I Get My Kicks On Channel Six

Contact Point, Greenpoint, Cape Town

I’m forever in awe of music’s ability to transport the listener. Given half a chance, you’ll find me with my head positioned exactly equidistant from two speakers, engrossed. Fifteen years or so ago I was in London, where I spent a lot of time doing just that, blissfully listening to a Walkman whilst traveling by train, not always legally or indeed paid in full. Hell, to be perfectly frank, it was usually travel under false pretense thanks to my natural-born, god-given and much sought-after talents as a forger. Just ask the Camberwell Police Station. Hey, I might not have escaped London unscathed but far be it from me to spurn the talents that my ancestors so generously bequeathed to me. Moving on, and getting back to the subject of music, it was on cross-London journeys both above and below ground that I spent huge amounts of time listening to music. Of all the music that accompanied me across that city, two albums stand out from the crowd, and will forever take me back every time I hear them: Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Siamese Dream’ and Underworld’s ‘dubnobasswithmyheadman’. They helped me make sense of the scale of the city, and painted the landscape with the drama and feeling so lacking in much of the industrial wastelands that passed for scenery. Lemme tell you, I traveled to and lived in some far-flung and godforsaken corners of that city, and as far as companions in a foreign city go, they were loyal, consistent and reliable.

So here I am, years later, in Cape Town. Another new city to discover and, as it happens, I have the new version of the Walkman, an iPod. OK, so it’s not the 6th generation 160GB model but rather a 2G Nano that I was given as a freebie at a press lunch, but it does the job and I ain’t complaining. Anyway. So there I am, having started a new job, down Sea Point way, right above the Sea Point Contact, a rock formation noted by Charles Darwin when he visited the spot in 1836. But I’m not looking at metamorphic rocks, no. I’m looking at the pretty damn scary left that breaks off the rock shelf, and I’m thinking that even though it’s a pretty makeable wave, only a crazy person would go out there. Then I see a bodyboarder picking his way over the razor-sharp rocks to the jump-off point. I watch the dude wait for a lull and he times his jump-off perfectly, makes it out without even getting his hair wet. Knows what he’s doing, does this local. Leaves me smiling as I take in the sea air and coastal landscape of my newly adopted home.

And then, through those little white in-ear headies comes the opening notes of ‘Dirty Epic’ by Underworld, and I don’t feel so out of place anymore. For all intents and purposes if I closed my eyes I could be disappearing down a tube hole on Farringdon Street. Fantastic.