In the front room of her East London home, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy is surrounded by records, audio equipment, and a lifetime of stories. She speaks quickly, with warmth and precision, the voice of someone who has lived inside music for four decades.
“I started working in record shops in 1984,” she says. “I’d already been on the radio for a couple of years. I interviewed hundreds of bands through the late ’80s and ’90s, produced syndicated shows, told stories about music and collected records obsessively. Classic Album Sundays came out of all those things at once.”
Founded in 2010, Classic Album Sundays began as an intimate listening event that has since grown into an international movement. Each session centres on one record, introduced through stories, context, and conversation, then played in full on an audiophile system, phones off, lights low, no talking. The idea is simple: to restore the ritual of listening deeply, together. Fifteen years on, it has reached major cultural venues from the V&A and Royal Albert Hall to festivals and listening bars around the world.
The seed, though, was planted a little earlier. Around the late 2000s, Colleen had stepped back from regular DJing to spend more time at home with her young daughter. Sundays became slower, cooking, cleaning, and listening. “Friends would come round. Adam would cook, he’s the chef; I’d say, ‘Pick an album you really want to hear. We’ll listen to it all the way through.’”
By then, Colleen and her husband had begun collecting serious audio equipment. “I’d been DJing and hosting events for years including with David Mancuso when he began coming to London around 2003,” she recalls. “That’s when we invested in a system based around Klipschorns, a few of which landed here at our house. Around the same time, we became close with Peter Qvortrup from Audio Note UK, who lent us different valve amplifiers to try, the Jinro among them. It was heaven.”
They played Another Green World by Brian Eno one afternoon. A friend, James, turned and said, “So this is like a classic album Sunday.” The name stuck.
Around the same time, Greg Wilson, another long-time friend, was running a blog encouraging people to listen to full albums at home and chat about them online. “Greg said, ‘You should do one, Colleen. The next album’s Dark Side of the Moon.’ ”
Colleen’s copy was the Mobile Fidelity’s pressing, mastered at half-speed by Stan Ricker, a gift from David Mancuso. “We turned the lights down, lit candles and incense, didn’t talk, just listened. Afterwards everyone online said, ‘Colleen, the album playback must have sounded amazing on that system.’ And I thought, not everyone gets to hear music in this way. It only seems fair to share it publicly. ”
The First Sessions
At a local playground she ran into her friend Declan Perkins, who owned a few pubs. “I told him the idea, and he said, ‘Use the Hanbury Arms on a Sunday.’ ” The first events were small but intense. Colleen and her team hauled Klipschorns and glowing valve amps up pub stairs, paid for a babysitter and van out of her own pocket, and lost money each time, but kept going.
Each evening opened with her playing records that framed the main album - earlier work, influences, or music from the same era, while people chatted and ate pizza. Then came the story: how the record was made, who played on it, why it mattered. Phones off, lights low, one full album start to finish.
When BBC Breakfast ran a feature on Ziggy Stardust at one of these nights, everything changed.
“For two weeks my phone didn’t stop ringing.
Every newspaper, every radio station wanted to talk. Some thought it was weird ‘Why is she treating albums like museum pieces?’ - but most loved it.”
From there, Classic Album Sundays travelled to festivals, museums, and institutions: Camp Bestival, the V&A, the Royal Albert Hall, the British Library. “I even interviewed Nick Mason for Dark Side of the Moon during the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A,” she smiles. “The record that started it all.”
It has since expanded globally, from London and Tokyo to Sydney, New York, and beyond.
A Parallel History
Colleen had lived in Japan in 1989 as a radio DJ in Nagoya, years before she discovered the country’s jazz kissa culture. “A few years after Classic Album Sundays began, my friend Darrel Sheinman from Gearbox said, ‘Have you been to any jazz kissa?’ So we went. I couldn’t believe the connection, people sitting quietly, not talking, listening to music on beautiful systems. It felt like the same spirit.”
She later wrote a long post about those Jazz Kissas Café Lion and Eagle in Tokyo, Jamaica in Sapporo which circulated widely online. “Aneesh Patel told me later that when they saw that post, that’s when they were opening Brilliant Corners and mentioned that’s how they first heard about listening bars.”
When Brilliant Corners opened, Colleen moved her sessions there. “I helped them with the Hackney Council letter and lent them two Klipschorns. It meant I could just bring my front-end, the Jinro amp from Audio Note, my Rega P9, moving-coil cartridges, and use the speakers I had installed there. That’s how I met Kay Suzuki,” she laughs.
Defining the “Classic”
Over the years Classic Album Sundays has grown from a personal experiment into a global series of events and interviews. Artists now join in - musicians, producers, engineers, or devoted fans of a record.
“What makes an album a classic?” she considers. “It isn’t just sales or canon status. Some are obvious, like Dark Side of the Moon, but others are cult records that shaped underground culture. I’ve always been into subgenres; punk, indie, funk, hip-hop. Working in record shops you hear everything. But I wanted Classic Album Sundays to be broader than the usual idea of ‘classic rock’ and ensured it would include women, global voices, jazz, soul, electronic music and more.”
Requests from audiences often shaped the programme: Nick Drake, Boards of Canada, and sometimes Colleen chose a personal favourite like Black Uhuru’s Dub Factor. “Sometimes people suggest records I’ve never really listened to. And that’s the best part - discovery.”
She’s too aware of the deeper shift the project represented in 2010. “It was right as streaming and shuffle culture were taking over. The CD era was ending, vinyl hadn’t fully come back. We were becoming more isolated in our listening. Classic Album Sundays was about connection - listening together, on a real high end sound system with phones turned off. That’s something we’d lost.”
She pauses. “I didn’t realise it then, but it’s good for your mental health too. Turning your phone off for an hour, listening deeply, it calms people down. Music can raise your life energy. David Mancuso gave me a book called The Life Energy in Music. That’s still at the core of everything I do.”
Part 2 to follow: on interviewing artists, live sessions, the global spread of listening culture, and the gear that shapes the sound.
Classic Album Sundays: The Art of Listening (Part 2)
When Classic Album Sundays began, it was simply Colleen telling the story of a record before playing it in full. Then artists started to join her, first tentatively, later as the defining feature of the project.
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