl is her first love. A “serious” record collector from the age of 15, Murphy has since been taking in more music per year than many of us will hear in a lifetime. This element - the collecting - as well as a fresh take on weaving “journalistic storytelling” into her events are two things that diverge from Mancuso’s teachings. “David didn’t really speak about music that much,” she explains, “And he wasn’t actually a record collector: he had lots of records for the party but they would find their way to him.” The DJ, who died in 2016, had just one piece of advice for Classic Album Sundays. “He said ‘make sure you don’t put anything else on after the album finishes,’” she remembers.

It’s this “open door” sense of democracy and dedication to the musical event of the album that characterises CAS and everything else Murphy does. Sadly (but as many of us know), the music industry is known for an ingrained tradition of gatekeeping at odds with this ethos - particularly against women. There is no such childishness in Murphy’s world. "You have to be into the music and be responsible around the sound system and be respectful. And that’s that” she says.

It is not just Mancuso’s "hippie" influence that makes this record devotee a prophet for those looking to truly ‘get’ music. Her own experiences with gatekeeping and sexism make her uniquely attuned to the many problems the music industry still fosters. “It was thing after thing after thing; you wouldn’t believe it now,” she tells me of her time in the 1980s, “there was one record shop on Avenue A that had a bench by the front door that said ‘Girlfriends Can Sit Here’. I remember going to dance record shops and standing there waiting for someone to ask me what I wanted to hear. No one would pay me any attention.” Still today, there are barriers. “It’s hard to gain access,” she says simply.

Though it has presented itself to her again and again, sexism has never prevented Murphy from leading an enviable life in the industry. At fourteen, she had her first radio show. Not long after, she became the first woman to go on the payroll at an NYC record shop, the first to advise fans on the shop floor, then “the first female programme director at the radio station [WNYU].” She had a big poster of Joy Division over her bed and witnessed a New Order show degenerate into riot as fans ripped up their seats, bellowing for an encore that never came. Then of course, she began to attend the parties in Mancuso’s Loft, soon becoming his mentee and one of very few people he would trust to stand in for him. 

Today, after twenty years as a Londoner and adopted Brit, Murphy is an industry legend in her own right. She's toured her DJ sets extensively (her shows are so popular they have been bootlegged in Japan), has her own Worldwide FM show, and has dabbled in artistry - this year, she remixed Róisín Murphy's disco banger 'Murphy's Law'.

For someone so indebted to the analogue, Murphy is positive about the temporary hyper-digital age the pandemic has brought on. "Sitting in front of people and with people is always preferable, but I acted really quickly and put up our Patreon," she says, "we’ve been building a community." As such, you can thank the pandemic for the globalisation of Classic Album Sundays, which now offers a monthly online experience, a quiz and a new video series in which music titans discuss the record that's most special to them. 

Perrenially-cheerful and a pleasure to speak to, there is only one moment in our chat that Murphy comes close to negativity, and even then she phrases it in a positive light. "We have to be careful we don’t lose our humanity," she says of extended periods of social distancing, "but I think younger people will be getting together as soon as possible and having huge parties." We float the idea that there may be a third Summer of Love when it is ethical to mix once more. She shrieks in delight: "to think of that at the end as a prize!" Our hope mirrors hers: and so we hold out hope for a swift return to the communal - and that warm, scented darkroom of strangers hearing a record as one again. 

Join the club and support Classic Album Sundays on Patreon here. The new digital show ‘My Classic Album’ live-streams every Sunday at 8pm on CAS YouTube and Facebook with guests Kae Tempest, Goldie, Black Midi, Moses Boyd and more.

More about: Colleen 'Cosmo' MurphyClassic Album Sundays